PegaWorld iNspire 2024: Navigating Customer Experience Transformation in the Digital Age with Telenet & Verizon

Okay. Uh. Hello, everyone. Thank you very, very much for coming to this session today. Uh, the sessions on Navigating customer experience transformation in the Digital Age with Telenet and Verizon. Um, I would just also like to say this is not just any panel. This is an award industry, award winning panel. Both the other night Verizon and Telenet both won the award was really really esteemed panel today. So I just want to put this into context.

The US market serves 361 million people in the telco section and is valued at around $332 billion, whilst the European market serves about 474 million and is valued circa around 270 billion. Um, we've had huge structural changes of fiber expansion, 5G rollout, macro market changes through mergers and acquisitions, recently, companies splitting into networks and servicos. So networks and servicos whilst they've been really strong headwinds. Uh, not only that, but the regulatory in the EU market, the US has had to grapple with increased costs from the emergence of low cost MVNOs and spectrum auctions, and increasing focus on bundles with an ambition to exceed customer experience, Despite this relentless periods of change, my guest today have employed strategies shifting from traditional approaches to introduce sorry to a digital first and consistent customer eccentric centric business model. I'm super pleased to introduce the panel who are going to share their experiences and insights from contrasting organizations across two different sides of the Atlantic. So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to uma. Would you? Thank you for that great prelude Fari. I'm Uma Rahman from Verizon Technology Services.

I'm an associate vice president and my portfolio includes back end platforms. Uh, responsible for customer experience orchestration, order management and operations. Very happy to be here. Looking forward to a fun session. Fantastic. Thank you. And yoga. Hi. I'm yoga.

Um, I'm a senior director of emerging commercial platforms at Verizon, and I manage the customer Experience Services platform that serve our customers through both assisted and digital channels. Brilliant. Okay. My name is Kate. Hi everyone. I'm from Telenet at Belgian Telco Player, but we're also part of Liberty Global for those who know it. In general, I work with in customer operations, but I have a big background in IT and digital and within customer operations. I'm responsible for the customer interaction platforms and automation. So very interested in everything that we've seen so far already from Pega.

Fantastic. And Brett. I'm Brett, I'm responsible for the delivery of Pega within Telenet for the customer service piece. Um, we work a lot with Kate, obviously Kate, but. Most annoying customer. Most important and well valued customer. Um, Kate forgot to mention that that actually Telenet is the best telco in Belgium. You forgot to say it. Um, um.

No, I'm responsible for that. So I've been on working on our Pega journey for a long time. We started implementing it back in 2017. I got my first gray hairs there. Um, and yeah, we're in a good shape now. So happy to have the conversation with our dear colleagues of Verizon as well. Fantastic. Thank you very much for that. Omar, um, can you tell me what customer service was like 2 to 3 years ago for your customers and agents, and what was the impact of that of the status of that to your customers in the business?

Yeah, sure. So 2 or 3 years ago, just like many other companies, Verizon got hit with the pandemic, too, and the changing needs of our customers. We have about 2000 stores. Customers were so used to walking to the neighborhood store and get whatever help they want. Now needed a different model, different forum for for their service. Um, luckily from technology, we are already embarked on a North Star architecture transformation where we were streamlining our tech stack. Um, to we had different applications streamlined, which provide centralized decision engine and personalization. So we were able to quickly pivot to that, accelerate and increase our digital mix. So we were able to adopt a digital first strategy, which you talked about in a rapid fashion.

I think that really accelerated just for many others, our digital transformation as well. So that's where we are today. Thank you. And in terms of customer service in AI, can you describe today's landscape in Verizon yoga please. So when we talk about customer service and customer experience in general, both have evolved significantly in the past few years, right. And there's been a big shift from a channel centric architecture to a customer centric approach, and more and more of our customers prefer to have a consistent, best quality experience across all of the channels. And what we've done at Verizon is brought in all of our orchestrations into a single case managed workflow platform, and that has enabled us to provide our customers with that. Uniform experience that they expect. So our customers can now start a conversation with us on one channel, force it, and then resume it on another channel and take it to completion.

So that is a very powerful experience for them. And by bringing in all of this orchestration into a common platform, we also are enabling our agents by providing them an end to end visibility of what's happening with the customer's journey, and that helps to reduce the overall cognitive overload for our agents in general. And it allows our agents to connect with our customers better. Focusing on having that conversation with our customers and having more meaningful interactions. And when it comes to customer service, that's very important. Every interaction matters. Right. right? And more and more of our customers when they call in, they don't expect to be talking about all of their previous historic interactions with us.

They expect us to know what they have gone through already, and we're bringing in this whole customer journey into a single platform. We are now able to stitch that journey for the agent and give a more concise, uh, summary to the agent to say this is what the customer has already gone through. So the agents don't have to ask this to the customers, and customers don't have to repeat it again. That's again a very powerful experience. Right. And to top on top of all of that, when we bring in our predictive services and personalizations, we are now able to give our customers the right recommendations. And what's the next best action for the customers? It's more like a personal problem solver or a personal shopper. Right.

And by bringing in some of these strategies, we've been able to reduce our overall interaction time significantly. So the opportunities that are available are tremendous. And the key really is to make sure that we are tapping in on the right technologies for the right outcomes. I love that answer. Brilliant. I love the bit about the customer and the customer interactions and that personalization touch. It's really rich. So I'd like to bring Telenet into the conversation right. You know Telenet has had has just come out of a difficult previous 12 months.

Can you outline some of the challenges in terms of customer service, the impact the approach you take and and how how you've improved and what part of Pega played in that journey ? So it's been a really tough year for us. Um, luckily we're we're now back, but, uh, we were in kind of a perfect storm. We had we just finished our digital transformation. We underestimated a bit the amount of change that comes along with it. We had a couple of technical problems. We had some bad press around it, so we had to do something. How we approached it was by setting up a program, and yesterday in the keynote I saw a Phoenix while we actually our project was called Phoenix. So we put up a program and what we looked at was looking at slicing the problem a little bit.

So we looked at, okay, what are the different areas which we need to tackle. And we created different work streams for them in the program. Um, this made sure that we had a lot of focus to get the right things done. Now where Pega has helped us a lot. Um, from a platform perspective, my teams were able to pick up some difficult challenges quite quickly, and the whole Build for Change, I think Don mentioned it as well. You can deliver quite fast, so we were able to tackle the most difficult journeys first and do small changes 2,080% through like a small change with a with a big impact. And at the same time, the work stream for customer operations was kicking up the training again. So people were starting to use the platform properly. They didn't make mistakes anymore.

So that's how we kind of got out of it. The help we got from Pega as well on this and still really thankful for that. Pega literally came in into our call centers, into our shops. They looked at it with their expertise, looked at how the flows were working, and gave us a whole bunch of good suggestions translating into real value. And you can you can look at it like this. We reduce call handle time by it. So if you look at performance for example, where we also got a lot of help, we in some screens it was so bad that it took sometimes 20s that's super expensive on a call. I don't need to explain that to you guys, I think, but we reduced that to three seconds just like that. And I think those are the kind of savings we were really able to to generate with the help of Pega, but also, by the way, that we are using the platform today and we're still not there, but I think I'm happy to say that after this difficult period of high focus, we're now, you know, taking the market back a bit.

We just launched a very interesting commercial offer in the south of Belgium. So we're a national player now there with our flanker brand. We use CDH to have a really nice, uh, offering in our app. So we're really starting to get back now. But it was a tough time. But I think the way we approached it and with the help of Pega, has definitely enabled us to take big steps there again. Fantastic. Yeah, sure. Okay.

I really like to also share with the audience over here the key word that, in my opinion, Brecht also used is that we should never underestimate the change management. We can implement a new tool, a new platform, but never underestimate the change management that comes with it. Like even for new onboarding agents, the tool needs to be self-explanatory or it doesn't make sense for them. Like if even more senior advisors are used to clicking on in certain patterns because they are very much click click. They do it almost blindly and suddenly the screen is completely changed. That takes time. And that change management, that's so, so crucial. And the fact that indeed with Pega and everyone, they really stepped to the contact centers, went to retail just to see how are the agents actually doing it, because everybody designs it with a certain intention. But then seeing it in use, seeing how advisors are on a daily basis, like where is this button suddenly going to?

And that you can, just by putting the button in a more convenient place, makes such a huge difference. Those are the the little things that really can help a lot. No. Great, really. Thank you. Thank you for that. So it's really super interesting from my perspective that you've got very similar themes coming from two very different CSPs, and really great to see the use of Pega across the board there. So, um, what I would like to ask now, uma, uh , uma touched on this on the status, uh, yoga. So can you outline, uh, Verizon's vision, some of the initiatives you've put in place to address some of the challenges you've had in the past?

And have you seen a change to the customers, the customer experience? And really, for the audience today, what advice would you give to others about to embark on a similar journey? Yes, yes. I can add to it. So, um, when it comes to the overall transformation piece of it that we're doing, what we try to do is we look at what is the technology that we're going to adopt in for the overall transformation. And we look at it from different aspects in terms of the center of practice that is available for our use. And in terms of are we able to build reusable functions that can be built once and reused at multiple places? And we also think in terms of, are we bringing in the right technologies that can be plugged into our security postures? So those are some critical aspects that we look in.

And that is definitely something that I would say each one has to look in when they go and pick in some of this transformation aspect of it. And um, Kate also talked about some of the change management pieces of it that is very critical because as much as we want to go and adopt a new technology or transform the ways of working, it is important that we consider the people management piece of it. Make sure that they are trained to go and start, uh, being productive on the new platforms that we want to build out there. And that also includes putting in the right processes, putting in the right guardrails. So anyone who comes in use and start using these technologies feel comfortable to be able to innovate and play around with it, and at the same time, make sure that the platforms continue to stay reliable. So those are few things that we would say we need to go forward as we move forward, start employing. I would like to add, because I was thinking when Kate was speaking as well, and that's so true about we need to understand how this is being used. Mhm. So a couple of weeks back and I think for we talked about it earlier to a couple of weeks back, I was in visiting our call centers, so I spent a few days talking to the experts there, the supervisors, and I, um, I did listen to calls side by side with our agents, spent a few days listening to calls, and that was really awesome experience.

And like Kate was saying, it's all muscle memory, the way how fast agents are using stuff. So we need to be really careful about what we are changing for the agent desktop and how they're using it, and there needs to be a constant feedback and understanding of what is really useful for them, what how they are adopting it, and how we are training them to do it, and how we are reducing the cognitive overload for them. And so listen. So listen, that's what I would I would really encourage people to do who are embarking on a transformative journey. Um, that helped me understand what our customers were calling about and how the agents reacted and how the customers took that and and how we can move towards that first touch resolution, which is our nirvana. Fantastic. I mean, a great insight. And I think the panel of touched on a great point, which is that you have to you can't do this at a distance. You have to go and actually understand what's happening with your customers and within the company, or actually what their experience from an agent's perspective.

Okay. So I'd like to follow on, Brett. Telenet now has decisioning through CDH sales automation customer service and recently went live with digital messaging using WhatsApp whilst you are looking to upgrade to the latest version of Pega. What new Pega capabilities or maybe some some you've seen today? Over the last couple of days, have you found that the most exciting as you continue to revolutionize your customer service and why? So there's a lot. So it's a difficult choice, but if I need to pick one, I would definitely say Pega Blueprint even the version before, the one that's now, that's now coming out, I think, um, we talked about change management. It's also about breaking the barrier between it and business. And I think the way that my teams are now organized, we're organized as ourselves a bit differently, where we try to get end users within the blueprinting process.

But it's always difficult when business people don't speak it and IT people don't speak business. Right. So that's that's a challenge, which I think with the new features coming out now, will really break that barrier. And it will also make sure that we can deliver a lot faster, which also means that if you make a mistake, you can correct it easily. And I think that's really crucial, bringing that value very quickly to customer operations, having direct user input there in an even stronger way, because maybe business users will be able to prompt themselves and put in exactly what they need. And that's something I'm really looking forward to, because I think that's if I look at at what we've learned in our journey, is that we got it wrong in the beginning. On what on the common understanding of what we needed to deliver. Like a user said, you know, a couple of years back at the start of the program, yeah, we need this flow and it needs to happen like this. But yeah, sometimes it goes to three different teams.

Once you Blueprint things done, you deliver something which you think is going to be great, but then in the end it's not. And I think this is this is the typical thing you see everywhere within within it. And it's always that field of, you know, tension and it's kind of translating sometimes. But I think this technology will really help us support breaking that barrier a bit more. We're also looking to, to to see how far we can get with citizen development in a year, maybe a couple of years. It's something we really want to look at as a company and see how far we can stretch it, for example, in Kate's team. Um, and this will definitely help because it takes a lot of the cognitive load to where you don't need to be super technical to make sure you already have a prototype. So I'm really excited about that part. Next to that, obviously there's a myriad of things that you guys are launching, so difficult to assess it, but if I look at it from my perspective and the value it will bring both in speed as well as being right the first time, I think that's for me.

That's it. That's the biggest one. Brilliant. Okay. Do you want to elaborate on that? For me. It's the agent assist capabilities. Of course, if we can even make our agents more productive. And I always say like the they should spend lesser and lesser time in tools and more and more engaging with the customer.

So if that can be facilitated by certain agent assist capabilities. I agree. With that. Was a dream come true. Yeah. Brilliant. Thank you for that. Um, so I think it's great to hear that, like the depth of experience and the different points of views, both Verizon and Telenet and how they approach, uh, some of the cause of their customer service, and the different strategies and methodologies and mindsets that they employ. I want to look a little bit into the future now.

So from a from Verizon's perspective, yoga, we have learned how the future can throw curveballs at you, whether they be social economic challenges or disruptive technology. If you were in 2028, what does customer service look like for you from a technology perspective? So it's a little bit of a Don Schuerman esque question about the future, if you can tell the future, but I'll be interested to understand your views. 2028 is a long term. If we look at the rate at which technology is changing. But I'll take my fair guess there. So, um, I would expect personalization to continue to evolve along with AI to drive more contextual experiences. What I mean is, um, the right experience for the right customer at the right time, in the right style and tone. Right.

And that would drive customer experience for us in the future based on not just demographics, but also the sentiments what exactly the customer is going through at that particular point in time. And offers and promotions will continue to be more dynamic and exclusively tailored, if you will, for a given customer, what we would call the segment of me and I, as all of us here can expect, will continue to take the center stage. And. and with more and more adoption of human in the loop use cases where AI basically partners with their human counterparts to make them more productive and more efficient, if you will. And again, going back to AI, um, GenAI along with conversational AI and NLP might drive a more text based and voice based service engagements. That's something that we could expect as we start maturing in those models, and AI in general would be helping the overall agent experience right from onboarding to the time it takes to train them. And we saw some of the new, um, features that are coming in for agent training, etc. so that's already there by 2028, I'm expecting that to be fully matured. And, um, more and more of the agents will rely on AI to be their personal research assistants and where AI basically scores through all of the several resources that are available at the disposal and maybe brings up more concise contextual informations to the agents so the agents don't have to be doing that impromptu research while they are having to interact with the customers.

This, again, will allow the agents to connect with the customer. Press fast forward like now. Um, so that's definitely something I think will come in and And, um, I, along with some of the predictive tools that are coming in, I would expect we should be able to identify the customers intent upfront. And we should also be able to identify who are the best agents who can serve this particular customer's problem, and pair them in such a way that our customers get the best possible experience at any given point in time, and that will be really powerful. So a lot of things to look forward as we go to 2020. Like all of you, maybe. I'm also excited to see how this whole landscape evolves. Great. Great answer.

Thank you very much. I love that the customer is almost every couple of words in there. It's not about the technology, it's about where the customer is going to be. How do we serve that customer? And I think that's been a common theme over the last couple of days. So okay, I want to pick up on to that future. If you look into the future in the next couple of years, what does a best in class partnership look like? What does the customer service look like and where do you see Pega playing a role? It's a bit what Don said this morning, right ?

You can't predict really what's coming. But there I really hope. And I look to all the partners there, that we should craft our strategic roadmaps together, because for all of us, it's looking in a glass bowl and we don't know what's coming. But by looking at it together, at least we can co-create it and really see OK really look at business capabilities. Where can you play a role as a partner? Where can this partner, for instance, excel and really together make the best possible experience for customer service as a whole? Because customers will always have issues? Unfortunately, I'm not the first. I will never shout and say there are no issues whatsoever ever happening at Telenet.

No, it will always be the case. It can be stupid things. Somebody just cut through a cord or something whilst doing renovations. There are always issues and in general we just need to find the best way to help those customers and how we are doing that, at least from our side, is really with a focus on what we call the digital front door, as we call it at Telenet, we really want the customer to create a habit of touch coming in touch with us from a digital perspective. Today, we're still a very traditional telco where customers have the tendency to call go to retail, but we really want to change that and make it super easy to contact us digitally. And there, of course, we also want to make use of automation as much as possible, and it's there that we really feel like we need to step up from a digital perspective and make even that experience better, because why are customers still going to those human channels? Because they still feel the need somehow I want to talk to a human. I want to explain my issue, but there should come a time that we can offer better, or at least the same experience, or even preferably better experiences on a digital front. If I can add to that, if I look at partners, um, what I'm really expecting of partners today, you know, there's a difference for me between vendor and partner.

There's are two completely different things. If you look at our situation, we're trying to do really cool stuff. We have bought a lot of really cool technology, which should be a great enabler. And I think they're what I'm expecting is that we, we, we create real partnerships where we get insights in what are what are they doing with other customers that can help us, and how do we set things up the right way so we don't need to redo them all over again, especially with the big challenges in digital . How do we do this best? Because we're we're obviously part of a group, Liberty Global. We can go and ask our peers there, our sister companies there, how do you guys do it? But, you know, if we like we work with envy. We work with with cognizant, we work with Pega.

It's really about leveraging all of the knowledge that is in there and making sure that they're helping us being successful together. And that's a whole difference from a traditional vendor perspective. Right. So that's the type of of of partnerships that I think we should really craft, which by the way, we already have to a certain extent, but definitely build on towards the future so we can make the lives of our customers a lot better with the technology that we have and the best way that suits our needs. 100% agree. Great. Thank you very much for that very rich picture. And I'd like to switch it back to to Verizon. And so with regards to customer service leadership, can you give three pieces of advice on customer service transformation and the key decisions to be mindful of embarking on a transformation?

Sure. That's a great question. So I would say have a clear vision and strategy. First, know why you're doing this transformation and what you hope to achieve and what your end goal is, that's for sure. Have that. And next. Invest in people, process and technology and how all that comes together. Those are your key assets and how they come together. That is key in transformation.

Um, I was thinking about, uh, when we were talking about the Knowledge Buddy yesterday, and I was thinking I was. I was happy that in Verizon, we already have something similar to that. Something like an agent, buddy, if you will, which is, um, geared. And we are building and expanding to use our internal AI engines and we are building llms bringing that together, like you said. So the agent has a curated information so they don't have to go multiple places to look for that. So that's a clear indication of how you bring the technology to the people and develop a process. So you know, you're successfully assisting where you want to be. So those are the things which you want to be careful of while you're embarking on a transformation, especially something which involves humans. So three things I would say, um, scope.

Make sure you clearly define scope and what you need to achieve and when you're going to achieve it. Um, change management. I know a lot of folks here talked about change management. I would underscore that that is huge. You need to be aware of what is changing when it's changing, so socialize it. There could be other stakeholders outside your ecosystem who are still impacted by that. Make sure everybody understands and are in invested along with you. And third thing, and I can't stress this enough is governance. So make sure.

You. Build a. Build. An environment where change is happening constantly but also provide a safe space where even new people can come in and and be successful. Build an environment with guardrails and safety net. So, you know, as and when we go through those changes, we have that backup. So we have that plan and we have that confidence that as we are evolving and adopting, there could be slight slips, but we have the safety net in place to get us through there. Those three things I would say are the key. Very clear.

Thank you. Really good insight, I think, although they sometimes come across quite simply. It's really good. Insightful for anyone who's done similar roles in the past. So I'd like to go back to Kate. So from a customer service perspective and thought leadership, if someone asks you your advice about using Pega in the future as part of the transformation, or to make an immediate difference to a business, what advice would you give. To Customer Central? I know it sounds very cheesy to say so because it's been said a thousand times, but you really need to do it and then it means doing completely different things in your organization. It means like setting up indeed a bit.

Also governance about what it means. For instance, we have at Telenet, our hero KPIs that everybody in the company knows, knows about. They're even being broadcasted on the laptops. If you if your screen is sleeping there, you even see the hero KPIs. So everybody lives and breathes it. They know the situation. They know how many customers are contacting us the first time, right? And so on. That's what it's really all about.

And it's also about, for instance, the processes we we never talk anymore from a, from a technology perspective about the performance and the latency. There are dashboards and monitoring and so on. That happens. But we always look at what the end result is. Does the customer feel it. And that's the main thing to to track upon it. So really put the customer really core in the heart of everything that you do. That's the key. And change your organization around it.

We went even a step further, if I may, and I liked very much the conversation from Deutsche Telekom this morning where he really also said our business needs to talk it. We went even a step further. We no longer have an IT department within Telenet. The it is really within, for instance, within customer operations. We have the platforms within customer operations for sales, the commercial and everything commercially bound. All the platforms are the same, are in the same teams as the people who designed the campaigns, who create the products and so on. So that really shifts the thinking drastically, because suddenly they understand the complexity that comes with creating a new product. They are way closer to each other, and I think that's really where it comes down to. If you really put the customer central, then you need to look at your organizational design the way you do things, because otherwise you're just saying it but not doing it, then it's just a blah blah, if I may say it like that, and if you really put it into into action, then you drastically need to change your organization and everything that comes with it.

So it's definitely not an easy thing to do. No, no, I so I think that's some fantastic absolutely great insight. I mean dif totally different. But both telcos both driving customer service, trying to make a real difference for their customers. Um, so first of all, I'd like to say thank you very much before we go to questions. But thank you very much. I think it's been really insightful. So if anyone's got any questions, can you please, for the panel, please come up to the. It's either shouting or using the mic.

Yeah. Hi, I'm Patty Duncan, I'm from Charter in Denver, Colorado, and we're using Peg in a couple of different ways in the company. But my project in particular, we're still we're still in the process of rolling it out. And it's not it's not central to customer service for us, but a lot of the same. It's an implementation flow. We can pick the best tools. We can pick the best platforms. We can do everything right. How do you guys approach that way to work in order to get it to work, in order to get the right people at the table , especially in customer service.

Everything's a fire every day. So spending time with you in a meeting to get to the heart of the matter is really difficult. So how do you all approach that work to get the teams together, get this rolled out, ensure that you're hitting deadlines, you've hit it. It's focus. Like if you really make it a priority within the organization and you really have the room there to put it as a key company priority, then people need to make time for it. So and also like the organizational change that I just explained, my team is literally there talking to the people who are in that day to day fire, who are the main contact persons for teams like Brecht, for instance. We learned it the hard way, to be very honest with you. We went to. There.

That's where we're learning right now. And that's and that's a little bit, you know, now we're talking all the time. How can we avoid another Phoenix. So in everything that we do is like, oh my God, we don't want to go back there. But we did learn that if you if you don't involve people at the right moment in your in your, in your co-creation process, then yeah, you're not even co-creating. Right. So I think as a, as a, as a key message, um, if you look at the time that people would be spending a couple of hours that they spend in those meetings, and hopefully with maybe with Blueprinting, it might even go down drastically. That time is well spent because you'll spend maybe triple the money by refactoring everything, because they weren't there in the beginning. And I think that's the kind of the kind of, you know, thoughts that we're taking along now.

It is an investment. You need to look at it as an investment and not as a cost. Because otherwise you pay. You pay the price anyway afterwards. But I would. Recommend, at least from my experience, what's worked is an iterative approach. So that is where the scope and um, scale comes into picture I think. So I know it's adoption and anything new is difficult. So when we chunk it out and then we give a small piece and then see the results, and then then people get more invested and excited when they see the results.

Is it really working and the feedback, the constant feedback then that you would automatically get everybody to your table? Yeah. If I may add, this is the change management piece that we talked about. It's important that the team, the people understand what we are trying to do and why we are trying to do what is the outcome that we are trying to, uh, you know, attain at the end of all of this. And that to the most part, will get the buy in from the team. And what is the cost of not doing that? That also needs to be very clear when when those are laid out, it's easier to bring in the buy in that you are looking for from the team. And that's pretty much what we employ ideally. There the project sponsor, to be honest.

Right. Ideally because that's the big thing that we also said like it shouldn't be an IT transformation, it should be a business transformation. And if you can get the business to be the actual project sponsor and take the lead in defending the. Why? Because it's one thing explaining the why to them. But if you can really make the step in that they are the defenders of the why, then you will go really way faster in terms of implementation. Great. Thank you. Thank you very.

Much for your question. Any other questions? Nope. Hi. Uh, my name is Ravi. I'm part of charter. We were supposed to have a meeting, right? Probably should. So.

Yeah, I'm. From the. ID side. So a. Quick question around. The. Business processes because we talk about transformation and the key when we do transformation and what Omar said getting the right scope and the dates right intact, um, comes around with business processes and understanding what the business process is to. And probably sometimes it needs to evolve, uh , to get an automation in process. Right.

So I'll take an example, which you guys mentioned as, uh, looking at the customer services to give a clear picture of what kind of offers you can provide. Um, and Intel goes, I'm pretty sure you would know that there would be back office updates in the pillars, which would render your data in your, uh, technical CRM systems outdated. How did you deal with all of that? So you can take that? Sure. So this is the piece where when we said we're going to bring, we're bringing in all of the customer interactions into a single, um, workflow manager case managed workflow that brings in the visibility that you're talking about. Something has changed in the back end. So it doesn't have to necessarily be a customer interaction that needs to go into the customer's journey. There are several other things that drives the customer experience.

Some of them can be offline transactions like what you're alluding to, so bringing those as well into the customer's journey and bringing that stretched end to end visibility will help us to bring in those very, uh, surgical recommendations that you want to provide. So it's all put in one place so you're able to get the data together and drive those kind of contextual offers. I think. Yeah, I, I think what you're heading towards is the need for a versatile offer management platform. So the way we approached it is we did give that capability to our business partners to build it in, in, in, in a staged environment and so that it can be tested before it can be turned on live for the customers. So there is probably a at the most a couple of hours lag latency. So that so we have given that ability for our business to react quickly to the market. Especially like you said, we are in a competitive market and we need our businesses to have that agility to be able to tweak offers at any given moment based on how the market is reacting. So we did approach that.

We've stood up this this platform, which is reactive and and stable and pretty versatile. That's how we thank you. Yeah. Alam I'm from Aztec So when we talk about the digital transformation and both the companies are pretty old, I know there's a lot of legacy, which you have, uh, been also struggling with. So how do you maintain that? Right. Customer experience when you have two parallel tracks going on with the legacy going here and the transformation going on there? So what type of suggestions you have or the challenges you have faced and overcome? So we we actually decided to get rid of our legacy.

So that was the bold move that we did with our digital transformation program for the residential area. We took the decision to replace the CRM system. So the BSS layer and then on top of that we put Pega. So we kind of made that decision because our homegrown system wasn't able to, you know, to deliver what we what we needed as a company commercially, but also from a customer experience point of view. We are still migrating, so we're at 99.6% at this moment. Of all of our customers, we're still struggling. But it is complex because on the other hand, in our B2B space, there is still a lot of applications and we also struggle a little bit there on bringing them all together, but also there there are plans to really see, okay, how can we simplify the entire landscape, how can we rationalize it and take some decisions? I mean, I think that it's really hard if you stick to your legacy, and I know it's easier said than done. I get that, but sometimes you need to take the decision to simplify it because otherwise you keep on dragging a lot of costs along.

To be honest, it's really indeed making those bold choices to stop investing in your legacy and keep it purely to maintenance and making sure that those customers who are still on the legacy platform can be supported. So it is really taking the bold decision. Don't do any further investments on legacy and then hence speed up the track to get your your greenfield out was really a greenfield implementation that we did get your greenfield solution sorted and migrate as quickly as possible because it also again gives the workforce, the people internally, the right priority and focus to do focus on that new system instead of constantly. Indeed, we make the comparison internally. Imagine that a fireplace has to constantly fire between two houses that are on fire. Yeah, no, you preferably want them to focus on one house that isn't on fire, then having to spread over two. So that was literally the way we we we looked at it and said no, all priority should be on setting that new system up and running and do the migration as quickly as possible. And does that then mean that for certain customers at the experience, experience is not 100% how we would like it to be. Yes, but that's really pushed us to go as quickly as possible with that migration.

And indeed it's 8000 customers approximately, that we now have left. But those are indeed legacy customers with a variety of products where you can't do an easy like, like for like change in terms of products. So it really takes one on one communication. And it's also a continuous process because even on our new stack, we're already doing a product rationalization . So we're already looking into okay, do we still want to support these products? Do we still want to offer them as a promotion? Do we still want to keep them alive? So we're doing that exercise right now to see how can we just cut them out. And but it's again, it's the decisions you need to take.

And obviously it always comes at a certain cost. Like Kate is mentioning some. Yeah. For some it's not it's not going to be great. But that's still outweighs the cost you would make when you're not doing it. Yeah I think I agree. See transformation is also when adopted as an agile process of transforming, we will be able to give continuous improvements in terms of the benefits that we want to give as well. So even though sometimes transformation looks big, um, the only way to eat a mammoth is one bite at a time. So we will have to pick up where do we have the best benefits in terms of starting the transformation?

So we get the outcomes early on so we can drive the customer experiences so the rest of them continue. And the at the end of the day, the whole platform is transformed and we are able to get the benefits. Well, I'm afraid we're just coming up 10s left. So it's it's been a really interesting panel. As I said at the beginning, an award winning panel. Thank you very much for your time. It's been a real pleasure and honor to have you here today, and I hope everyone has a good rest of the great day. And don't forget to go and see the Innovation Hub. Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me. Thank you.