Accenture and Alcatel have landed a four year deal to implement and manage customer care for all of Telefonica using Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Management Suite.
Back in 2010 Ericsson won a similar deal in billing and acquired a 500 strong team from Indira, a local IT firm, to take over billing in 20 separate Telefonica markets stretched from Spain to Brazil.
Accenture will take on the systems integrator role, and during the past 15 years it has made a ton of cash out of integrating SAP manufacturing and management software for leading manufacturers.
The software will similarly be used for Telefonica residential customers in European and Latin American countries and so will have to plug into the Ericsson managed billing systems. The companies say that Telefonica customers will gain control over their broadband experience, using self-help tools to reduce calls to customer care.
This is a huge loss for Ericsson who would have wanted its own OSS tools to be at the center of Telefonica’s customers systems. The new systems will talk through open APIs which any call center, self-care, or third-party application can use.
The system covers everything from home and portable device management, including TR-069, remote provisioning and diagnostics, over-the-air updates, and trouble-shooting and interoperability testing; a service management platform with an automated drag and drop workflow builder for rapidly deploying new services, pricing or offers; all of which are drag and drop for the customer care staff. The system will also allow Telefonica to adopt NFV and SON more rapidly, says Alcatel, and mover more services to the cloud.
Alcatel claims that its system can provide 7000% time savings in root cause analysis of faults; find 20% savings in bandwidth during peak hours; and far fewer security related customer calls. The system provides real time analytics for services and also copper and fiber network fault finders.
The deal came out of a strategic between Alcatel-Lucent and Accenture in September 2014 to combine Alcatel-Lucent’s CEM products and Accenture’s systems integration and transformation capabilities.
The system will provide Telefonica personnel with network visibility and new tools for agent-assisted, consumer self-help, field technician-assisted and proactive customer care for 100 million subscribers.