Belgacom moves aggressively to create customer loyalty and stickiness

BelgacomGroup, the largest telecommunications company in Belgium, announced this week it will embark on a long-term strategic initiative to create end-to-end views of transactions and a single view of customer data by integrating across its retail, wholesale, fixed line, mobile, broadband data and Internet services.

By adopting an enterprise service bus (ESB), a data translation mechanism, and a transaction assurance platform from Progress Software, Belgacom is hoping to create a companywide business-services architecture that will create a unified view of customers. The goal is more personalization and a better understanding of customer experiences so the impact of services on satisfaction and loyalty can be better understood.

“You don’t just magically install an application and ‘boom’ you’ve got better customer experience. And even after you go through transformation, you still have tons of fragmented applications and technologies. The only real solution is to standardize on one platform companywide to reduce operational complexity and foster sharing and re-use of business services. You cannot improve customer experience unless everything in the enterprise works together,” said John Wilmes, Progress Software’s chief technology architect, communications sector.

Though it can be a somewhat painful and time consuming process, more and more operators like Belgacom are embarking on the end-to-end organizational improvements necessary to go beyond data transformation and onto a complete business-services architecture approach—intended to reduce costs by enabling re-use and sharing of business services across organizations. In the case of Belgacom, the core of its architecture approach will be the Progress Sonic ESB, as well as the Progress Actional business transaction assurance platform, and the Progress DataXtend Semantic Integrator, which it will use for software integration.

“In the past, a business services architecture approach was problematic because you couldn’t re-use and share data across the enterprise, but now with universal mapping through common data models, you can realize operational efficiency and gain visibility into transactions,” explained Wilmes, noting that the flow of transactions from initial Web Services interaction to the point of entering databases helps operators like Belgacom conduct monitoring of services and improve response times to customers.

“With so many applications and interfaces to accommodate, it used to be difficult to see transactions end to end, but now we can see the execution of transactions and respond quickly, without disrupting a service,” said Wilmes, attributing that fact to the work being done in the industry around standard communications protocols.

In this case, Belgacom’s ESB project has been created in line with the TM Forum Solution Frameworks NGOSS, which is focused on the re-use of business services for future-proofed service delivery.

“For companies that grew lines of business and departments through acquisition, there is a lot of fragmentation and different streams of service provisioning that make a single view of customers very difficult. The services and the customers suffer as a result,” said Wilmes, who says that operators address the issue by streamlining middleware, technologies and products that hinder the ability to unify systems for optimal communication. “Though everyone talks of customer experience, only those working to truly integrated fixed, mobile, broadband and media will succeed in creating stickiness, and to do that, an ESB can be very effective for unification of IT infrastructure so that systems can better exchange information pertinent to customer experience.”