Telstra Global nears transformation finish-line

Customer-centric design

Customer needs have been put front-and-centre of Global's transformation," Balu said.

"We have a very large customer advocacy program within Telstra and Telstra Global, and we put the customer in the middle of everything we do."

Customers that consume Telstra Global connectivity or cloud services across multiple geographies clearly benefit from a more consistent experience, owing to the underlying standardisation of product SKUs, pricing and data flows.

They also benefit from the 'zero touch' approach taken by Telstra Global, which culminates in self-service capabilities via the Customer Control Centre — abbreviated to the "C³ Portal".

"Our customers want control of the information that's associated with the service," Balu said.

"That's where they can see the status of the order, the status of any incidents they've got or billing information.

"We expose that through our online portal so they can manipulate the data without interfacing with us. The only reason we can provide that is because we've got that common information model and common process model end-to-end across the [architecture] stack".

Balu is already plotting ways to take the self-service concept further.

"We're now starting to expose APIs for our regional service providers that utilise this platform but also for our enterprise customers to be able to draw information," he said. "They don't want to utilise the portal so they can come through an API."

The APIs could be used by a customer, for example, to populate an internal IT service management platform with service information from Telstra Global.

SaaS fast-track

Balu notes that despite an architectural endstate that is heavily reliant on software-as-a-service, getting to that point wasn't easy.

"Especially being part of a large organisation, there was a lot of discussion on why we couldn't leverage what is already in place," he said.

Balu got cloud systems over the line by showing the way they aligned with Telstra Global's business strategy of customer-centricity, differentiation and productivity. The decision also paid off with the project coming in ahead of schedule.

"We started this in 2011 and we're going to wrap this up next month — we're closing transformation on December 16," Balu said.

"It was a three year journey so we're ahead of time, and that's because we went through the cloud to stand up most of the capabilities."

Ry Crozier attended Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.