F IR E GH RI T ST TIM HCL MAKES PROBLEM RESOLUTION SIMPLER FOR TIER 1 CSP IN UK HCL FACILITATES A QUANTUM IMPROVEMENT IN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE FOR A LEADING COMMUNICATION SERVICE PROVIDER, ENABLING THEM TO RETAIN THE POSITION AS A SUPPLIER OF CHOICE IN THEIR MARKETS. Region: U.K. Industry/ Domain: Telecommunications Functional Area: Retail, wholesale, global services, last mile services Area of engagement: Integrated Services ABOUT THE CUSTOMER Client is one of the world s leading communications services companies, serving the needs of customers in the UK and in more than 170 countries worldwide. It serves consumers, small and medium sized enterprises and the public sector in these countries, offering telephony, broadband, mobile and TV products and services as well as networked IT services. For the year ending March 2012, client reported annual revenues of GBP 19 Billion. Our client has achieved an improvement of 3% over last year in customer service improvement score and reduced faults handled and calls about customer issues by 6.2% in the year.
THE CHALLENGES As a mature IT outsourcer and offshorer, our client has worked with suppliers in this space since the 1990s, including equity participation and co-ownership of a captive IT provider. In 2007, having outsourced nearly all of its application support and management, client s challenges were centered around the inability to consciously influence Customer Experience (CE) which is acknowledged as the only sustainable differentiator that Communications Service Providers can build. Appropriately, then client s CEO,, recognized the importance of focusing on CE early and had set the organization committed target for exceeding 90% CE scores by 2010. Despite this legacy of experience in outsourcing, client was unable to align suppliers services to directly influence CE. This was despite, its suppliers were more or less delivering to the specifications required in their contracts, the health of client s systems and thereby the support for and alignment with business. This was hurting business and putting client s market position and market share at risk. The cost of CE improvement was important too: managing widely spread business functions cost effectively across multiple applications that clearly influenced CE was eating up a major chunk of its profits. Its application portfolio of over 200+ Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) (comprising of CRM applications, workflow management applications, web-based B2B applications etc.) was too complex to be managed effectively to improve CE. It was in this climate that client turned to HCL Technologies. The group decided to outsource the task of application support and maintenance to positively influence a range of measures to improve CE as well as lower operational costs such as, Improve CE scores and First Call Resolution (FCR) rates Lower turnaround time for the resolution of incidents Achieve high availability of critical business applications Reduce the occurrences of reactive incidents through proactive management Consolidation of IT application landscape & Transformations Reduce vendor management overhead through strategic partnering. THE SOLUTION HCL Technologies turned out to be the only partner to sign-up to all the requirements and associate its service changes against the achievement of the targets. HCL was also selected for its ise in telecom business process (etom) and proven methodologies for managing a wide range of applications across multiple technology platforms. Thus, HCL became the first supplier to sign up to tying its revenues to CE Improvement Targets, one of the parameters on which client measures its performance.
HCL adhered to Business-aligned application Custodian Approach for managing the 200+ applications that are part of the Lead to Cash( L2C) and Trouble to Resolve (T2R) processes of client. As the application custodian of these 200+ applications, HCL has end to end ownership of resolving the incidents / trouble tickets raised to resolve issues related to these applications, in a multi-vendor environment. HCL entered into OLA with other IT service providers of client and effectively tracked and managed the resolution of the incidents that are parked with the other IT service providers for the in-scope applications. The key tenets of HCL solution: SCOPE L2 Suport Incident Management Problem Management Change Management Configuration Management Application Custodian Availability Management Problem Management E2E monitoring Service Leave Management Release Management Fast track transition using ezmigrate framework - Operational assessment to test the readiness fo support takeover HCL SOLUTION ITIL Based Approach Red Phone & eenabler Smart RCA Contnuous Service improvement Deployment Taskforce Database Audit - HCL TOnE Solution HCL Solution Best Practices TRANSITION: HCL leveraging its AsseT transition framework, completed the transition of 200+ applications from multiple IT service providers of client in a short time. An accelerated ramp-up of 1000+ FTEs in a short span of 3 months enabled transition of 60% of the in-scope. The team created System Appreciation Documents and 99% of the application transition passed the Operational War Gaming conducted by an external agency engaged by client, in the first attempt.
STEADY STATE STRATEGIC INITIATIVES: To achieve incident reduction and improve customer service delivery score, HCL formed a Strategic Initiative and Delivery Excellence (SIDE) team to work with the application support group. The key initiatives are: Red Phone Service assurance Manager Deployment Task Force Strategic initiatives and Delivery Nakeeran Command Center Continuous Service Improvement Independent Database Audit Root Cause Analysis Dedicated team operating 24 x 365, proactively monitoring new high priority Availability of HCL senior manager to handle critical incidents during out of office hours Ensure error free deployment Focused team driving strategic initiatives to improve operational efficiency and delivery excellence Independent Service and Process audit team to assess the teams knowledge levels Develop deep technical and functional knowledge of the application. Focuses on incident reduction to improve the application stability Independent database audit team to proactively audit the databases to reduce the incidents due to database issues Efficient RCA thereby reducing the number of tickets RAPID REQUEST RESOLUTION: Based on our ise and experience in resolving the incidents in the past, HCL has created an extensive known error database (KEDB) with details of the incidents, root cause analysis report and the resolution activities. For all P3 and P4 incidents that are less business critical and for new service requests we have formed Rapid Request Resolution (RRR) team. This team would acknowledge such incidents and provide quick resolution by referring to the KEDB. The key benefits of RRR team are: MTTR improvement in P3 and P4 incidents Optimized resource utilization and freeing up the bandwidth of SMEs for P1 and P2 incidents
Rapid Request Resolution Factory T2R Application-1 Application-2 Application-3 Application-4 Proviso Java.NET Bridge Billing SQL MQ Mediation RSS Factory Manager Domain L2C Integrated Business Aligned ASM Clarify Lead Engineer Lead Engineer Lead Engineer Solution Executives Solution Executives Solution Executives Achievements: Meeting the expectations of customers/ Achieving customer satisfaction Optimized resource utilization E2E Integrated Availability of Business Reduction of cost spent for ASM year on year BENEFITS DELIVERED TO CLIENT: Improved Performance - 92% reduction on Incident Reduction through various Service Improvements, leading to improved stability and better Customer Experience. - Reduction of repeat incidents by 40%, through proper Root Cause identification and elimination. - 50% reduction on Incident Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) to improve Cycle Time and Customer Experience. - First to introduce Strategic Initiatives to achieve the goals identified and targeted. - Improve to industry benchmarks, where SLAs are not dependent on existing environment - Increased use of industry best practices and tools - The success story has been shared by HCL along with the client in TM Forum conferences in Singapore, South Africa and Dubai. - Case study is published in TM Forum Case study handbook. Reduced Operational Risk - Standardized ITIL process and industry processes through documentation, automation and proactive management eliminate single point of failures and risks
- Business Process Audit to identify gaps and track them through Continuous Service Improvement plans (at application and engagement level) - No risk to SLAs on increased project activity - Increased visibility into operations Variable Capacity and Costs - Variable component in the revenue model offering flexibility - Resourcing flexibility based on fixed component of the revenue model - Pool of Business Knowledge and Technology Expertise INNOVATION & VALUE CREATION HCL has been consistently working on continuous improvement and delivering value over the engagement period. HCL s value index has been consistently green and above 6, with the current value delivered account to 738K GBP, which is 80% of the target for this financial year 2011-2012. The value creation activities and business benefits delivered to Client has been rated the best by HCL s value creation council this year. Hello, I m from HCL! We work behind the scenes, helping our customers to shift paradigms and start revolutions. We use digital engineering to build superhuman capabilities. We make sure that the rate of progress far exceeds the price. And right now, 90,000 of us bright sparks are busy developing solutions for 500 customers in 31 countries across the world. How can I help you? www.hcltech.com