Cisco Business Critical Services improves customer experience and reduces costs for OTE Group with automation strategy

For OTE Group, the largest telecommunications company in Greece, customer experience is a top priority—a value we understand and share at Cisco CX.

OTE is a key player in Greece’s digital transformation, committed to making its connectivity solutions simple and available to 30,000 organizations including ministries, financial institutions, hospitals, and schools. But with two-thirds of the global population connected to the internet¹ and European service providers facing increased competition with declining ARPU (average revenue per user) year over year²—providing revenue-generating services was a necessary outcome.

To help meet expectations and demand for simple and connected experiences, OTE looked to Cisco Business Critical Services to automate its customer provisioning process. This would soon prove to be an essential step to enable OTE to onboard new services and improve customer experience and satisfaction. Let’s take a closer look at how they achieved their goals with this true collaboration.

Improved productivity and reduced costs with automation

The benefits of implementing and automating network technology provisioning processes were clear to OTE’s Director of Network Strategy, Michalis Papamichail, who is responsible for network strategy and building core network plans.

Their traditional process of provisioning new customers was manual, time-consuming, and required the efforts of multiple departments. This resulted in common errors in customer account and network provisioning databases. On top of this data inconsistency, they were challenged with managing resources and handling inefficiencies between teams that had conflicting business priorities. All of this made it difficult to deliver services to customers.

That’s where Cisco Business Critical Services came in. Cisco experts worked closely with OTE to help them remove manual tasks and enhance their success. By automating key network processes and activating end-to-end services across multiple vendors, OTE immediately saw outcomes, such as:

• Decreased customer activation times: It used to take OTE several days to activate and install new customers through manual provisioning. Now they can onboard in minutes.
• Faster troubleshooting: Network issues are resolved faster with automation and accurate provisioning information, improving network performance.
• Movement of onboarding to one team: Automated provisioning processes drove organizational efficiency and allowed OTE to aggregate multiple departments into one.

With these outcomes, OTE was not only able to reduce costs and remove human errors associated with manual processes, but they also improved their ability to deliver a broader array of services to their customers—faster.

“The results are already here. We have formulated faster provisioning, which leads to zero errors. And it also gives us an opportunity for better troubleshooting, since we have a more uniform way of providing services to our business customers.”

– Michalis Papamichail, Director of Network Strategy, OTE Group

Outcomes that put you in control

OTE’s transformation journey and achievements are consistent with the results seen by other organizations that use Cisco Business Critical Services to accelerate and achieve their business outcomes.

By engaging with Cisco Business Critical Services, organizations who leverage our human + digital intelligence can see significant gains in their networking and IT performance, with results like:

• 253% ROI over 3 years and as few as 4 months to break even
• 33% more efficient IT networking/infrastructure teams
• 13% lower costs for IT environments supported
• 74% lower productivity losses
• Up to 54% less unplanned downtime
• 45% faster issue resolution

I often hear people speak about how advantages like these are driven by our digital offerings. Of course, that is a big part of the value we provide. But the conversation always comes back to the benefits of our human expertise. Our human expertise is not only the foundation of Cisco’s digital intelligence, but it also powered the capabilities and teamwork that helped OTE’s visions become a reality, as it has with many of our customers.

OTE plans to remain agile in today’s rapidly competitive market by continuing to enhance its offers and services to meet ever-changing customer needs. And by working with Cisco Business Critical Services, they’ve been able to confidently rebalance their resources, save costs, and accelerate innovation as they lead the way in Greece’s digital transformation.

To learn more about OTE Group’s digital transformation and Business Critical Services, I invite you to visit their full story at Reducing costs and automating customer provisioning at OTE Group and discover ways to unleash your innovation with Business Critical Services.

---

Sources:
¹Cisco Annual Internet Report, 2018-2023
²Statista, ARPU Development in Europe, 2011-2022
³IDC Value Study, Cisco Business Value Snapshot, 2021