- Great Plains is building a new digital experience platform based on a cloud architecture
- The goal is to improve support customer interactions with the sales and marketing teams
- In preparation, the first thing the company has done is to migrate its inventory systems to a cloud platform
Katie Curtis helped transform the operation support systems (OSS) at Zayo, and now she’s doing the same thing for Great Plains Communications as the company’s chief information officer.
In the 1.5 years she’s been with Great Plains, she’s helped build a cloud-based architecture that allows for innovative applications to be built on top. It’s all part of a roadmap to introduce a new digital experience platform at the company in October.
Curtis will be at the Fiber Connect show in a couple of weeks, speaking on a panel about “Navigating the Customer Journey,” and Fierce Network caught up with her this week to learn more about her work at Great Plains. The service provider has an 18,000-mile regional fiber network that reaches 13 states in the Midwest and Western U.S. It offers community access rings, last-mile and middle-mile connectivity.
Curtis said the panelists at Fiber Connect will be talking about the steps of the customer journey, including the marketing and sales process that captures customers’ attention. For her part of the conversation, she’ll talk about how service providers can support and enhance the customer journey from a technical standpoint via their operations support systems (OSS) and billing support systems (BSS).
To optimally support marketing and sales, a service provider needs a cloud-based architecture that can support different types of applications. This is important because different generations like to interact with their service providers in different ways. Older customers prefer traditional call centers. But the youngest generations often like to do everything from their phones. These different forms of interaction require different technologies.
“My background as CIO immediately goes into applications,” said Curtis.
In preparation for rolling out its new customer experience platform later this year, the first thing the company has done is to migrate its inventory systems to a cloud platform.
“You have to start with the foundation,” said Curtis, explaining that “inventory” includes all the serviceable assets, mostly fiber, but also smaller amounts of copper and hybrid fiber coax.
“We are a 114-year-old company,” she said. “We have fiber and legacy technologies. We migrated to a platform called Vetro Fiber Map and use Circuit Vision. So physical and logical are now in the cloud.”
Curtis said a lot of telcos don’t have a strong grasp of their inventories. And for Great Plains she wanted to start with a solid foundation, “getting our inventory clean and clear so ordering is seamless.” Next, she’ll pivot to transforming the company’s billing system.
Great Plains trials Ciena's Blue Planet
In August, Great Plains plans to assess Ciena’s Blue Planet provisioning software. It will be trialing the software for auto provisioning of residential customers. But ultimately, it wants a platform that provisions both residential and commercial customers. Curtis noted that right now Blue Planet’s “wheelhouse is more in the commercial space."
The vision with Blue Planet’s software is that customers would go through Great Plains’ digital experience, submit their order, which would be processed through its order management workflows, and then their service would be automatically turned on without human involvement.
She said that it can get pretty complicated, but “there are definitely companies and systems that do it today.”
One company that comes to mind is Colt Technology Services and its On-Demand platform that allows customers to automatically provision circuits and turn them up and down within minutes.
Colt’s Chief Digital and Information Officer Ashish Surti recently told Fierce Network, “The biggest frustration many customers have with telcos is time it takes to provision services, so anything you can do to reduce the time between providing a quote and actually spinning services up is a benefit."
As far as Great Plains’ Curtis is concerned, everything starts with a strong cloud-based foundation.
“I think of the customer journey as the systems needed to support what the customer wants. For me, none of that is possible without a strong architecture,” she concluded.