Now more than ever, we see a significant shift in the operating models across organizations, mainly when delivering service and experiences. Companies that excel at keeping customers at the center of their strategy have an easier journey to increase their base and build trust with the end-user. It’s a fact that our customers and consumers expect nothing less than the best customer service—be it speed, accuracy, or quality that sets the bar higher in a virtual realm.
This need for exceptional customer service can no longer be ignored when it comes to the utilities and telecommunications industry. It’s essential to invest in and implement the right software in order to leverage it as a key differentiator and in turn deliver exceptional Moments of Service™ to customers.
There is currently a lot of disruption in the utilities and telecommunications industries such as volatile gas prices and growth in electric vehicles. This means managing your existing customer and asset base are paramount. It should therefore be as efficient as possible, allowing you to focus time and effort on the new challenges.
As energy and utility providers compete on customer service, they’ll look to provide a more retail-like customer experience model—one where customers can get the right personalized energy solution, on the channel they want, in just a few clicks.
IFS Cloud is a complete solution to ensure the Moments of Service™ expected by customers can be met. This spans from customer interaction by any expected method, ensuring the field work schedule is constantly optimized to meet the promised service, and ensuring the customer is kept up to date of progress throughout. In addition, IFS Cloud ensures that the organization’s assets are managed throughout their lifecycle, including supply chain and logistics, inspections, investment planning, maintenance, overhaul, and decommission. The operations can also use the single product for managing finance, HR, projects, marketing and sales.
Engineering a Green, Sustainable Future
If I were to cite an example in this context, in West Europe, Tech Mahindra has been working closely with one of the largest telecommunication organizations on several initiatives. These initiatives help improve processes and assist with field force scheduling and resource optimization, driving customer engagement.
With the Netherlands at the forefront of becoming carbon neutral, our customer has the vision to go completely green with their field force services. This involves keeping engineers’ travel to a minimum and providing remote support where possible. Our plan is to deploy our IFS PSO solution, enabling faster ‘engineer to route’ optimization, using battery-operated vehicles. These battery-operated vehicles have demonstrated 99% punctuality for in-home visits, reducing the frequency for further visits and contributing to sustainability goals.
At IFS, we believe in investing in sustainability and the value it can drive within your business. Through investments in technology and connected data, more businesses can better build, manage and measure their sustainability initiatives.
Our commitment to sustainability is built upon our plan to improve operations, enabling our customers to achieve their sustainability goals and commitments. We are also dedicated to supporting the industry at large, to encourage more accountability to our environment, across the industry.
Deploying 5G: The NXT in Telecom
As telecom operators accelerate 5G deployment, sustainability is a crucial driver in the utilities’ industry; there is a rising demand to develop, deploy, and maintain new assets to cater to such needs. Further disruption will inevitably present a risk. Retiring workforce, changes in population or demographics, reducing the labor pool, and lack of communication within the millennial workforce can cause disconnect that adversely impacts the Moment of Service to the end-user.
To put this into context, one aspect of the telecom industry does not mirror another; climbing a radio tower versus threading a coaxial cable through a hole in the wall all require a certain level of training to ensure their skills translate into excellent customer service. Therefore, organizations need to drive efficiency and speed while engaging with a highly skilled set of workers. This is one of the surest ways to drive up customer experience delivery and stay ahead of the competition.
Within utilities, emission management in real-time with IoT-enabled sensors, asset management, and asset performance are all fundamental elements needed to deliver excellent service. By implementing software that can increase efficiencies and time to value, technicians will gain time to upskill and deep–dive into other issues and resolve them, creating the best possible Moment of Service for their end-user.
Creating Connected Experiences of the Future NOW
Tech Mahindra and IFS are on a journey to deliver on the NXT Connected World. Connected Experiences and create the Moment of Service. The collaboration will identify customers in the telecommunication and utilities industries and will focus on implementing the right software experience for users across the value chain to enhance their experiences. Being omnichannel enterprise software in the cloud will deliver a single source of truth, transparency, compliance, pioneering capabilities, and experience for customers.
Our cutting-edge solutions and focus on time-to-value connect seamlessly with IFS’s software capabilities and deliver a laser-focused customer experience. As a result, Tech Mahindra has been recognized as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IT Services for communication service providers (CSPs), and as a Leader and Rising Star by ISG in the Network: Software-Defined solutions space.
With over a decade of Tech Mahindra and IFS’ association, we are excited to deliver the future of telecommunication and utilities NOW.
Stay connected to hear more over the coming weeks.
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