Beyond care: augmenting customer experience through digitalization

“Click”, Orange Wholesale’s customer digital interface sets a new standard in our journey to Wholesale as a Platform. Reflecting the digitalization of our networks into a new customer interface with a host of new features, it goes beyond care functions to empower the least tech savvy users to achieve more.

Our customer portal was built for and with our customers, keeping one promise in mind: allow any user an unprecedented level of control on their wholesale solutions through the simplest, most transparent possible experience.

Reflecting the digitalization of our networks in our customer portal

As Jean-Marc Barraqué, VP and Head of Digital Transformation Program at Orange Wholesale International says: “Our operations are evolving thanks to digitalization. And we want to empower our customers with the flexibility we gain thanks to this digitalization”. For instance, Orange Wholesale’s digital network offering can rely on an unparalleled 50 SDN PoPs (Software Defined Networking) worldwide, enabling Wholesale-as-a-platform ready solutions such as IP Transit or EVPL online – and more to come! These PoPs make it possible to allocate new resources without any additional hardware and act as a true Telco Cloud. The missing part on our journey to scalable, smooth digitalization was the user interface, which gives actual control on this power to all our users. “We want our customers to view our portal as more than a ‘first aid’ spot, available when they need help. We want to empower them to achieve more with effective digital tools, accessible from one single, user-friendly interface”, Guillaume Petillat, Digital Customer Experience Director elaborates. Secure direct connection management, performance monitoring, bandwidth allocation can now be implemented on the user portal. This means that digital orderings of our CDN solution Media Delivery Boost, Cloud Connect or 5G signaling will be available right from the portal in the near future, enabling fully digital experience.

This results in an impressive number of smart features related to offer management. And we made sure to improve administrative account management with a host of options.

But the most impressive benefit in terms of customer experience is that many of these features can now be accessed even without using our portal.

Thanks to APIzation, EVPL Online and ticketing features, as well as Content Delivery Boost’s metrics visualization and purge can be triggered right from the user’s preferred interface. Major partners have already integrated Orange Wholesale’s resources right inside their CPQ tools (Configure, Price, Quote).

Improving experience based on customer feedbacks – for any user

These improvements and new features focusing on user experience were introduced after listening to our users themselves. And these users are more and more active, as half of our customers now connect to the portal every month. Through different feedback collecting tools triggered continuously over the last years, both online and in person, we realized that two requests stood out.

Our users want more tools and more autonomy to manage their operations. That’s why we strived to develop more online services, and to make them so simple to use that anyone without specific knowledge of wholesale digital tools can operate them on a daily basis, intuitively and seamlessly.

“The introduction of Click illustrates what all surveys and customer feedback show: building ways to the future. And this is what our digital transformation is all about. Our customers want more autonomy in their business and back-office activities, and innovation at their fingertips”, Jean-Marc Barraqué stresses. “We want to allow all of our customers’ staff to seamlessly experience our portal, not only NOC (Network operations center) experts. We want sourcing people to be able to request connectivity quotations themselves, service managers to check if a specific route is available or not with the desired QoS, finance people to appreciate the competitiveness of our rates”, he adds.

Considering the concrete implications of such a popularization of our tools, we therefore introduced advanced account privilege management features. So that every customer can pilot his or her own, bespoke customer experience.

User experience benefits