Process: The Forgotten Component of Cloud Computing

Carrier cloud providers are moving as quickly as possible to offer new services in order to build new channels and acquire new customers. They have solved technical challenges and have an impressive array of composite services. But now cloud providers need to monetize their investment, and it’s at this point that many carriers are challenged, having overlooked the creation of effective processes that enable the sale, consumption and ongoing performance of their services. Monitoring and management of cloud computing services require a customer-retention strategy…

Top Three Processes

There are many processes that need to be put in place to enable a carrier cloud provider to scale migration and implementation of its services for each customer. But there are three processes I believe are the most important and, unfortunately, often the most overlooked.

1. Inventory tracking as related to contract management. A carrier signs an original five-year contract with a new client for 100 users. Six months later, as that relationship grows, the customer adds cloud services for 50 more users that will expire in five years. In two-and-a-half years the customer adds another service that doesn’t have an expiration date and will only be cancelled if the client requests cancellation. To avoid customer churn, the carrier needs to manage these contracts with different terms, and have a holistic view of this client’s inventory with all the different expiration dates. Multiply this by a large number of clients and it’s clear that an effective process tied closely to billing processes must be put in place to manage all these contracts.

While customers buying a foundational product such as PeopleSoft are probably less likely to change providers at the end of a contract, lower rates would be a big reason for a customer to move to another provider. The same holds true if the customer is buying space or databases that could just be moved easily over to another provider. Without the ability to look holistically and track customer inventory, carrier cloud providers will be vulnerable to customer churn.

2. Escalation and communication. When dealing with very large clients, contacts for billing or sales questions are usually well known. But operational contacts for escalation are less well known, especially in the global environment where you may have escalation points at different locations around the world for different times of the day. For instance, if there is an outage at 3 a.m. in California, does the carrier call the customer contact in New York or in Hong Kong for escalation or outage notification?

Outage management, escalation procedures and communication with customers is critical. Understanding the overall communications structure and process must be clearly stated and communicated. Escalation contacts must be designated by the customer, kept accurate, current and relevant to the time of day. 

While the customer relationship management (CRM) process is often thought to be just about billing or initial installation contacts, escalation contacts and communication processes in the event of outages should also be tied into CRM, and ongoing relationships with those customer contacts maintained by the carrier. Outages will occur, including planned outages at times, but maintaining customer information about whom to contact and how during any sort of outage condition and making this information accessible is essential.

3. SLA Tracking and Processes. I’ve seen it time and time again – once a network implementation has gone live there is a collective sigh of relief at the carrier that things are running smoothly and all is good. What carriers often ignore during the “high" of going live is that things can go wrong, and processes to manage future problems need to be put in place early on.

In a lot of cases there is a service level agreement (SLA) that includes tracking and management. If ABC Company signs a contract with a carrier, their response agreement is included in the SLA, and their level of notification in the case of an outage or other problem is clearly spelled out. However, on this same server we have XYZ Company with a different type of agreement. How does the carrier manage and make customers operationally aware of the different SLAs during an outage? I believe that situation requires a very defined process of its own.

You have a team of people fixing what is broken, but you need a separate team responsible for ensuring that what is getting fixed, and in what order, is communicated to the customers. Everyone needs to talk to each other, but the two teams have different accountability and responsibility.

It’s interesting that in almost any network operating center (NOC), when you have a SWAT team that gets created in the middle of the night, your people are out in the field talking to other field people and another team is talking to customer management. But when you get into new technologies like cloud computing, some of these practices have been forgotten. The focus is similar to good outage management, where some folks are focused on the technical side and some folks are focused on the communications side.

I saw the same thing happen when DSL was implemented. Everyone is optimistic. When carriers were launching DSL, no one imagined they would need held-orders tracking because they thought everything would go so well. It’s all about exception management. What carriers have to do is ensure that they are actually including the exceptions to the process. You have service in that area? No. Is the customer out of service? Yes. Whom do you notify? What if you can’t reach that person? Who is the next point of contact?

It is such hard work to define the process that is going to work that getting to the exception process is usually an afterthought. Very, very common. I see it all the time. I think people are naturally hopeful and that can be a carrier’s Achilles’ heel. But development of standardized processes that include exception processes will be critical to carrier success in the cloud provider market.