Digicel: Reducing costs through self-service migration

Challenge and background:

“With VISION’s first step, everyone was very animated; it was as if we had found a new way to split the atom.”

Denis O’Brien, Chairman, Digicel

VISION’s promise:

VISION promised to cut approximately $11 million from a $29 million customer care budget by reducing headcount while minimizing customer churn and not having Net Promoter Score (NPS) fall by more than 10 points.

What VISION did:

The Diagnosis: VISION did a thorough analysis of customers’ top reasons for calling and completed a review of current IT systems and infrastructure to get a robust understanding of Digicel’s customer care processes and where improvements could be made. We concluded that our best chance of achieving call reduction was to force migrate customers to self-service.

The Strategy:

• Force Migrate 14 million customers across 32 countries from call center-based customer service to self-service channels within a 12-month period.
• Design end-to-end customer conversations
• Develop & Enhance IT systems: IVR, Apps, content management system, social media, and operations-support systems.
• Implement this new technology across 32 countries and consolidate 14 call centres to 6.
• Implement a new operating model which reduces staff by over 1000.

Outcomes and Benefits:

• We have already achieved approximately $ 7 million in-year and $12 million full-year savings.
• We are on track to reduce 7.5 million calls per annum compared to this time last year.
• We are on track to reduce call centre costs by $13 million, which will exceed our savings target.
• We have seen no evidence of customer churn, and NPS has fallen only for short periods of time and never by more than 10 points.