Since reorganising around value streams, the infrastructure team has been looking at the systems we have for supporting ordering our more complex products including Colocation, Backhaul, Edge Centre, and Smart Locations.  

We had a hypothesis that creating a more streamlined system would help both us and you manage orders more easily. To test that we decided to start by getting a better understanding of how those ordering systems and processes are currently working for you. Our research included talking to a range of different people across sales, provision and product from different types of RSPs – large, medium, small/specialised, wholesale.  

Findings

We discovered that overall, the process of ordering these products is manageable and the Chorus Portal works well. Wireline and Smartsheets are harder to use and do need replacing. And in general, it would be good to be able to order everything in one system.  

The more immediate concern for the people we talked to, are the processes behind the systems, particularly around build delays and unknown timeframes for next steps. This makes it hard for them to manage customer expectations and meet commit dates. 

Other key insights

• Ideal to have everything easy to find and track in a system, not via emails.
• Easier if availability and feasibility are viewable before placing an order.
• Some products don’t have clear expectations around response times.
• Prefer for site contact issues to be raised immediately so that they can be resolved when the tech is onsite.
• Updates and alerts need to be clearer to understand what the next action is.
• For the volume of orders, service providers thought it was unlikely they would automate these complex products into their own ordering systems.

Actions underway

Focus on improving the processes and backend systems so we can:

• Better manage and communicate build delays more proactively.
• Create clearer expectations around next steps in the order process.
• Better visibility of product availability and use-cases.

We are working towards incremental improvements to these over the next year.  

For our technology roadmap we are looking at the following areas:

• Improving customer relationship management capabilities. 
• End-to-end for complex jobs (CCS jobs) – tracking across complex jobs.
• Investigate replacement for Wireline for new orders.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the interviews and helped us with the research. As usual we will keep you informed as we progress these developments. 

Contact

If you would like to hear more detail about the research, please let your account team know.