Customer Experience Driven Digital Operations by MTN-South Africa

South Africans as being tech-savvy people and adapting ‘always-on’ culture – this is igniting data boost for Home, Mobile and enterprise sectors. South African customers demanding MORE speed and Quality of Experience (QoE) for their applications and operators are facing challenges in keeping up subscriber’s high expectations.

Delivering ‘best customer experience’ is now must for survival for operators.

This requires transforming service operations using digital tools and platforms to manage all their customers on an individual basis. MTN has invested in such unified platforms to enhance service delivery with end-to-end visibility, instant data access and more personalized customer interactions.

A unified platform not only helps MTN to improve service experience for its users, but also ensures greater efficiency, proactive network monitoring, enhanced reactive care by its customer care and also increase new opportunities to upsell based on personalized offers. In this article, we explore the advantages of Network & Service Operation Center (NSOC) transformation to extend the service layer, accelerate response times and improve the overall customer experience.

Focus on Customer Experience

Leading in Customer Experience identified as MTN’s top vital enablers out of five in MTN’s Ambition 2025 strategy. MTN understands that ‘Customer Experience’ is not just focusing on network coverage, it’s about understanding end-to-end customer journey and deliver best network and service experience to its users.

MTN is committed to deliver best service experience to its customers and invested in state-of-the-art solutions by implementing Network & Service Operation Center (NSOC). The transformation towards NSOC requires up-skill its workforce, focusing on processes, tools and platform adoption to improve service delivery, upgrade network performance and increase capacity. By transforming towards Network & Service Operation Center (NSOC) user-service operations approach, MTN implemented proactive operations to help customers and react quickly to network issues based on data-driven insights.

“In our partnership with Huawei, we were able to grow our customer experience based on Customer Experience Driven Digital Operations. Huawei consultancy journey helped MTN to learn from the best experiences in the market, in terms of how to manage all customers at an individual level and ensure their experience,” says Themba Sikampula, Senior Manager at MTN. “For example, fault management alarms enabled proactive operations and our service personnel can pinpoint and resolve network degradation before it effects other customers,” he adds in the interview.

Meeting customer expectations

Since the global pandemic, South African culture is more online than ever and customers have high expectations regarding fast internet connections, seamless coverage and security/privacy. By creating a blueprint for its NOC to SOC transformation journey, MTN moved quickly to boost innovation in its network monitoring.

Along with building up network pipes to expand capacity, the mobile carrier increased monitoring to ensure faster uplinks/downlinks and throughputs while measuring operations performance metrics. It also adopted Huawei’s innovative tools and Smart Care CEM platform to ensure greater efficiency.

In addition to monitoring and managing customers at an individual level, team members use the platform to effectively interpret, analyze and respond to service issues. Staff can also access new toolsets and features to locate and retain value-add customers, reduce churn and achieve more granular monitoring through the customer experience index. Moreover, MTN commercial sales and marketing teams can easily access relevant network and customer experience data to personalize customer offers, improving their price availability and service experience.

Choosing the right partner

A unified platform represents a successful model for call-center integration and tool access enabling support staff to quickly respond and help customers with any challenges. Huawei has long been a premier partner for MTN, delivering solutions that meet the carrier’s evolving needs. For example, the company’s NOC to SOC transformation enabled integration of all call-center agencies.

As a result, support team members can simply log in to the platform to find answers, initiate campaigns to help individual users or access real-time feeds to send alerts or service updates. Whether it’s network efficiency for service delivery, planning network operations or accessing customer data for campaign management, Huawei’s versatile toolset will drive the next generation of service delivery.

“When we choose partners for efficiency improvements and generating revenue, we select partners like Huawei who can really add value in terms of the customer experience,” says Sikampula.

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