M1 drives digital transformation through seamless self-serve and single view of the customer

Challenge

Launching products faster at scale

M1 is Singapore’s most dynamic communications company, serving more than two million customers. It was the country’s first digital network operator, leading the way with ultra-high-speed broadband, 5G, fixed voice, and other services on the Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network.

Its mission is to continuously lead Singapore’s telecommunications landscape with cutting-edge technology and custom product offerings that meet changing customer needs. To get a competitive edge, it needs to get innovative new products and services to market quickly and at scale.

In addition, M1 keeps the customer experience at the heart of everything it does. As part of its omnichannel strategy, it aims to connect the physical and digital touchpoints to deliver seamless, hyper-personalized customer experiences, whilst automating processes to improve company efficiency.

However, M1’s existing on-premise API gateway wasn’t delivering what the business needed. The gateway was labor-intensive and couldn’t provide API reuse or business logic, which slowed the down delivery of new offerings and chipped away at their competitive advantage. Even more critical was the lack of scalability. The existing solution couldn’t support higher volumes of traffic and was a bottleneck for company growth.

To launch new products and services to market quickly, maintain their competitive advantage, and meet customer expectations for digital services, M1 needed to become more agile and digital-first. That meant migrating away from heavily customized, on-premise infrastructure onto a more agile cloud solution.

Objectives

Delivering innovation to customers through modern integration

M1 defined the following objectives to revolutionize its integration strategy:

• Optimize resources and improve business sustainability by shifting all back-end systems to the cloud, creating a 100% cloud-native stack (a first in the telco industry)
• Build reusable APIs to accelerate and simplify integrations, leading to faster time to market
• Establish a data fabric by connecting backend systems to fuel self-service
• Create an environment that supports hyper-personalized digital interactions for customers, and removes the need to go in-store or involve a sales rep
• Digitize and automate online ordering to improve customer experience and increase company efficiency

Solution

Establishing an agile foundation

M1 first needed to get the foundation in place to achieve its business ambitions. This involved a phased migration from its legacy on-premises infrastructure onto a new cloud platform to create a minimum viable product (MVP).

The new, future-proof technology stack integrated all aspects of M1’s systems onto one digital platform, consolidating 150 legacy applications down to 30, radically simplifying the way M1 operates while providing real value to customers.

MuleSoft Professional Services supported the migration, providing knowledge and expertise to ensure M1 had the optimal set up for its needs. The MVP was ready to launch in just nine months, compared to more than a year for similar projects.

“It was too risky to do a big bang migration. To safeguard business continuity, we’re running both systems in parallel, using Anypoint Platform to connect our systems and ensure we always have 360-degree visibility of the customer.” 

Chiam Chee Kong
Deputy Head of Software Engineering & Architecture at M1.

With Salesforce, M1 has created best practice end-to-end customer journeys, by integrating with backend systems to provide a customer 360-degree view.

• New customer leads are fed into Sales Cloud, which provides sales reps with a single view of their customers, and connected into Salesforce Communications Cloud for product catalog and CPQ (configure, price and quote).
• Service Cloud forms the backbone of M1’s contact center for consistent customer experience across all sales channels.
• Marketing Cloud supports and improves the customer journey with CRM, accurate quoting, service management, personalized offers and promotions.
• Tableau collates real-time data and makes it actionable to drive smarter decision-making. One way that it comes together is that the marketing team can surface insights such as which devices and plans are most popular so they know what to promote without needing support from the IT team.

M1 also integrates other business critical systems outside of Salesforce including order management, inventory, point of sale, and billing solutions.

Delivering advanced self-service for customers

Next, M1 turned its attention to the customer experience. The first project was to enable customers to self-serve and configure their own payment plans for mobile phones. With over 6 million product plan combinations available, in just seconds, customers can generate plans that perfectly fit their needs without any human touchpoints, giving M1’s service and sales teams the opportunity to be more productive elsewhere.

When the customer selects their perfect plan, MuleSoft connects M1’s ecommerce platform and website with Salesforce CPQ and the product catalog. Salesforce CPQ then calculates the price in real time, and the customer can simply click to confirm the purchase and send the order to the ERP system.

Contracts and invoicing have also been digitized, eliminating the need for paper. The charging system (MATRIXX) determines what product, how much, and when a customer will be charged, automatically triggering the billing system (Aria) to send an invoice out to the customer. Once the bill is paid, the payment update is made in Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM. Thanks to reusable APIs, this customer 360 view is available on any channel to staff in-store, agents at the contact center, and sales teams across the organizations.

Results

Supercharging efficiency and team productivity

With Anypoint Platform, M1 has transformed the customer and employee experience. Nearly 90% of transactions are now digital (up from 15-20%) and 85% of orders are completely automated, requiring no manual input from staff. And now with self-service, customers can design their own plans in seconds, so M1 no longer needs to configure and launch new plans, which previously took two weeks to complete.

Replacing antiquated architecture on legacy infrastructure with a philosophy of reusing integrations also helped the team to go to market 25% faster than originally planned. This agility coupled with the ability to reuse APIs will further accelerate time to market, which will help M1 to protect its position as a cutting-edge telecom company. To date, the company has completed 13% more projects a year through API reuse and saved up to 15 man-days per project – a saving of SGD135,000.

But the biggest benefit for M1? “I’m really excited about the scalability we have with MuleSoft. In a fast-paced industry, we now have the confidence that we can stay ahead of the game with a future-proofed environment and delight our customers as we grow our business,” commented Chaim.