Celcom Axiata Berhad (Celcom) is the oldest mobile telecommunications company in

Malaysia and also its largest, with an unrivaled reputation for quality and reliability.
Nevertheless, maintaining its com-petitive edge has been a struggle. In 2006 Celcom dropped
to third place among Malaysian cellular pro-viders. Since then, management has worked
fever-ishly to turn the company around, and Celcom has regained the top spot in its market.
This turnaround required new technology and business processes for managing the customer
experience.

To become number one in the Malaysian mar-ket again, Celcom’s senior management
knew that the company had to build better networks and market more aggressively. But the
real key to suc-cess lay in improving the customer experience. According to Suresh Sidhu,
Celcom’s chief corpo-rate and operations officer, there will always be a competitor who can
beat you on price or even out-innovate you. But it’s much harder for a competi-tor to disrupt
a strong, positive relationship with customers. Celcom believes it’s the market’s best
differentiator.

The Malaysia telecommunications market is quite mature, with few opportunities to

acquire new cus-tomers. Customer retention is essential, as is luring customers away from
competitors. Malaysia’s cus-tomer base of 14 million is large and diverse, which requires
multiple approaches to interacting with them. Older customers prefer in-person service from
Celcom dealers or retail outlets, while sophisticated young urban users prefer to do business
online. All want reliable mobile service.

Celcom was saddled with a siloed information technology architecture and business
processes that could not provide a complete view of customers. For instance, customer data
from one system such as billing were not easily available to other systems such as inventory.
This is a common problem for mobile providers because carriers have traditionally counted
customers by looking at SIM (subscriber identity modules in mobile phones) IDs. However,
many customers have multiple devices and SIMs for personal and work uses. Celcom needed
systems that could identify and serve each customer rather than that person’s SIMs.
Otherwise, Celcom service representatives would waste valuable company and customer time
making sense of a customer’s multiple SIM IDs scattered among various records in the
system. The company wanted to be able to see a customer as a specific person, not a SIM or a
number.

Celcom’s solution involved changes to the compa-ny’s technology, processes, and people.
At the core is an Oracle-based business support system (BSS) that consolidated customer
records, centralized inven-tory management, and sped up business processes. This system
consolidates customer information into a single view of the customer to improve customer
service across online, call center, and retail channels. The Oracle implementation included
new customer portal sites and retail stores as well as an Oracle Siebel call center system and
Oracle inventory man-agement and Communications Order and Service Management
applications.
 The BSS project team asked approximately 700 Celcom employees in customer service,
retail, marketing, and other divisions to list the top 10 experiences that users and dealers
wanted, such as fast activation, less paperwork, and always having the most popular phones
in stock. The BSS trans-formation team then developed technical and busi-ness process
requirements based on these top 10 lists and compared offerings from several vendors.

Celcom chose Oracle as the primary technology provider for the new customer experience
manage-ment system. The company wanted the most com-plete suite of customer relationship
management (CRM) tools that would support multichannel and cross-channel marketing
efforts. Oracle seemed the best fit and had the most functionality built in without requiring
additional modifications.

Celcom’s transformation plan entailed retaining some of Celcom’s existing systems, and the
Celcom team liked Oracle Communications’ modularity and interoperability as well as its
cross-channel capabili-ties. Oracle Communications is a cross-channel prod-uct suite that
provides a variety of services, including broadband data, wireless data, and mobile voice
services. It helps communications services providers such as Celcom manage and integrate
customer inter-actions across multiple channels to improve customer support, reduce problem
resolution time, customize marketing to narrow market segments, and expe-dite time-to-
market for new products and services. Celcom understood the importance of cross-channel
customer experiences and wanted to make this differ-entiate the company among its
competitors. Celcom’s systems solution enables customer interactions to seamlessly traverse
its retail shop, online shop, call center, and partner/dealer channels.

The BSS provides a single customer record, regardless of how many services (mobile,
landline, and data) and devices a customer purchases; it is populated with data from various
touchpoints. By consolidating customer data into a unified customer record, Celcom can offer
tailored promotions offers in real time that fit a customer’s individual history. Celcom’s
holistic view of a customer includes fam-ily relationships, which has special significance
when marketing in Asia. The company is able to see every aspect of service each customer
uses, which makes cross-marketing and up-selling more efficient.

Celcom completed the BSS implementation in just 18 months, replacing 17 separate

systems with one seven-module Oracle system.

Celcom officials explicitly tried to get employees invested in the new system to ensure it
aligned with the business. The company enlisted project directors from both business and IT
departments. Represen-tatives from sales and marketing chaired the tech-nology selection
committees to ensure that people outside of IT were making the case for the project. Top
management, including sales and marketing department heads and Celcom’s CEO, are part of
a steering committee for customer experience man-agement that meets every two weeks.

Celcom’s integrated systems make it possible for call center representatives to respond
much more rapidly to customer queries. In the past, cus-tomer agents needed to toggle
between two to five screens to do their work. Now they work with just a single screen, which
increases efficiency. Using fewer screens cuts average call-handling time by 15 to 20 percent.
BSS includes a new tablet-based app for Celcom dealers that makes signing a customer up
for a new mobile phone completely paperless. New phone activation time has been cut from
two hours to two minutes. Fewer activations require manual follow-up. Celcom dealers and
customers are happier.

Inventory of mobile handsets at Celcom facili-ties and dealer stores is now centralized and
man-aged using BSS. Dealers can see what Celcom has in stock, and Celcom inventory
managers can monitor the stock on dealer shelves. More detailed inventory control helps
Celcom move more products because it can ship fast-selling units to dealers before shortages
occur or have marketers target promotions in regions where the company wants to move
specific products. This would have been impossible before. Salespeople are beginning to use
big data collected in BSS to bet-ter manage sales by region.

Celcom is now much closer to achieving its brand vision: pleasing its customers and
exceeding their expectations.

Sources: Jessica Sirkin, “Oracle Implementation at Celcom Brings IT, Business Together,”
searchoracle.techtarget.com, accessed January 17, 2016; www.celcom.com, accessed January
18, 2016; Fred Sandsmark, “Customers First,” Profit Magazine, May 2014; and Oracle
Corporation, “Celcom Transforms Its Customer Expe-rience with Industry Leading Oracle
Communications Suite,” March 31, 2014.

CASE STUDY QUESTIONS

9-13 What was the problem at Celcom described in this case? What management,
organization, and technology factors contributed to this problem?

9-14 What was Celcom’s business strategy, and what was the role of customer relationship
manage-ment in that strategy?
9-15 Describe Celcom’s solution to its problem. What management, organization, and
technol-ogy issues had to be addressed by the solution?
9-16 How effective was this solution? How did it affect the way Celcom ran its business
and its business performance?