KCOM'S business transformation

KCOM’s

business transformation IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

2

KCOM

KCOM’s

business transformation Managing Director of Wholesale and Networks Tim Shaw highlights how IT transformation and new ways of working are helping UK telco KCOM deliver world-class fibre broadband to its customers

PROJECT DIRECTOR: Richard Durrant AUTHOR: Ben Mouncer VIDEOGRAPHY: Edward White

3

I

n the busy UK telecoms space, KCOM has always marked itself out from the crowd. Everything from its backstory to the close relationship it holds with its customers - and even its distinctive branding - speaks to a company proud to be different.

This identity has been forged over more than 100 years of service to the citizens of Kingston upon Hull and the county of East Yorkshire. Founded in 1904 as the ‘Hull Telephone Department’, KCOM moved quickly as technology progressed in the 20th and 21st centuries and revolutionised communications.

Today, KCOM boasts enterprise offerings at a national level, keeping it at the cutting edge of developments in customer and cloud-native services. But its core 4

purpose remains the same: to supply the very best broadband and telephony to its local people and businesses.

KCOM is uniquely positioned in this sense, holding what Ofcom describes as “significant market power” in the region.

A legacy of Hull City Council’s decision to retain ownership of its entire network when the UK began nationalisation through BT, KCOM is Hull and East Yorkshire’s onestop shop for all things telecoms. This has pros and cons - and so gives KCOM the impetus and ability to innovate.

In October 2019, Hull became the UK’s first city to offer full fibre broadband to everybody, the result of a bold £85 million investment from KCOM seven years earlier. In January 2020, KCOM committed to a further £100 million in spending to take

KCOM

that network to the wider East Yorkshire region. “More people than ever will be able to access one of the best broadband services on the planet,” cclaimed CEO Dale Raneberg.

With this award-winning rollout picking up pace, KCOM’s commitment to its customers is clear. But in order for the organisation to deliver a level of service that matches its broadband speeds, it is also having to refresh its internal systems and processes, introducing advanced technology and new ways of working. That is where Tim Shaw comes in.

Shaw is KCOM’s Managing Director of Wholesale and Networks and has overar-

ching responsibility for the company’s network and IT capabilities. He joined KCOM in June 2019 to lead its renewed transformation programme, having served in a variety of senior roles within some of the UK’s biggest telecoms providers.

“Digital transformation is right at the top of our agenda,” Shaw tells Digital Bulletin as he settles down to talk about an engrossing start to life at KCOM, which has also included a global pandemic being thrown into the mix.

Shaw’s experience in the industry gave him the nose for what KCOM excelled at and where it could improve when it came to business systems. His assessment of

5

If you think around telecoms in general, we’ve got to simplify our products” Tim Shaw the obstacles was three-fold, starting with the customer experience.

“If you think around telecoms in general, we’ve got to simplify our products.

Customers are always demanding more, quicker, with less interaction, smoother, less friction. Because of our history, some of our systems and our processes were just not customer-friendly. It was the first thing I noticed when joining and we quickly decided that was the big change we had to make,” he says.

“The second one was really around digitalfirst and how thinking in that way becomes absolutely critical. Voice is still important customers still love to talk to people - but there’s also a large proportion of customers that want that digital experience. They’re very much used to that elsewhere, so we need to be able to move in that way.

“The last one is around service; being able to always be “on”, and have up-to6

date records and be able to react to issues.

That’s really critical.”

Shaw and KCOM formulated a transformation strategy around upgrading their capabilities in these three areas. This meant not only constructing best-in-class systems, but also ensuring they worked using a scalable delivery model and an industry-leading IT architecture. The aim was to truly elevate the customer and employee experience.

The immediate priority was perfecting the customer journey. KCOM called on the talent across the business in its consumer, wholesale and network teams to reimagine the “customer flow”, from the point of an individual or business wanting a service through to engineers completing an installation. With strategic partner Vlocity in place, Shaw set out an ambitious plan to launch KCOM’s customer ordering and proposition management solution within a matter of months.

“I must admit, when we started the project and we sat down in the kick-off meeting and I set the team the target, I think the look of shock and “that can’t be done” was hilarious,” laughs Shaw.

“But we were ready to go. I’d worked with Vlocity in the month preceding kick-off and we had introduced the concept of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), really to get the idea of “agile” into the way we do things.

We colocated people, we really brought

KCOM

KCOM leverages the Vlocity Communications Cloud to drive the best customer journeys

7

Tim Shaw Managing Director of Wholesale and Networks

Transform to Grow REDEFINING A DIGITAL B2B EXPERIENCE Customer success across industries has never been more important to us. Learn more about how our customers stay agile and grow with digital transformation.

“KCOM selected Vlocity and Salesforce to digitally transform the B2B/B2C customer experience to change how we interact and sell to customers while allowing our teams to work at pace and focus on value-adding activities.”

– Tim Shaw, Managing Director of Wholesale and Networks, KCOM

vlocity.com

We had introduced the concept of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), really to get the idea of “agile” into the way we do things” the teams together and we made it something different that we hadn’t done before.”

KCOM worked alongside Vlocity throughout the launch, leveraging the Vlocity Communications Cloud. Founded in 2014, Vlocity has quickly become a respected provider of industry-specific, cloud-based software applications, enjoying particular success in the telecoms sector. Earlier this year it was acquired by CRM giant Salesforce for $1.3 billion.

“Vlocity is the engine that holds all of our product catalogues and really enables us to configure and drive that best customer journey,” he says. “Given where we are and our ambitions, Vlocity gave us everything that we needed; the speed, the cost-base and the ongoing support.”

Ultimately, KCOM was able to unveil its MVP in January, only five months after the project began. Following a soft launch, the full launch came just 10 days later and in 10

the months since it has already completed seven releases by working in two-week development sprints. Now KCOM boasts a fully operational platform for customers to seamlessly engage with its products through digital channels.

Shaw says KCOM opted for this Vlocityled platform approach to ensure not only speed of delivery during the build phase, but also to allow for easier configuration of its software moving forward. Vlocity’s “lowcode” solution means KCOM is able to train non-specialists to configure it, leaving the Technology team to focus on other priorities.

He wants to take this “Know the Platform,

KCOM’s customer ordering and proposition management MVP was released just five months into the project

KCOM

Trust the Platform, Clicks not Code” approach on to other implementations.

“It has given us a real boost in productivity.

We can now put our coders on our digital experience right at the front-end where we can add the real difference,” he adds. “When we get to the product journeys, this means it’s all around configuring the best experience. The idea that small changes should be done by the commercial teams, and medium to large-scale changes by the technology teams, is something I’m really keen to do.

“Why do I think that’s critical? The business is forever changing, whether that’s a new product, new pricing, a new feature

KCOM & COVID-19: DEALING WITH LOCKDOWN “ When the lockdown was announced it was all hands to the pump. How do we get our workforce working from home, which traditionally we’d never been able to? Some roles we were able to, but moving a contact centre that we’ve got in Hull, to everyone working from home, is no easy feat. And some of us have never seen that work, especially with some of the legacy systems that we’re trying to move away from and transform. “ By the first week we had just over 60% of people working from home, and then halfway through week two, we had over 85, 86% of people working from home. Everyone mucked in, worked in the way that needed to be done. In a short period of time, we managed to build up a really constructive model that enabled us to move forward. “ I think it just shows with the right focus and everyone working together, you can really achieve anything.”

Tim Shaw, Managing Director of Wholesale and Networks, KCOM

11

12

KCOM

- if that’s something the commercial teams can do in the moment, and it gets checked and tested and can be released the next day, why wouldn’t we do that? That’s the direction we’re starting to really think about how we take the Vlocity platform and the work we’ve done with Salesforce at the front end.”

The automated testing element built into the platform underpins the broader DevOps approach adopted by Shaw’s technology team, as he goes on to explain.

“When we’ve got that ability to test everything automatically and be confident, your ability to develop faster and release faster is really enabled. DevOps does create a better way of working between your development team and your operations team, but without that test automation, you can’t get to the point of fast delivery, which is the ultimate goal of DevOps.” Another critical change KCOM has made to maximise order fulfillment is greatly reducing its number of base products.

At the beginning of this transformation process Shaw oversaw an audit which revealed that more than 100 different products were being offered to its relatively small consumer base. Order fallout, especially around new products, is a common problem for telecoms operators.

To address this issue, the team consolidated KCOM’s various products into a core range of less than 10 and Shaw says this 13

catalogue-driven approach has had a simplifying effect on the company’s processes.

“We can simplify our billing, we can simplify the way we construct our systems, the way we provision the network - everything becomes a lot more straightforward because it’s just got to be done for 10 different variations, instead of over 100,” he states.

“This was a hard one to get across to the sales teams: the idea that we can manage with only a certain number of core products to be sold. Through the new platform they can make commercial variants, but there are set, core products. It certainly helps that everyone knows that billing has always been a challenge for us because of the number of products we offered.”

Simplification is a running theme through14

out KCOM’s transformation story. In the short time since launch, its platform has resulted in quicker fulfillment cycles and reduced customer fall-out, which has led to better use of engineering time and a high Net Promoter Score. The next steps for Shaw are creating these efficiencies everywhere possible.

“Like any transformation, launching the new platform is the milestone,” he says. “Actually closing the legacy so that everything is on there is now my biggest focus. We need to get to a point where this is the only game in town and we can really start to declutter our IT estate across the business.”

For IT leaders, the challenge of technology implementation is matched by challenges

KCOM

around people and skills. Employee satisfaction, alongside customer experience and revenue, has been a motivating force behind KCOM’s work up to now and will continue to be going forward.

Shaw concentrated significant effort on ensuring members of his technology team were armed with the right skills and certification to excel on the Vlocity platform.

After some intensive training on Vlocity’s programmes, KCOM can now claim to have some of the most proficient people on the platform within its own organisation.

Going beyond that, Shaw admits the transition to new ways of working hasn’t always been easy - but that the wheels are now very much turning on what he calls “business transformation”.

“I will never forget sitting down with the teams in our contact centres, trialling our new system and them trying to use the same process they use today and saying it wasn’t the same and could it be changed to match what it was before. That was a surprise for the teams in that area, realising that a new system doesn’t just mean following the same way you’ve always worked.

“We’re having to change everything that we do going forward. How do we shift the way that we think? How do we change the way we work? From that point onwards, it moved away from just being technology transformation to business transformation.”

Another milestone in the journey came during a meeting at the beginning of this year, adds Shaw.

15

CASE STUDY

xxxxxxxxxxxxx

When I joined, we were just at the start of thinking about this transformation, and now, nearly a year on, we’ve achieved so much”

16

DIGITAL BULLETIN

KCOM

“We were in a meeting and I was giving an information update on digital transformation. As I was starting to go through it, you could really start to see the room understand what the transformation was delivering and, although challenging, how it was helping to change the business for the better and also benefit customers.

I think that was a big ‘penny dropping’ moment for some of our employees.”

Moving forward, Shaw is confident his technology team is creating the right culture for change and success, led by an agile approach and design-thinking. The next step in its digital transformation is driving through a new service management solution, working to a similar timescale to that of the previous MVP. As it has done throughout its long history, KCOM is acting fast and staying innovative - qualities Shaw believes make it an exciting place to work.

“When I joined, we were just at the start of thinking about this transformation, and now, nearly a year on, we’ve achieved so much,” he concludes. “The best thing about working here is actually seeing ideas that I’ve seen before, I’ve done before, but actually at the size of business where you can make significant change really quickly. You can just watch the business - and the way we do business - move with what we do.”

ISSUE 18

17

Cutting-edge media services for business. www.digitalbulletin.com info@digitalbulletin.com