The real cost of legacy tools and manual workflows to telcos and ISPs

Legacy systems are costing your business

For ISPs of all sizes, day-to-day operations are a juggling act across a variety of systems, portals and spreadsheets. Key practices such as billing managed are in one system, while orders, inventory and support tickets are spread across others. It’s strangely possible that provisioning processes might be half-manual, and half-automated, with customer data living in spreadsheets (or worse?), with constant concerns over its accuracy, validity and security.

It may feel like everything ‘works’, but under the surface, this patchwork setup creates operational chaos, hidden costs, and serious risk. This is the story of where many ISPs find themselves today, and why the cost of staying there is higher than most realise.. or are willing to admit!

 

The risks of manual workflows

The hidden costs of manual work processes add up, even though they aren’t clearly defined as line items on the business accounts. The fallout from this way of working has knock-on monetary effects, with reduced efficiencies, efficacy and scalability ultimately damaging to the bottom line of your business… and the experience to your customers.

  • Slow response times, where a simple provisioning task takes 3 systems and 2 approvals, obviously means your time to deliver suffers. Manual data entry almost certainly results in some level of human error – the type of niggly mistakes that frustrate customers and cost yet more time to resolve. Every new customer adds linear effort, meaning that scaling the old way simply requires more bodies. All this means that a typical ISP or telco could be losing thousands a month in wasted time and reworks — not to mention lost customer trust – and creating a ‘glass ceiling’ to profitable growth.
 

Fragmented systems = fragmented teams

When systems aren’t unified, neither is your team. Siloed cross-departmental workflows can result in wasted effort, confusion and, again, damage to what matters most; the bottom line of the business. Likely scenarios arising from legacy working practices can mean poor visibility of key issues across separate business functions, such as support teams being unable to see billing history and sales not seeing open support tickets. This results in unnecessary back-and-forth, with nobody owning the full customer view.

  • This can result in blame games, with the disconnected data meaning departments operate as entirely disparate entities. No single source of truth or ultimate accountability can result in finger-pointing and inconsistent workflows that hamper productivity and results.
  • This patchwork approach to systems means a headache for IT to maintain, as well as inefficient onboarding for both new and existing team members. Training staff across multiple tools takes time and leads to inconsistent service. Once the team are up to speed with multiple systems that don’t talk successfully to one another, even then they are naturally slowed by this hopping around, resulting in a poor employee and thus, a poor customer experience.
 

Death by spreadsheet: why homegrown solutions fall short

Someone once said “familiarity breeds comfort” and in the world of business, nothing is more familiar that good old spreadsheets. While they might feel familiar, allowing you to customise them, and being flexible… they’re inherently fragile and wildly insecure. They don’t scale particularly well, are prone to version issues and often there is a reliance on key individuals to manage them. It’s probably fair to say that if your ‘system’ disappears when one person takes a holiday, it’s not a system.

 

Opportunity cost: what you could be doing instead

Every hour your team spends reconciling data or chasing information is an hour they’re not –

  • Onboarding new customers
  • Improving support quality
  • Testing new growth strategies

Your team should be focused on strategic, valuable work, not mind numbing admin. This is where a consolidated management platform can really shine – giving back team members, across multiple departments, hours in their days so that your business is holistically more productive as well as better aligned.

 

Acknowledging the real starting point

Before you transform, you have to acknowledge where you’re starting from – legacy tools and manual processes have helped you get this far, but they won’t get you where you need to go next; that glass ceiling will always remain. In the next post, we’ll explore what happens when ISPs and telcos delay their digital transformation and why the cost of inaction is even higher than the cost of inefficiency.