When you submit an application to get the NBN connected, you want a smooth and fast experience, with no surprises. The best way to achieve that is to have a great back-end that enables the data to flow where it needs to inside the business.
Aussie Broadband announced today that close to 90 % of its residential and small business NBN orders are now fully automated. That means an NBN service can be connected without any staff member needing to touch the order.
This is in stark contrast to the business operations back in January 2017, where nearly half of all workflows needed human intervention.
By keeping the data around a new order electronic, it can be simply workflowed to the parts of the business that need it. There’s no manual entry of data and that avoids the human errors that typically create issues in the process.
The net effect of process automation is twofold, keeping costs low and customer satisfaction high.
The downside is potentially jobs, however, if your career involves taking data from one system and entering it into another, you’re days are likely numbered. If this impacts you, hopefully that you have larger ambitions and can find alternative, more creative or impactful work.
Our in-house built NBN integration system means that we can provide a speedier service to our customers. We can basically take an order from our website to installation – without any human intervention.
General Manager Service Delivery, Leigh Markham.
One of the main benefits of automating repetitive, manual tasks is that it frees employees to focus on more important work, such as customer experience.
It’s one of the reasons why we don’t need to offshore our service centre and can maintain an all Australian support team.
The automated provisioning process can connect a new service in as little as 10 minutes.
This allows us to maintain low service delivery costs, whilst still maintaining high sales levels each month.
General Manager Service Delivery, Leigh Markham.
The chart below shows the dramatic change that automation has made in how many orders the Aussie Broadband Service Delivery team has to “touch” on the way through to getting a service live.
And so the process should be automated. Many of Aussie BB’s customers would be churning from the NBN (if it wasn’t for the NBN switchover, ABB’s growth would be smaller I would think) – so this process should be able to be automated. That 10% residual would be where something isn’t right with the NBN, and a phone call is required.
I can directly concur with this. I was a customer of Internode for many years but their service quality degraded rapidly in 2018. I switched to Aussie Broadband online and within 15 minutes of submitting my order, the link changed. That is direct evidence of automated interaction between the ordering system and NBN wholesale services.
Since being a customer, on the occasions I have had to submit a support ticket, it’s obvious there is money and time spent on call centre experience. Aussie BB have basically done it right and placed the humans where they need to be.