Telefónica O2 Ireland Creates the Gold Standard for Business Customer Care with the Service Cloud, Sales Cloud and Force.com from salesforce.com

Case Study

Business customers are the lifeblood of Telefónica O2 Ireland. Large enterprise accounts of this leading mobile communication provider typically have an expansive employee base registered on many different types of handset, data peripheral, accessory, and rate-plan. Their objectives are to reduce the cost of maintaining the relationship with O2 Ireland, and streamline the sales order and customer service processes. For example, an O2 Ireland corporate customer purchasing 500 BlackBerry handsets expects a fast, easy summary of the phone delivery schedule and order status transparency.

This is where the Sales Cloud from salesforce.com comes in. The enterprise Cloud Computing model was initially introduced to help O2 Ireland’s corporate sales team manage leads and opportunities, and track day-to-day activities for selling to large businesses in Ireland. Subsequent integration with O2 Ireland’s Amdocs billing system provided sales teams with a wealth of detail about each customer; including the services they have from O2 Ireland, how frequently they use them, and their billing profile. This allowed the mobile provider’s account managers to engage in more meaningful sales dialogs with customers, based on a near real-time view of their situation. The net results being that O2’s business teams are better able to track activities, drive opportunities, and, effectively manage the business sales pipeline.

This success inspired O2 Ireland to look at other customer relationship management (CRM) innovations using the Service Cloud, in particular opportunities for the customer service team to improve the way they managed everyday customer interactions. Historically, the majority of activity was conducted by phone, or by the customer emailing the O2 Ireland customer service team regarding service requests on their mobile account. The Service Cloud’s email-to-case feature changed all that: enabling teams to automatically create support cases from emails sent to designated customer service addresses. That means improved issue tracking and faster service.

Critical solutions for managing business customer relationships

Liz Caughey, a business Online Manager for O2 Ireland, has witnessed the way the salesforce.com applications have flourished in the company. “The Service Cloud has quickly become one of Telefónica O2 Ireland’s most critical solutions for managing business customer relationships, because it is so easy to use and so flexible,” she explains. “It has become the platform of choice to manage and record all activity—from emails, phone conversations, and face-to-face meetings, to recording updates on real activity happening on each account.”

Electronic order capture was next. Developed and deployed in partnership with its systems integration partner Deloitte and Salesforce Consulting, the automated order management enables O2 Ireland’s sales teams to create orders and contracts in front of the customer. The customer signs on a tablet PC and the contract is produced―all during the customer meeting, while the sales representative is in the customer’s office. “We capture all direct sales order activity in Salesforce CRM. The teams processing the orders use the Sales Cloud workflow to transit each order through the activity stages, from service activation of services to shipping new mobile devices to customers,” says Caughey.

However, the best was yet to come. Fuelled by this success, O2 Ireland researched a segment of its business customer base and the message emanating back was loud and clear: they wanted more online self-service. Customers generally didn’t want to communicate via email; instead, they wanted to log a question with O2 Ireland online (such as an order for new or replacement hardware), receive a tracking number, and then manage the status of that activity right through to resolution. Deloitte introduced O2 Ireland to the Service Cloud Customer Portal. This would give customers a true online service experience, ensuring they had the flexibility to manage their interactions with O2 entirely online if they chose to do so, and enabling customer service questions to be managed, just like an order coming in from a field sales team person.

"Salesforce.com and Deloitte were able to prove that the Force.com Platform and Customer Portal would provide the equivalent user experience but in a highly scalable manner,” says Caughey. “Scalability of the service and processes were vital, because each O2 Ireland key business customer would require its own portal with unique branding―and in the case of the largest customers, customer specific catalogs and order approval processes/hierarchies."

The Service Cloud solution was compelling for other reasons. Visual Workflow would enable O2 Ireland to easily describe and adjust the user experience from customer to customer. The user interface leveraged the same industry accepted technologies as the other e-commerce vendors. And the salesforce.com Model View Controller approach provided a level of elegance and agility to the ongoing development and maintenance of the application―e-commerce servers would have been complex in comparison.

Award-winning online service management for business customers

The outcome was Blueclick.ie, a new online service management tool for O2 Ireland’s business customers. They can use the simple, secure blueclick.ie service to receive quick and easy access to O2 Ireland’s most up to date product and service information. Customers can create orders online for new and replacement O2 Ireland products including, phones, accessories, and SIM cards, and then track the status of the order through to shipment. They can submit requests online to the O2 Care team such as PIN codes, move employee accounts, activate users and make changes to the service. Using Blueclick.ie, authorised users can manage their company’s product catalogues, maintain and update account, and user information. A full suite of reports are also available, such as status tracking of orders and service requests, account status reports, and recent order summary. In due course, stock management will be added, through integration with O2 Ireland’s SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.

One of the most persuasive aspects of the salesforce.com and Deloitte proposal for Blueclick.ie was the agile development methodology. Agile deployment enabled O2 Ireland to receive a working prototype for Blueclick.ie in eight weeks. They showed this to a handful of their key customers, collated feedback, and two weeks later delivered another version which incorporated the features and functions customers had asked for. This work was done in two sprints of eight weeks each―a significant achievement given the levels of customization the Deloitte and Salesforce Consulting teams undertook. Indeed the task has been recognized by industry peers: Deloitte’s CRM portal deployment at O2 Ireland won the 2011 ICT Excellence Awards for IT Project of the Year (Private Sector).

“In due course, we would like the Service Cloud to be the platform of choice for all of O2 Ireland’s channels of customer interaction,” says Caughey. “Right now, the entire delivery lifecycle is performed in the Service Cloud―the customer orders a phone, pays by credit card, and the phone is delivered by partners who have been alerted in our partner relationship management system. By standardizing on one single, unified platform for managing multi-channel customer requests, Telefónica O2 Ireland is delivering faster, more responsive service and adhering to service level agreements agreed in the customer contracts. The organization is also reducing the cost of servicing business customers and accelerating the customer service and ordering process.”

Results

• Track day-to-day activities and opportunities for selling to business customers in Ireland
• Enabled more meaningful sales dialogs with customers, based on a near real-time view of their situation
• Automatically created support cases from emails sent to designated customer service addresses
• Underpinned electronic order capture, contract management, and fulfillment
• Supported blueclick.ie, an award-winning online service management for business customers
• Enabled O2 Ireland to introduce scalable, branded business customer portals
• Developed and deployed portal in 17 weeks
• Reduced cost of servicing business customers

O2