With the implementation of Clintworld’s Clintview simulation software, Orange Belgium not only crushed EU’s new best deal obligation, but unlocked the opportunity to align campaign objectives across departments, prune active legacy tariffs, and finally take the solution in-house.
As one of the major actors on the Belgium telecommunications market, Orange offers postpaid and prepaid mobile telecom products and services to its residential customers, and DSL fixed network telephony and high speed internet, acting as an integrated communications provider and offers a portfolio of mobility and connectivity services to it’s commercial market.
Little did they know that the European Union planned a revision to Europe’s regulatory framework for electronic communications which, among others, outlined new communicatory requirements for Telecoms that underpinned end-user rights to a fair, more informed deal.
A cohesive solution to their current system had to be found—quickly.
At the heart of EU’s Single Digital Market Strategy lies the European Electronic Communications Code (EECC), which consolidates and amends existing Telecoms frameworks across the EU.
Among the many changes, the EECC bolsters new end-user rights aimed to improve fairness when buying and using broadband, mobile, pay TV and landline phone services.
Though conceived at the end of 2018, a deadline for National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs) to transpose the EECC into national law was set for December 21st, 2020. Following this date, each EU Member State provided their own individual deadlines for Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to implement changes in time.
Like for every European telecommunications service provider, the EECC changed the name of the game when it came to customer communication, where one such revision requires Telecoms to annually inform customers of the next best deal available to them.
As a Belgian operator, the best deal obligation was nothing new for Orange, since an earlier legislative initiative from the Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications (BIPT) inspired the very same conditions outlined in the EECC directive.
However, the new directive drastically expanded the requirement in both the B2B and B2C segments, while redefining it’s recurrence and method of communication. The new changes forced Orange Belgium to reassess their strategy, looking for a complimentary solution to their growing challenges. After careful consideration, they turned to Clintworld’s Clintview analytical simulation software.
Lucky for Orange, Clintview has been a part of their interdepartmental mar-tech stack for two and a half years now. Included in their 2018 digital transformation efforts, the Telecom had employed the software to fully automate their tariff simulation process when conducting continual what-if analyses on such residential and business pricing use cases as product cannibalization, competitive pricing analysis, profitability health-checks, and so on.
Until EECC, local regulation required annual best deals to be performed on residential customers, though Orange Belgium had outsourced this service at a cost. With the right tool in place and a new legislative motivation, it was time to bring this service home.
With Clintview, there was no need for costly customization, we were able to produce results using the standard product from three years ago. No surprise in cost and a smooth, easy implementation with limited investment from the Orange IT team.
With no additional license cost, Orange employed their already-owned Clintview project base, creating an agile, fully configurable, and future-proofed solution in such a short turnover. From specification, configuration to delivery, the complete solution took a speedy one month to implement, followed by several months of active testing and tuning.
While the solution obliterated EU’s best deal obligation, a lot more was left to love:
Until now, Belgium’s minimal best deal requirements meant Orange’s operations could remain outsourced. However, the expanded EECC conditions meant keeping the solution externalized would quickly turn into a costly endeavor.
Orange took the cue to produce a solution that not only sat safely on their in-house IT environment, but unlocked the ability to communicate results inter-departmentally, producing a cleaner, more-efficient customer experience.
An upgrade to the understanding of internal processes:
Clintview not only allowed us to better understand our customers, but clarified our understanding of internal, interdepartmental processes when products are configured into the billing system. By double checking misconfigurations, it’s helped us become more structured and more organized when requesting new tariff options and discounts to be processed by the billing team.
Thanks to Clintview we were able to immediately identify deviations in our data feeding processes: some customers were doubled, fields were found empty, and incorrect configurations of the tariff plans in the billing system. Identifying these unusual behaviors helped make changes in the way things are configured in the future.
Improving is impossible without an absolute focus on customer support. With the new solution, customer care is able to instantly identify a customer’s next best deal, becoming unremarkably responsive to an individuals rapidly changing habits and surging connectivity needs.
So, while the obligation is available on the customer bill every month, if they call customer services, they will be able to tell the customer what is the cheapest available tariff—all while taking into consideration the technical and business pricing complexity (including several layers of available discounts) of the business framework contracts.
Ultimately, Orange considered this legal obligation as an add-on to their tariff recommendation provided on a quarterly basis to their B2B customer cluster. Since each customer now has two options, the cheapest and best fit, the options increase the overall trust of the customer towards the brand, providing full transparency of what’s available.
By implementing Clintview, Orange was able to turn a legal obligation into an opportunity. By leveraging the best deal requirement, Orange now has the platform to orchestrate a mass pruning campaign of their active legacy tariffs. In other words, they took the new legal framework not as a weakness or threat, but an opportunity to help customers find new commercial offers, cutting costs for finance, etc.
Above all, Orange Belgium were satisfied to work with the Clintworld consultancy team once again to capitalize on an already invested Clintview software installation that currently covers multiple pricing related use cases. They’re now ready for any regulatory or competitive market developments, becoming fully enabled to adapt themselves to these changes.
Results like these are only possible with a dedicated product and team. If you’d like to see how to achieve the same at your Telecom, request a demo today.
