Insights

Digital Solutions and Consultancy Services

Case Study

Customer Management Foxtel

2.5 million customers, 10,000 miles, one delighted client

How we revolutionised the customer management experience for leading Australian TV services provider Foxtel.

Foxtel is a leading subscription television service provider with a huge number of cable, satellite and broadband customers. In 2012 they acquired a large telecommunications provider in order to penetrate rural communities.

This instantly increased their subscriber base to over 2.5 million households. Shortly after that we partnered with Comverse (who owned the Kenan billing system and a web portal framework) in order to deliver a call centre portal with a compelling and easy to use user experience that would help ensure the acquisition did not lose customers or … staff.

And if that wasn’t already exciting enough, all of this happened on the other side of the planet.

Here’s how we took those 10,000 miles in our stride.

 

First, a bit of backstory

The migration of the new employees and customers to our client’s systems (along with their upcoming move into the triple play market) highlighted the need for a call centre portal that would not only help transform the business, but also install company loyalty in the brand.

Our client needed a brand-sensitive portal that was easy to use, helped the call-centre staff navigate the products and services they were selling, as well as providing meaningful information so that the new ‘migrated’ customers saw the benefits of the acquisition and would understand the cost-savings to their existing subscriptions.

It also needed to require little to no staff training to keep operational costs in check – absorbing a whole call-centre team but having to train them for 2 weeks is not cheap.

In many ways the approach was simple: a good staff experience, which would in turn lead to a good customer experience resulting in customers staying put and attracting new ones.

It was about the customer hearing the smile on the other end of the phone as they had their problems resolved quickly, informatively and efficiently.

We were in. It was time to jump on that plane.

 

Our approach

We all agreed that an agile approach with multiple phases was the only way to get the project going quickly and deliver value early on. Recognizing that the 12hr time zone difference between the UK and Australia was a big advantage if used correctly, we spent days travelling (and even longer on midnight conference calls) working closely with teams in Oz so we could achieve 24hr development cycles. Sprinkle this with our Separate Reality know-how and we had an extremely efficient and open development process that delivered outstanding results – as well as allowing us to work as one big team when stormy weather came along!

The project went from an idea to production in 8 months and return on investment was seen within 4 months.

 

Instant results, long term savings

With an overall focus on significantly – and instantly – reducing operational costs, the project delivered:

35% cut in call handling times

Slashed training costs – the easy to use UI and guided processes revolutionised the training programme and staff were able to take live customer calls within 2 hours of self-training. It took 2 weeks before with an instructor!

Immediate ROI – the portal made such an instant impact that our client’s initial dollar return on investment was realised within the 1st quarter after Phase 1 went live. That’s a return on investment of three months!

Offline capabilities – our solution decoupled the customer management processes from the performance and reliability of the back-end. This in turn made sure that sales could still be taken through the system even when the back-end systems went off line. Staff no longer had to do “swivel chair” integration during maintenance periods.

 

That’s not all

One thing we’re especially proud of is that our client’s CIO also won a ‘CIO Of The Year’ industry award in Australia for the migration. The project was ambitious and there was some turbulence on the way (there always is) but with the right team (and attitude) it just shows what can be achieved.

Get in Touch

Click Here

Sign up to our newsletter