Netia & Tele2

Integrating Telco customer service operations

Netia, a Polish alternative telecom carrier, acquired Tele2, an innovative new operator that had acquired rapidly a significant customer base, using a small, lean organisation and extensive outsourcing of key processes. The integration required a best of breed design for customer process and operations to deliver synergies and improved practices from the merger of the businesses.

David led a team to capture the ‘As Is’ customer service processes, operating models and underlying costs for each of the parties to the merger, analysing and comparing them to inform decision making. This work identified key differences to inform decisions on the To Be design. For example, all of Tele2’s operational processes were outsourced and executed on outsourcer systems, delivering much lower headcount and slightly lower unit costs. Tele2 did not execute classic CRM and retention processes, reducing its costs, but foregoing benefits such as lower churn/better retention relative to Netia. Some of Netia’s customers received services that were ‘manufactured’ entirely from TPSA (the incumbent Telco) networks, whereas all of Tele2’s customer base, received such services. This enabled Tele2 to operate lower cost technical/maintenance services – all fault reports were simply sent to TPSA, whereas Netia performed ‘triage’ on all faults to determine the cause of the fault and had a more complex workflow to determine which faults would result in a report to TPSA.

These factors were used to develop consensus on the To Be design, develop estimates for synergies from integration related changes and embed the actions required to realise synergies into to initiative plans. This allowed Netia to integrate seamlessly Tele2 and obtain synergies in an orderly and controlled manner.