From SoC to Digital CEx, Our New Normal Digital Experience

-- stc embarked on a customer-centric digital strategy long before the pandemic. Then during the pandemic, when the entire world switched to digital mode and every ordinary household embraced digital in one form or another, their strategy paid off well. In this article, Mohammed Alsalem, General Manager for CCEx Strategy and Anlysis at stc, shares how they implemented their customer-centric digital strategy. This included setting up an enterprise-level digital customer experience management system, building a powerful experience management platform centered on a Service Operation Center (SOC), and focusing on digital customer experience to improve internal operational efficiency and develop new digital services for the 5G era.

Digital transformation has been the prime focus for STC over the past few years. The stimulus given by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the visionaries who realize the importance of digital technologies in transforming the economy gave a new impetus to our digital mission. In fact, STC had embarked on customer-centric digital strategy long before the pandemic. These strategies also align with Saudi Vision 2030 that aims to transform the country from a traditional economy to a digital economy, by encouraging digital customer experience from all aspects. During the pandemic, when the entire world switched to digital mode and every ordinary household embraced digital in one form or the other, our strategy paid off well. We are pursuing that journey with accelerated momentum powered by innovative strategies that help us scale our digital mission to a new level and drive our journey to become the best digital experience provider in the region.

Digital experience is not optional any more

With digital experience emerging as a major driver to support growth, it is clear that governments, businesses, telcos and other organizations can no longer view customer experience as an option, it has now emerged as an imperative to survive. Like many other leading countries, KSA has set a clear agenda to address customer experience issues from the core. A general department in CITC (Communication & Information Technology Commission) has been created with a customer experience focus. CITC has also started publishing CEx awards and benchmarks. The regulatory authority has also developed the CEx complaints mechanism to focus on customer issues. These initiatives have emerged as a major driver for not only STC but also other operators to adopt customer experience at the center of their digital strategy.

At the same time, we also need to look at how customer behavior is evolving in the new normal. Customers are increasingly becoming more demanding for digital, and the willingness to forgive bad experiences that was seen at the beginning of the pandemic has gone. They have developed higher expectations for digital experience that brands deliver to them. Responsiveness, reliability and intuitiveness have emerged as critical factors to ensure that customers are having good digital experience. If we look at digital native companies which have moved up the ladder, we see that they have established a focused, customer-first operating model, and they believe customer centricity is the most important characteristic that helps them establish a truly digital native culture for the long term.

Huawei and TMF accelerate stc's customer-centric digital journey

Back in 2018, we launched one of the most significant initiatives in our digital transformation journey. In fact, this initiative named DARE laid the foundation for around 170 projects that we have been pursuing across different business areas. The acronym DARE highlights the scope of the project as: Digitalize STC, Accelerate core assist performance, Reinvent customer experience at World-class standards, and Expand aggressively in scale and scope. Pursuant to this, in 2019, STC, in partnership with Huawei and TM Forum, implemented a customer experience transformation program titled CCEx. This program leverages Huawei's SmartCare platform, comprising customer experience management, network performance management and service quality management, and is guided by TM Forum's Business Process Framework (eTOM) to scope the project and the Customer Experience Maturity Model toolkit to define its capabilities. The scope of the project also covers establishing a unified model for the customer lifecycle; some 178 customer journeys have now been certified across all touchpoints based on TM Forum's Lifecycle Metrics standard. The whole idea of the project is to have an industry standard-led implementation that guides us to build a customer centric approach with a business focus to drive digital transformation. It has helped us build standard definitions and metrics across different units and gain a holistic customer view.

Customer Experience strategies to drive Opex and Capex

Customer experience programs are evolving quickly around data analytics. Predictive platforms now allow companies to better measure and manage their customer experience performance. Predictive analytics leverages comprehensive, connected and dynamic customer-level data sets to map and track customer behavior across interactions, transactions and operations. By leveraging predictive analysis across the entire customer journey, telcos can gain a thorough understanding of individual customer experience. Predictive scores are assigned for each customer based on journey features to assess the ROX (Return on Experience) for particular customer experience investments which can then be tied directly to customer experience initiatives for valuable business outcomes. At the next level, information, insights and suggestions are shared with key stakeholders about the actions they should take to personalize customer experience and improve customer experience outcomes.

The biggest advantage of this predictive model of customer experience is that the near-real-time nature of the insights uplifts satisfaction level, reduces churn, and improves ROX. Thus, with this predictive model, we are talking about a customer-journey-based operational model that is impacting everything. It starts with building a foundation on data by capturing as much relevant data as possible to gain visibility. The next step is to focus on building a customer centric operating model as opposed to a service-centric model, which ultimately places customer experience management at the heart of the company's operations. Thus, CEx programs of the future will be holistic, predictive, precise and clearly tied to business outcomes.

Unified customer experience management

STC believes that establishing a 360-degree view of customer insights is important for driving Opex optimization and achieving customer experience goals. STC has implemented a 360-degree view across marketing & sales and customer services among others as part of optimizing our operation model. Combining customer insights with business insights, we can improve decision making. Huawei SmartCare offers very important operational use cases for this, especially in terms of Opex optimization in marketing campaigns, and hence generating incremental revenue. Upon successful completion of the project in 2021, CCEx now provides a 360-degree view of the customer and fosters a customer-centric culture at STC. Of course, at some point, you should also use this strategy to optimize the design of your network as well as to influence the decision for the next investment. Thus, customer centricity with a 360-degree view approach not only improves operational efficiency but also impacts Capex, revenue and profit while enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

STC digital transformation in 5G era

The new era of digital transformation also calls for innovative strategies around B2B, Cloud, and IoT, in addition to cross-domain collaboration to enable the numerous use cases around 5G. With this understanding, STC has modified its DARE strategy to DARE 2.0. As part of this, we have invested in trending technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), cloud, big data, virtualization and augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR). This strategy demands even greater focus on customer experience, especially considering the mission-critical nature of several applications and the demand for high levels of service quality across many IoT use cases. For example, telehealth has emerged as a focus area for STC after the pandemic. With the aim of delivering quality care at an affordable cost, STC is collaborating with leading partners in the health ecosystem. In a similar manner, we are also developing our IoT capacity to support applications across smart city, logistics, public service, smart home, industrial automation and more. We have also built a cloud-ready framework to facilitate a stable service ecosystem for the B2B sector. With this, we can deliver solutions that scale on demand as customer needs change and market demands evolve. Customers can build models based on new cloud technologies, which were once considered too complicated and unmanageable, and take full advantage of the benefits of Software as a Service (SaaS).

In today's uncertain economic climate, cost optimization is increasingly becoming one of the focus areas for telecom operators. We believe that an agile approach with automated processes, deployment of new applications, and data-driven decisions will result in faster ROX and a competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced digital environment.