AT&T saves 2 million work hours annually by adopting API-led connectivity

Challenge

Overhauling the integration strategy

AT&T Inc. is the world’s largest telecommunications company and the second largest provider of mobile telephone services. AT&T subscribers expect the sales and service teams to sign them up quickly and turn on the service fast. However, before MuleSoft, AT&T's legacy systems inhibited effective management of the customer experience. Multiple systems were connected via point-to-point (P2P) integrations making it difficult to access and share data.

The main problem is that AT&T lacked a single source of truth — one integrated platform that ensures customers have a common experience as they move through the sales and support process. Simple customer interactions were challenging because service agents needed data from more than 50 separate systems during a single call. This resulted in long wait times, slow time to resolution, and wide-spread customer dissatisfaction. It also hindered the company’s ability to sell relevant products and services to their customers.

Objectives

Improving the customer experience through digital transformation

AT&T needed to modernize the digital experience for customers and service/sales team members by:

• Replacing P2P connections with API-based integrations.
• Aggregating customer information from 50+ systems of record into one holistic, scalable, and secure solution.
• Establishing a unified, seamless view across all customer interactions.
• Providing 9,000 Mobility Services and Support agents with systems powered by Salesforce and MuleSoft to help manage call interactions with 180 million customers.

Solution

Connecting 50+ systems across the enterprise with APIs

To support its digital transformation objectives, AT&T deployed the Salesforce Customer 360 platform powered by Salesforce clouds (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud) and MuleSoft. AT&T also built a Business Sales CRM Platform on Salesforce to enable the sales team to view customer data and recommend actions or upsell opportunities.

AT&T used MuleSoft to build, deploy, manage, and share more than 50 APIs that connect Salesforce Customer C360 to the many legacy systems holding valuable data. Leveraging API-led connectivity to unlock data from the previous sales and service support systems, AT&T eliminated the need for the service teams to log into 50+ different systems to find the information they need to serve the customers. Instead, they access a single Salesforce platform to resolve all customer issues.

Using MuleSoft, AT&T also built APIs enabling common services such as logging, exception handling, event notification and reporting frameworks. In addition, CloudHub Platform Operationalization and Security Patterns for all API transactions improved AT&T's security posture and increased governance over data access. MuleSoft also enabled automated performance testing and deployments using CI/CD and headless testing for APIs.

MuleSoft enabled AT&T to build future-proof APIs that are compliant to the TMF Open API specification, a standard for API interoperability and portability to enable end-to-end seamless connectivity across complex digital services. Compliance with this standard empowers AT&T to integrate Salesforce with any future systems.

“At the heart of our new Salesforce implementation is MuleSoft,” explains Brad Ringer, Principal Solution Engineer at AT&T. “MuleSoft is our integration layer. To complete any APIs, data, or batch processes, we’re using MuleSoft. We’ve implemented a solution that really meets our requirements to provide connectivity in and out of the internal network to Salesforce. And it’s extensible for our future needs.”

AT&T is also able to reuse the same APIs as they add new products. So far AT&T has built 30+ reusable integrations with 75% reuse. For customer accounts, products, billing and payments, orders, Salesforce case creation, Salesforce data extraction, and data sync with Einstein Analytics.

Results

Saving 2 million work hours every year with API-led connectivity

MuleSoft API-led connectivity has streamlined and fortified customer support across all channels at AT&T. By integrating systems via APIs instead of P2P connections, and connecting Salesforce to multiple legacy systems, AT&T reduced the time it takes service reps to access customer data, enabling them to provide a better customer experience.

AT&T also accelerated time to market for new products. While it previously took a year to onboard a new product, now it takes 6 weeks thanks to MuleSoft and API reuse. Each time AT&T introduces a new product, the company is able to reuse the APIs that were already built. Currently, AT&T offers 120 different products that have been built with the support of API-based integration.

“The result of MuleSoft is that we reduced the time our teams are doing administrative tasks,” Ringer adds. “MuleSoft saves each of our teams 30 minutes a day, which over the course of a year is more than 2 million work hours to focus on what they do best — helping our customers.”

Brad Ringer
Principal Solution Engineer at AT&T