Frances’ ta-da story: often, the real victories happen behind the scenes
The expertise of those who work for our company and their diverse professional backgrounds is the main reason why Orange Business is so resourceful. The wide skill set of our employees is what enables us to meet the expectations of our customers, right when they need it the most. We like to call it the “ta-da!” effect.
There really is no limit to the data challenges we take on for our customers
"I am Head of the MSI Center, here in Cairo. The MSI Center is a large, customer-centric, agile organization within our Major Service Center (MSC), which operates, supports and manages connectivity, incident and service management, unified communications, security compliance and IT services in a multi-supplier environment for large clients. One of the early decisions with large clients is to make the most of the opportunity to visit the clients’ headquarters to really put ourselves in their shoes. When you see the large facilities of our major clients, you can really understand why, here in Egypt, we have large teams dedicated solely to individual clients."
First things first - prioritize
"For one of our largest clients globally, we manage more than five suppliers/vendors for connectivity services at over 700 sites and across all areas of technology like SD-WAN, UCC, LAN and security. This involves the management of many tens of thousands of devices globally.
"To deliver all these services, we have our dedicated 24x7 MSI Operations Center here in Egypt supporting the day-to-day operations and regional staff around the globe close to key customer locations. It’s quite a complex environment, but the advantage of having this end-to-end engagement (as an integrator and as a service provider) is that we get a more holistic view and understanding of our customers’ infrastructures and challenges, as well as their business priorities.
"It’s a large group, so it’s only natural that they get a large volume of incidents and changes, backed up with many industry-leading Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and KPIs. Because of the nature of the business, a single failed wireless ‘connection’ or failed ‘phone call’ at a critical site can be a huge safety issue or result in significant monetary losses — making it a very high-pressure working environment."
In order for our teams to be as effective as possible within this huge, complex, multiple-service environment, our team at the MSI Center needed a tool to manage, prioritize and measure daily activity — and it was clear that data would need to be leveraged to drive improvements.
Boosting performance to stay ahead of the challenge
"Our SMACs (Soft Moves, Adds, Changes*) performance was suddenly not at expected levels for one of our customers. The reasons ranged from tool-and-process changes to automation deficiencies and a major increase in activity levels, as well as sudden upskilling needs. This had an immediate effect on our SLAs with the potential for hefty penalties if targets were not being met.
"Teamwork, collaboration and innovation were the keys to the successful turnaround of this situation. We immediately scaled up our team to fit the client’s needs with an extensive focus on training and documentation to strengthen the team’s foundation and strong support from the technical experts and specialists’ team. The client’s service management team collaborated with the customer and helped set up a clear governance to help resolve issues and automate as much manual work as possible. They also took an innovative approach to creating tools to help the operations teams be more proactive. This included a PowerBI dashboard to monitor overall volume, quality and SLAs as well as a real-time ServiceNow dashboard with a detailed view of changes, which the team now uses to manage changes and track performance."
*SMACS is a user provisioning tool for Cisco Unified Communications (UC) solutions. It is designed to help businesses with the complexities of managing moves, adds and changes.
That magical feeling of all the "Ta-Da" moments falling into place
"By running dedicated ‘Service Improvement Programs,’ our overall performance levels have improved significantly across all areas, and our quality indicator is up 10% to 98%. As a result, you can really feel the pride the team has, and that’s a real motivator. Time has freed up managers down the line, allowing them to go deeper in their own roles. This is a textbook example of what it means to become agile. This was a true team effort among multiple Orange Business teams, as well as with collaboration with the client.
"We like to think of all these improvements as lots of 'Ta-Da' moments. Often, it's the delivered solutions that get the limelight, but a lot more happens behind the scenes. I get very passionate about this because it's a real challenge.
"People are motivated when they see something they did make a difference. We reward and celebrate this. And, trust me, when the client sends a message of thanks – the ultimate reward – we definitely celebrate."
