“With Salesforce, we can keep transforming the business and enriching our services in parallel. It helps us call the digital shots and gain competitive advantage.”

To keep up with customer demand, organizations across the globe are transforming their operations with digital capabilities. According to a recent study by the Boston Consulting Group Nordic companies are struggling to keep up with the trend, falling short when it comes to their digital ambitions, dedication, and execution strategy. But not leading telco Telia Bedrift Norge.

For the last three years, Telia Norge has been successfully transforming its business to put the customer at its heart. “Our vision is to become the preferred partner for digitalization in Norway,” explained Ben Azouagh, Head of Business Development Services, B2B, at Telia Norge. “We’ve established new B2B business models with our Platform of Engagement, based on Salesforce, which will ensure we remain relevant to our customers and boost our competitive advantage.” Running in parallel with the company’s existing connectivity services, the new business models focuses on customer challenges, opportunities, and needs, and how Telia Norge can work with its partners to add value. Thanks to its ongoing transformation eff orts, Telia’s done much more than just create new business models, it’s also created a more productive business operation. First time resolution rates have increased, with a 97% reduction in escalations to second line support. Telemarketing is far more eff ective with an 80% improvement in sales cycle time. And the open rates for marketing campaign mails has jumped up to 36%. “With our new Platform of Engagement, we’ve been able to drive performance improvements across the business. We are working faster, thinking smarter, and capturing better data and insights,” said Ben. Richer services help customers suceed in the digital age.With more than 20 years’ experience in telecommunications, Telia Norge has a wealth of knowledge that it wants to share with its 30,000 B2B customers by building deeper relationships and off ering value adding services. “We want to focus on our customers’ wider challenges and create more business value by helping them improve their operations, customer relations, and enhance partnerships to embrace the Internet of Things, and deploy disruptive technologies, “ said Azouagh.

To achieve this ambition, Ben teamed up with his colleague Espen Sundh, Business Owner/Portfolio Lead, Business Support Systems: their fi rst challenge was to unlock greater customer insights. “To connect with our customers, we need to understand our customers. Our parent company was already using Salesforce, so we decided to check it out,” said Espen. “We quickly realized that its capabilities went far beyond traditional CRM: Salesforce had the potential to glue together our departments and operations and drive our value chain end-to-end.” An agile approach to transformation helps Telia move faster. Supported by Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Community Cloud, Telia’s two-speed business transformation started Spring 2015. “The aim was to fi x what was broken in our existing business model, while simultaneously developing new ones,” explained Espen. Espen and Ben blazed a trail from the outset — swapping traditional project methodology for a more holistic and Agile approach putting real business value and user adoption at the top of the agenda. “We handpicked business stakeholders to join the team based on their experience and their attitude — we wanted people that were prepared to break from the norm,” said Espen. “These people became our champions for change — and we made them accountable for the success of the new way of working.” Telia Bedrift established a Program Governance and Center of Excellence to oversee the strategic alignment and governance of the transformation. “Salesforce is really easy to adopt and adapt, so we were able to focus on business outcomes rather than development demands,” said Espen.

Ben and Espen started the transformation where they knew it would have the biggest impact — service. In November 2015, Telia implemented Service Cloud for case management at its centralized B2B customer service center in Oslo, which handles around 360,000 B2B queries per year. “With current market trends and our new business models, we’ll be competing with companies that make service their diff erentiator, so we need to do the same,” said Ben. Better customers services differentiates the business with Live Agent, Telia’s B2B customers are now empowered to talk directly to second line experts to resolve their technical queries. “We increased fi rst call resolution and reduced the lead time from customer call to closing the case from days and hours to minutes, for even the most complex issues,” explained Espen. These improvements are refl ected in Telia’s customer satisfaction scores and NPS (Net Promoter Score), which have already increased and are still on the rise. Next, Ben and Espen turned their attention to sales, trading disjointed spreadsheets and email trails for centralized records on Sales Cloud that can be accessed by a 360-strong team spread across multiple geographies, locations and sales partnerships. “With standardized sales paths and automated approvals, the sales cycle is much faster and much more predictable and transparent,” said Ben. And not just for internal teams, but also external channels.  “With Community Cloud, we’ve extended the transformation out to our partners,” said Ben. “They can now fully interact as an integrated part of our end-to-end value chain. It’s an entirely new way of working and will be fundamental to the success of our new business model working in more embedded partnerships with our customers and partners.”

And there are still more innovations to come, with predictive models for prioritizing prospects next on the transformational agenda. “With Salesforce, we can keep innovating to stay competitive,” said Espen. “Making use of our data and centralized insight with analytics is next on our list.”

A new loyalty program reduces customer churn delivering more business relevant and personalized content will be key for both connecting with prospects and building stronger customer relationships. With Marketing Cloud, Telia can create both dynamic content and insight driven customer journeys. “We’ve already seen a vast improvement in our open and click-through rates for automated B2B marketing campaign and increased lead capture and creation,” said Ben. Telia hopes to encourage similar levels of engagement when it launches its new loyalty program for B2B customers during 2018. “In a highly competitive market, we need to work hard to keep our customers. As well as off ering exceptional service to keep satisfaction high, we need to show that we value them and off er incentives for staying,” added Espen. Telia’s loyalty pilot achieved a 30% reduction in customer churn. With service, sales, and marketing all on the same platform and eco-system, Telia can harness this inner- and outer looped 360-degree customer view and workspace to deliver a richer customer value and relevant experience. “We’re now reaching out to customers and treating every one like an individual, rather than waiting for them to come to us and treating them all the same,” said Espen. “By being more proactive, relevant, and personal, we can take the customer experience to a new level.” Telia can also take the customer experience — and its business — to a digital level, unlocking new channels, insights, and opportunities. “With our Platform of Engagement based on Salesforce, we can keep transforming the business and enriching our customer services. It helps us call the digital shots and gain competitive advantage.”  

Telia Norge is Norway’s second largest mobile network provider. It is a subsidiary of Telia Company, which is on a mission to create a ‘New Generation Telco’. Telia aims to bring the world closer through technology, connecting more people and integrating everything from living rooms and board rooms to home products and business processes. 

Read the full story