Proximus Eases Payment Pain
Telecom firm turns to TCS to transform back office operations
Industry
Communications, Media and Information Services
Connect. Curate. Comprehend: Unlocking Value Beyond Boundaries
In this article
Challenge
Proximus seeks payments excellence, cost reduction, and capacity management
Accurate and timely payment processing has been crucial for the ongoing success of telecoms – ensuring back office efficiency, customer experience excellence, and profitability. Proximus, the largest telecommunications group in Belgium, sought to improve its automatic payment posting to align to the global standards. A failure in direct debit processing had led to an increase in bad debt. In addition, Proximus needed to address a series of related issues such as high operational costs, capacity management due to uncertain project demand, a lack of business collaboration, and knowledge drain.
Solution
TCS overhauls operating model to deliver improvements for Proximus
To address the challenges that Proximus was facing, TCS developed a business-aligned DevOps operating model. The model was designed to provide clear accountability by merging the development and operational support teams into one. What was also needed was to increase the productivity by identifying synergies across complementary tasks and improve the monitoring and governance of business service level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to gain confidence within the business. The TCS solution themes closely mapped the challenges that Proximus was facing. To address high operational costs, for example, TCS designed a demand-based sourcing model that ensured timely scalability to match the project demand. Simultaneously, it introduced a role rationalization program to bring greater task ownership and accountability. To improve service delivery, TCS initiated proactive application monitoring, test and operational automation, and structured root cause analysis. Finally, effective knowledge management led to the adoption of a core-flex operating model, maintaining a central team while creating tool-based documentation for ease of use.
Benefits
Proximus reduces costs and improves service delivery, thanks to TCS’ DevOps model
TCS’ DevOps model had an instant impact – improved service levels, reduced costs, and transformed KPI and SLA delivery. Within a year, Proximus’s operational costs fell by 40% while bad debt was reduced by a whopping 90%.
Statistics
90%
Bad debt reduction
100%
Customer service reactivations
40%
Operational cost saving in year one
80%
Defect backlog decline