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With a nationwide presence, this Fortune 100 telecommunications company works hard to connect customers with various media and communications solutions. It started as a small operation and has grown exponentially over the past two decades with a vast network and infrastructure that provides innovative services at a great value.
Delivering exceptional customer experiences is now table stakes. That’s because 74% of consumers feel that brand loyalty is about feeling understood and valued. With that in mind, this leading telecommunications company embarked on a customer experience transformation initiative to streamline the complex installation process of communications services for enterprise clients.
They identified Pega, the industry leader in business mapping software that drives positive customer outcomes, as the ideal solution to achieve the company’s intended outcomes.
Having lacked the expertise internally, the company hired a Big Four firm to help lead the first phase of the execution of this critical transformation initiative. At the same time, the company wanted to create an internal team that could also work on the project's first phase — ensuring that the company could lead subsequent phases of the implementation after the consulting firm rolled off.
The Director of Automation recognized the need for a fresh approach to building a right-sized team of a smaller number of independent experts with deep expertise in similar Pega systems implementations. Not only would this ensure that the team could lead the subsequent phases of the implementation, but they would be able to do so at a fraction of the cost.
Having recognized the need to find independent consultants with deep expertise in a specialized skill set around Pega implementation, the Director of Automation reached out to Graphite.
As part of the initial conversation with their dedicated Graphite Account Executive (AE), the Director learned about Graphite’s:
Excited at the prospect of being able to create an agile team of Pega experts, the Director of Automation set up subsequent project scoping conversations to solidify the company’s need for:
Armed with detailed information, the AE posted the projects on the Graphite platform and filtered through 22 possible independent Pega consultants recommended by Graphite’s proprietary AI technology. The AE held 1-on-1 vetting calls with several experts and presented eight independent experts to the Director of Automation to review within 48 hours of posting the projects.
Each candidate was interviewed using Graphite’s in-app messaging and meeting room feature. To ensure that the independent experts could be onboarded compliantly as soon as the evaluations were concluded, Graphite’s AE was also working with the vendor management team at the telecommunications company to establish standard contracting arrangements through a managed services agreement (MSA).
At the end of the evaluation process, the Director of Automation built a team by onboarding five independent experts on Graphite. Together they bring an average of 11 years of experience in similar Pega implementations working at companies such as EY, Infosys, and Wipro.
Armed with insights from over 3,000 projects executed on the Graphite platform, the Graphite team knows that a diligent onboarding process is key to setting projects up for success. The dedicated customer success team put in place for the telecommunications company took the lead in ensuring key project stakeholders were aligned on the project objectives through onboarding calls.
Each independent consultant was first debriefed on their role and responsibilities and provided the strategic vision of the initiative. This allowed them to understand the desired outcome and how they would collaborate with internal and external teammates to complete the engagement.
From there, the independent consultants met with each other, with the hired program manager serving as the senior team member and responsible for facilitating the adoption, implementation, and sustainability of the agile process.
For the next 6-12 months, the program manager, Pega Expert, developer, and the two system architects will work closely together to oversee data migration from legacy systems to the new solutions. They will monitor the system performance by undergoing regular tests, recommend new solutions to improve new and existing database systems, and be responsible for educating staff and proactively mitigating issues.
As a result of building a solid team of independent experts, the telecommunications company has attained 45% in cost savings by displacing consulting spend. Likewise, the Director of Automation can handle the remaining phases of the implementation in-house without experiencing a slip in quality or productivity.
