Service Management from Tele2 IoT: Like nothing you’ve ever experienced

Hello all, hope you are all well! Nice to be able to use this blog format to express some thoughts around what Tele2 IoT is doing in terms of Service Management. Hope it won’t be a bragging session – well, about bragging, got a little story here that I would like to start with.

Just as I sat myself down at the computer the other day my son shouted to me from his room. He’s playing with his best friend and they always have a good time together.

Now, this friend is a “bragger”. He’s able to brag about anything. Some weeks ago he came over to me bragging about his new summer house. Not about the summer house itself, but for the fact that it has stairs. These types of comments are one of the most beautiful things about kids, sometimes even hilarious.

Just recently, when my son called for me, it was about whether he had seen “Walking with Dinosaurs” or not. Because his friend had not, and when he is in that position when he has nothing to use as a “counter tool”, he get’s either furious or just silent and sort of scaled off and almost white in his face, losing all expression. Or, he will just use his last resort (which he’s using quite a lot) – just hanging in hard saying that he has done it too. Whatever it is, he’s done it too.

Connecting this to Service Management is interesting as it is not too far from this. I can tell you what we are doing. And all of our competitors can say they are doing it too, or “sure, we can do it, no problem”. The thing with us, though, is that we are doing it every day, it’s obvious for us.

But this blog post won’t be bragging, I hope. It will be about what we do and why we do it. And first and foremost, why it matters to our customers.

In Tele2 IoT, we have a team full of professional Service Managers. We care for our customers – our VIP customers as they are called when they are cared for by a Tele2 IoT Service Manager.

The team’s personalities are interesting, and we do something different – we map the personalities onto the customer’s ‘personality’, so to speak, which means it’s highly likely you’ll get a good ‘match’.  And the background and knowledge of the people in this team… omg, it’s good, really good. We have knowledge and background from core-, data/IP-, radio-, voice network, quality engineering, customer support, even sales. And we take advantage of it too, learning from each other every day.

Adding some rarely-seen attitude to this, making it to a top performing team and highly appreciated service from our VIP customers – it really makes a difference.

Another differentiator is the customer mix we are working with. No Service Manager has “rising stars” or any “performers” type of customers only. Instead, we have a mix between the IoT rookies, the middle segment and the mature IoT players. All of the customers have their own journeys, their own mistakes that they have learned from, and their own success stories to tell. We make sure to absorb all of this and use it to help other customers. Call it recycling if you like – that’s how we make sure that our customers are getting new flavors, in-tells and new ideas.

One more key attribute about how we work is the accountability. Accountability is usually something you take for granted – and you should. A couple of years ago I read somewhere that the telecom industry is one of the lowest ranked by consumers when it comes to trust. Obviously horrible reading and nothing I, as a customer-facing person, want to believe. But let’s be honest – this is the case worldwide and the largest players simply don’t care. Their C-levels will tell you that they surely do, that you are their top priority and they will work their socks off for you – but they won’t.

I usually say that I have two favorites when it comes to newly acquired customers – either the complete new IoT player, or the one of the “big ones”. Customers with previous deployment with a competitor of ours has never got the chance to experience what we do in terms of Operations, Delivery/Implementation and Support.

We had one case where we managed to get a VPN up and running in 2 minutes… 2 minutes! Compare this to what this customer was expecting based on previous experience, which was somewhere around 2-3 weeks!

Speaking about new IoT players, what do we do (as Service Managers) for them?

Service Management is usually seen as a premium service, something for the enterprises and large players out there. No, no, and no. Service Management from Tele2 IoT is for everyone. New players need the tips, tricks, and advice to speed up their time-to-market and enable their explosive growth potential, and we are here to be that enabler.

Education is one part, and for me personally it’s a passion to get anyone to understand how telecom works and how it affects the business in every aspect. And as  previously mentioned, there are a lot of things to learn from the middle-stage as well as the mature IoT players.  The ‘middle-stage’ is interesting because they’re aiming to become mature and large players and because they have moved beyond start-up phase. These types of players need to be reminded of the start-up feeling, with a lot of ideas and a lot of stuff they want to do. And they also need to be reminded of what is needed to reach the top.

We are seeing all of this every day. We’re learning from it. And we are here to help you.

But I don’t want to brag about it.