“Being a Quadruple Play telecom operator, our business processes are many and complex, so deploying Bonita BPM across our information system proved to be vital. Today we offer a better experience to our customers, while reducing our operational costs and benefiting from a system architecture that is simpler to adapt.” Erik Lamal, VP of IT at VOO
VOO, major cable operator in Wallonia and Brussels
VOO is the trademark for the telecom activities (TV, Internet, fixed and mobile telephony) of the Nethys group, a major player in energy and telecommunications in Belgium, especially for cable services throughout Wallonia and part of Brussels.
VOO has nearly one million customers, to which new customers are being added via the mobile offers launched in 2013. Along with the renewal of new interactive TV services, hundreds of customer activations are managed daily.
Automation of a critical information system to improve performance
With the strategic decision to offer mobile to its customers, the need to automate processes, previously performed manually, became evident. “To develop our organic growth, it was essential to launch a mobile offering based on complete customer satisfaction, and we needed to evolve our complete subscription process, from order taking to the activation of the SIM card,” said Erik Lamal, VP IT at VOO.
"Our previous process did not allow us to ensure effective monitoring, and it was difficult to quickly detect malfunctions and blocking points in the customer journey, which slowed down our procedures," Lamal added. To meet the expectations of their customers and also provide them with a multi-channel shopping experience, regardless of the points of contact (mobile, Internet, shops), it was necessary to unify solutions that were dispersed in separate silos. For example, tools such as BSS billing managed in SAP need to communicate seamlessly with service management solutions.
Bonita BPM, orchestrator of twenty applications
VOO was already a user of Talend’s ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) solution for interfacing different back-end / front-end applications, and decided to add process management for their information systems in 2012 with Bonitasoft’s BPM (Business Process Management) solution.
Despite complex constraints, a few months were enough to put in place the first major process automation project, activating customer accounts for mobile. “Building on Bonitasoft’s highly efficient support service, we were able to deploy a process involving many different tasks within a reasonable time: subscriber qualification, automated mail, voicemail management, SIM card activation, recording telephone numbers in the Belgian phone registries, links for billing, and so on,” said Lamal. With about 200 new mobile customers per day, each generating two or three complete processes, important efficiency gains were achieved.
After this first success, several other Bonita BPM deployment projects then emerged in 2014 and 2015. Among them is the replacement of defective set-up boxes and modems; by delivering and receiving equipment with an automated process, and so eliminating the need to send a technician, VOO realized savings of several tens of thousands of euros per month.
BPM also greatly facilitated the activation operations, around 500 to 100 a day, for the new generation of set-up boxes. With graphic visualization dashboards, control over the process is now complete and blockages can be identified even before customers notice.
Major benefits and migration to Bonita BPM 7 to consolidate them
Looking back at different projects completed with Bonita BPM 5, VOO today notes the many benefits that their deployment has made to its global organization. “Besides the cost savings that we have seen on certain services, the most important aspect for us is to offer the best possible multi-channel experience to our customers and so keep their loyalty. Through better monitoring of processes with very specific KPIs, we can be proactive on failures that could affect our customers, which greatly increases their satisfaction,” said Lamal.
And lastly, Bonita BPM has helped to restore order in the VOO IT systems that now have a much more orderly architecture, and are thus easier to maintain and evolve. The many new features of Bonita BPM 7, available since June 2015, incited VOO to progressively migrate processes to the new version. “Our processes were already operating very efficiently, but our first migration to Bonita BPM 7 allowed us to see numerous improvements, in the quality of the engine, new features, flexibility, performance and stability,” concluded Lamal.
About VOO
VOO is the brand name for the telecom services of Nethys SA. VOO provides analogue and digital television, video on demand (VOD), high-speed broadband internet connectivity, and fixed and mobile telephony. VOO innovates and continually improves its performance and its offers to better meet customer expectations.
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