KCOM revolutionises communications experience in telecoms

About KCOM

For multi-site organisations with complex business challenges, KCOM is the communication services provider that delivers a world-class customer experience.

With a turnover in 2016 of £349m KCOM serves 145,000 households, employs 1,600 people across the UK and has been listed on the London Stock Exchange since 1999. Operating the largest and most advanced network in the UK – 2,200km of fibre located nationwide – KCOM is expanding its growing customer base.

The Challenge

KCOM has responded to an increase in customer self-service with the stated aim of helping customers enhance their personal communications experience.

In recent years it has focused on managed services opportunities across both public and private sectors and has rolled out a plethora of next generation services targeted at multisite organisations, with a focus on Legal, Professional services, Local Government, Retail and Technology.

It was quickly identified that the current NOC (Network Operations Centre) tools and staffing would not be able to scale to meet this challenge. Operational trends included these average monthly statistics:

• 70,000 ‘faults’ shown in the NOC
• 2,000 incident tickets
• 1,100 changes (25% are to configurations).

With a limited view of the impact on customers of the existing solution, KCOM had to think of a superior service with measurable service quality, correct information for key control indicators (KCIs), and prioritisation and escalation relating to customer SLAs.

Importantly, this whole new level of customer experience, underpinned by a new generation of OSS (Operational Support Systems) solutions, would effectively allow KCOM to share ‘good news’ with customers at multiple levels and not just rely on exception reporting. Crucially, it would be used to drive growth.

The Solution

KCOM had defined what they termed the Next Generation Service Organisation (NGSO) in terms of contact strategy (offering a single view of the customer), processes, systems and behaviours.

With this in mind, KCOM initiated an RFP process with tenders from 12 companies, out of which they shortlisted the best two providers to propose a solution set for New Generation OSS (NG-OSS). Devoteam was chosen for this ambitious project.

Devoteam began by refining the architecture of the new NG-OSS solution into four principal layers:

• Data collection (network availability, performance management, configuration and change);
• Data modelling and analysis (root cause analysis and detailed analytics);
• Presentation and service level management (operations interface, unified service model); and
• Secure role-based access (security access, authentication, service level performance management).

Drawing on our extensive experience of service assurance gained through wide knowledge of vendor technology, Devoteam identified CA Technologies as the best fit for KCOM’s requirements. We demonstrated, with use cases, how a CA solution would show how different end users could access their own data sources inside a unified single solution architecture, and focus the offering on service quality, responsiveness and enhanced automation.

Moreover, the strength of Devoteam’s proposal to use CA’s solution set focused on the customer’s ability to grow and scale without additional resources, set against their inability to improve service with the current NOC tools.

The multiple CA product set mapped easily onto the layers of the NG-OSS architecture to form a single integrated solution. The NG-OSS set builds from traditional operations solutions such as CA Spectrum and CA eHealth, extended with CA NetQoS RA, and then moves to more service orientation with the addition of CA Spectrum Service Operation Insight (SOI) and CA Business Service Insight (BSI). CA ITPAM provides the automation engine, and access is secured through CA SiteMinder.

NG-OSS has a remarkable infrastructure – delivered as a Private Cloud, independent of location for consumption of services, scalable and elastic, and able to support both the corporate group and partners.

The Benefits

KCOM’s NG-OSS is truly innovative in that the CA solution set boasts a number of firsts – deployment as a single solution and in a Private Cloud; employment of two-factor authenticated single sign-on across multiple layers.

In assuming single ownership of the project and, in particular, driving the timelines, Devoteam’s experience ensured a successful project. Paul Murphy, Strategic Change Manager at KCOM, commented: “Devoteam has been pivotal to the success of the project by turning individual software components into an overall solution” During the handover to the client, Devoteam prioritised customer OnBoarding to reduce operational risk. A summary of the benefits which have accrued from this innovative project includes:

• improved service without increasing headcount;
• an enhanced individual customer experience;
• demonstration to customers that KCOM is able to handle issues proactively;
• contracted commitments are actually being exceeded;
• use of technology to share ‘good news’ with customers at multiple levels, without today’s overheads.

KCOM’s ground-breaking next generation services, the product of collaboration with Devoteam, have set a whole new standard for the communication services industry to follow.