2004 C.I.P.A. Winners

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TELUS Mobility

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New channel self-service solution improves customer service, reduces costs dramatically

TELUS Mobility’s new Channel Self-Service solution (CSS) is helping TELUS Mobility achieve its goal to become the easiest wireless company to do business with in Canada. CSS gives the company’s dealers a comprehensive, Web-based toolkit to manage their client relationships right at the point of sale. These tools help make dealers more efficient and responsive in serving TELUS Mobility clients – while enabling cost savings of more than $10.7 million per year.

Challenge

TELUS Mobility leads the Canadian wireless industry in revenue, earnings growth and revenue per user. It also has the most spectrum - the airwave ‘real estate’ of wireless - of any company in Canada, and digital coverage for more than 90 percent of the Canadian population. It sells and supports its products and services through a number of channels, including seven Client Care centres, the Web (for customer self-service) and a network of 7,500 dealers.

In the past, these dealers were limited in what they could do for their clients at the point of sale. If a client wanted to activate a new account, change services or process a payment, the dealer would have to submit the request to a TELUS Mobility call centre. TELUS Mobility would complete the transaction, typically in about six minutes. But some transactions, such as activations, took up to 15 minutes.

TELUS Mobility knew that a waiting customer is often not a happy customer. Less cost and less time spent on processing transactions would mean more resources for selling – and a much happier dealer and client. It would also alleviate processing time and cost for the TELUS Mobility support team. But how to make it happen – especially since every dealer had its own unique systems already in place?

Objectives

TELUS wanted to apply technology in a way that would:

• Empower the dealers by providing them with tools to better manage their client relationships;
• Re-engineer and automate frequently used processes;
• Offload client calls from TELUS call centres to the sales channels;
• Reduce costs and speed rollout of new applications across all channels; and
• Reduce client turnover by providing faster, more-responsive service.

Solution

TELUS’s new Channel Self-Service application (CSS) offers a comprehensive toolkit to dealers via the Internet. It supports all product lines and all account types (consumer, small business or corporate account). It also calculates dealer sales commissions automatically. Dealers using CSS can:

• Sign-up/renew existing contracts.
• Add/change/delete features on a subscriber’s account.
• Change a client’s rate plan to give the client better value for their wireless dollar.
• Change account information or client phone number.
• Review account activity and process payments.
• Order equipment from TELUS Mobility, process equipment swaps and track repairs.

CSS required an effective information management strategy. The project team had to bring together many independent organizational units within TELUS to deliver diverse and dynamic functionality to the sales and service channels and end-clients within an integrated delivery environment. The team also had to work with a number of technology partners, including: AMDOCS, SUN, Hitachi, Oracle and BEA Systems. The result is a seamless solution to dealers regardless of their user interface or method of access.

Innovative Use of Technology

CSS has transformed TELUS Mobility’s relationship with its dealers. Dealers with a higher adoption rate of the new self-service application report much higher sales performance relative to their peers. The solution has resulted in cost savings of more than $10.7 million per year and increases in revenue totaling $3.1 million to date and potentially $10 million in additional revenue over the lifetime of the new clients. Specific benefits include:

Improved sales or revenue

• Increased available sales hours for dealers. This has resulted in tens of millions of dollars in incremental sales revenue for dealers and for TELUS Mobility.

Efficiency improvements

• Reduced time spent manually tracking repairs.
• Significantly reduced calls to the TELUS call centres. This enables a major organizational change within TELUS where people can focus less on administrative tasks and more on adding value to the sales channels through process redesign, dealer training and product/service launches.
• Reduced calls to the TELUS collections department.
• Automated processes for dealers that were previously done through TELUS via email.

Improved organizational effectiveness

• Eliminated manual work for contract fulfillment.
• Reduced monthly mailing costs 80 percent for client-requested contract offers.

Improved customer service

• Accelerated order fulfillment. Dealers can fulfill orders for clients with no offer letter and without a subsequent call to the TELUS call centre and fax.
• Added convenience. Clients can now have their phones repaired anywhere they want, at any dealer.
• Decreased turnaround time on repairs, which has increased client satisfaction.

The Channel Self-Service solution is clearly a core element of TELUS Mobility’s strategy to be the leading wireless company in Canada. In the words of Michael Berger, TELUS Vice President – Strategic Planning and Execution, "Our CSS has allowed us to become the easiest wireless company to deal with in Canada. It puts the tools dealers need to manage their client relationships right at their fingertips. The corporate investment we made in Channel Self-Service has already paid for itself many times over."

A 2004 CIPA Winner!

For its exceptional and innovative application of Information Technology to solve real-world business problems and bring greater benefit to all its stakeholders, TELUS Mobility was awarded a 2004 Canadian Information Productivity Award of Excellence in the Efficiency & Operational Improvements category.

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