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New Zealand's telecommunications market evolves quickly, with new players using innovative products and enthusiastic customer service to win business from the previous monopoly carrier. Through several mergers, TelstraSaturn gained a full portfolio of consumer and business offerings, but the company's consumer-focused customer care systems were not adequate for managing relationships with its newly acquired business customer base, and the company's investment in legacy systems had to be protected.
The company faced many integration, service and growth challenges, so looked for CRM software offering excellent integration facilities to not only improve service but also insulate clients from the inevitable hiccups that come with change. After each acquisition, TelstraClear was able to quickly expand and adapt its use of Amdocs CRM to the new shape of the business, so customer service remained excellent.
Today, Amdocs CRM is TelstraClear's main customer care application, integrating billing and other functions into a single application.
CRM offered an excellent function fit. It is an excellent package in the customer care area.
Jenny Mortimer
Head of Information Systems
TelstraClear
A Compelling Need for CRM...Fast!
Created in the wake of the 1989 decision to open New Zealand's telecommunications market to competition, Saturn in the early 1990s built a network and offered telephony and pay television services in Wellington, New Zealand's second-largest city.
In 2000, Saturn merged with another new player, Telstra NZ, to create TelstraSaturn. The two companies offered obvious synergies: Saturn's services targeted consumers for basic, personal telephony plus Pay television, while Telstra's strengths lay in servicing business with all their voice and data communications needs. But to keep these customers and win more the company had to make sure its service was outstanding.
TelstraSaturn's problem was therefore how to create the customer service infrastructure to satisfy these two very different groups of customer and do it fast enough that customers would not notice any change. This complex task fell to Jenny Mortimer, then TelstraSaturn's Head of Information Systems.
"Amdocs CRM's built-in features mean we can quickly deploy the industry's best practices."
In the Saturn days we wanted a package that would let us sell multiple services to a single customer, then provide a single bill, Mortimer said. In this Greenfield environment, Mortimer and her team achieved this objective with off-the-shelf customer care packages.
But once Saturn and Telstra had merged, it quickly became apparent Telstra NZ's business customer systems would not enable growth. Our existing services were good for residential customers, but poor for large companies with complex, multi-headed relationships, Mortimer said.
Nor was the company customer centric. Business Orders didn't enter the system until billing. We felt we were not really looking after the customer by looking after a billing relationship, not a customer service relationship. Other
factors also made it hard to develop outstanding customer relationships. We had very restricted visibility of contracts, the service levels we had promised or the actual services business customers consumed, Mortimer said. Individuals in the company, she added, did know these details, but ... that leaves you very vulnerable if you lose people. The business couldn't survive without better access to the customer information.
Complex Requirements
This situation added up to what Mortimer calls ... a textbook set of reasons to upgrade to full CRM and set her team on the trail for a solution that could be implemented within very tight deadlines. The solution would also offer integration with legacy billing systems while also providing sufficient flexibility to allow its eventual migration to new billing applications.
"Amdocs CRM is very easy to customize so we can create easy-to-use tools.
Changing telco billing systems is very hard, Mortimer said. You need to integrate with legacy systems and new systems, all while keeping the customer experience seamless.
Amdocs CRM offered an excellent function fit and an excellent package in the customer care area, said Mortimer. The telco-specific functionality of Amdocs CRM reduced the need for customization and reduced implementation times. Beyond the quality of the software was Amdcos' ability to implement.
Beyond checking boxes on functionality we were also very interested in a vendor's ability to implement and integrate, Mortimer said. There are many horror stories of telcos trying to move off their huge proprietary systems onto modern systems, and they are littered with failures...very expensive failures.
"CRM is extremely strong on service and fault management."
Amdocs CRM delivers the right software for our business needs and technical environment, including the flexibility to integrate to our legacy systems, as well as highly competent professional services to ensure successful implementation, said Mortimer. We saw there is a telco version of Amdocs CRM, which meant a lot of work has already been done and because we wanted something fast that was important. We also saw that CRM is widely used by telcos internationally so we knew it was going to work for us.
Amdocs also proved its services team would make a difference. Amdocs has a highly competent professional services arm, and an experienced team gave us a head start because this is complex work.
"Amdocs CRM gave us the tool to quickly develop quality customer service that delivered the seamless transition."
TelstraClear used CRM to create front end applications for both its old and new billing systems in a project lasting just four months. These new applications gave TelstraClear the beginning of its customer-centric systems, which eventually included service, order management, then sales.
Telstra Saturn initially deployed Amdocs CRM several years ago. Following this, with the creation of TelstraClear, Amdocs was again called upon to help by ensuring a smooth transition for customers, who were expected to be especially susceptible to competitors offers because of the uncertainty following the second merger.
With the second merger in two years, we wanted to insulate the customers from change as much as possible. Amdocs CRM gave us the tool to quickly develop quality customer service that delivered the seamless transition, Mortimer said.
To make the transition seamless, TelstraClear migrated all its customer information into a single CRM database. New policies enforced the flow of information from all the applications of both companies into CRM, regardless of origin or location of the previous customer record.
This quickly gave the new company a single record of each customer, complete with access to the legacy systems containing details of their status and history.
"Amdocs CRM delivers the right software for our business needs and technical environment, including the flexibility to integrate to our legacy systems, as well as highly competent professional services to ensure successful implementation."
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