Telstra creates 'digital incubator' to tweak services

Telstra has set up an internal ‘digital incubator’ to drive the digitisation of everything from service provisioning to the customer experience in its retail business.

The telco revealed the existence of the incubator along with several early digital projects. The incubator is set to function across several “operational groups”.

“The digital incubator centralises all learnings across the product design and development process to help create a 360 real-time feedback loop,” Telstra said.

“One branch of the digital incubator delivers [an] insights and analytics function, acting as a source of knowledge to the wider incubator and [Telstra retail] digitisation teams.

“The ambition is to provide real-time feedback and learnings to DevOps teams and the wider retail digitisation program for refinement, fixes, and strategic direction for development.”

The telco is currently recruiting data scientists to join the incubator’s insights arm.

They will – among other things – lead efforts to standardise data inputs from Telstra’s net promoter score, Salesforce and Siebel CRM systems, and try to “identify root causes across episodes, articulated through the lens of the customer but also identifying internal root cause and fix recommendations".

Telstra revealed several digitisation projects targeting NBN and mobile service provisioning, and the delivery of “notifications” to end users.

The company is advertising five roles around digital provisioning, which it said aimed to transform the “end-to-end digital retail provisioning experience, service and processes".

Some of the data-driven works are expected to focus on reducing errors in provisioning services and recognising those errors much faster, driving further improvement from the telco’s processes.

“Provisioning and fulfilment is critical in creating outstanding customer experience ensuring our customers receive their services right the first time,” Telstra said.

“The error management engine plays a pivotal role tracking, handling and even predicting when something goes awry, ensuring the information is radiated.

“This important service helps maintain a benchmark of customer expectation when interacting with us, even when things don’t go as planned.”

Telstra also said it had built a new service called Notify, for which it is now wanting to on-board the company’s customer-facing teams.

“The Notify service allows for a standardised customer centric notification experience deliverable to any Telstra customer via any business unit,” Telstra said.

“Notify is agnostic to the delivery platform or channel while at the same time providing intelligence through delivery channel, social delivery hour and other delivery logic.

“This important service informs and sets expectations with internal and external customers.”

The telco said the service initially supported SMS and email notifications, though it promised “future expansion to social media and push channels".