The future is flexible

Business are increasingly looking at the huge leaps made in digital CX for everyday consumers, and asking how this can revolutionise their operations. 2Degres explains.

Numerous transformative innovations have sprung from the business realm before being reimagined and integral for the consumer market.
Xerox invented the graphical user interface in the 1970s – something we all use daily today.

Cloud computing was the preserve of large corporates before becoming an integral part of individual lives through services like Google Drive and
Dropbox.

But innovation is a two-way street – just ask the team at 2degrees business who are on a mission to make business telco as easy to use as the most popular consumer applications, transforming a telco into a software company, or, in the latest jargon – a Techco.

“When you are used to ordering an Uber in seconds, managing your finances via a phone in the back of that Uber, and seamlessly checkingin, and boarding a plane without a second through, that becomes the baseline,” says Andrew Fairgray, Chief Business Officer at 2degrees.

“The challenge we have set ourselves is to bring that level of customer focus to business telco – to make it as easy to manage a fleet of mobiles as it is to add a new user on Netflix or upgrade a Spotify subscription.

“2degrees has been on the journey to move beyond traditional telecommunications to customer-first, on-demand services, driven by a core digital capability. In effect, a software company with great telecommunications assets.”

Fairgray notes that the opportunity for this transformation was highlighted in the merger of the sum of its two parts – Vocus New Zealand and 2degrees, which merged last year. The merger bought new scale to the challenge business – collating two million customers into a business that, while it turns over more than a billion dollars a year, prides itself on being a challenger.

The 2degrees team has developed a front end called Flex. Flex represents the next evolution in service for customers, an API-first selfservice portal with billing flexibility, mobile management, Network-as-a-Service, Computer as-a-Service and other capability that paves the way for
even more new services and growth.

Within Flex, one of those key capabilities is Mobile-as-a-Service. Simple experiences that matter for customers like cost centre reporting on mobile use can take days, but Flex enables this in minutes. These journeys have been designed and evolved with fast feedback iterations, encapsulating 2degrees’ key learnings to improve customer experience.

For example, Freightways, parent of New Zealand Couriers, Post Haste Couriers and others, is a complex enterprise with 12 divisions, each with its own cost centres and financial reporting needs. With such a large number of brands and mobile connections, this creates a challenge for the business when it comes to end of month account reconciliation. Freightways was using manual processes to allocate each mobile phone bill to the correct cost centre, the right branch and department. For more than 1,000 mobiles, this involved days of work.

Lack of account visibility had a huge impact on Freightways’ ability to control costs. One business unit was spending several thousand dollars a month in call overage. There were also costs still coming through for people who had left the company, which Freightways continued to pay because it had lost track of users.

With Flex, managers can allocate phone numbers to a specific cost centre, at a specific branch, at any point in time during a billing period.

From there, reconciliation is easy with built in reporting, and a self-service web-based solution. A single landing page enables users to immediately pull down insights on usage, order new devices, handle new mobile connections, perform SIM swaps and manage usernames. If a person leaves and their phone is given to someone else, it’s easy to keep track.

Importantly, Flex includes a converged place to manage all services, from real-time automation to provisioning secure bandwidth on-demand, so customers can scale up services as needed. The automation capability behind the scenes leverages technology originally designed by Uber to ensure reliable and real-time order orchestration.
Fairgray says Flex is the future for 2degrees, with an ambitious roadmap of new products and services queued up to drop.

“Like consumer apps, this is iterative – we’ll continue to add features and improvements to make our customers lives easier,” he says.

“We have a roadmap of enhancements including integrating generative AI to create deeper insights and support with carbon reporting, and bringing
in IoT infrastructure as well as mobile devices.

“We’ve gone from start-up to Aotearoa New Zealand’s third largest and most trusted telecommunications and digital services company. Our focus
is to use our scale and ability to innovate better products and services for our direct customers and wholesale partners, while retaining our care for
customers, challenger mindset and focus on value.”