Published on June 12, 2021
Headquartered in Manchester, M247 is a leading international connectivity and cloud provider. Working with POPX, the company provides an enhanced customer and partner portal, optimises customer service management and allows easy adoption of automation in business processes to drive operational efficiency.
Recognising the need for change, M247 regard IT and customer service as cornerstones of its digital transformation. The company is on a journey to be the most innovative technology partner for growing businesses, supporting them with cloud-first thinking, faster connectivity and smarter infrastructure. By transforming internal business processes, M247 will truly differentiate the service it provides to customers and partners.
Focus on one platform
The key focus was to give employees the best technology to deliver industry leading levels of service by:
- Innovating faster
- Increasing productivity
- Simplifying operations
- Achieving scalability without exponentially increasing costs
- Improving the customer experience
Kevin Paige, CTO at M247 states, "Our continued shift to make our customer experience truly digital has meant rethinking the way our customer service and IT service delivery work. As we continue to grow, we need to innovate to increase our scalability. To do this we needed to move away from using multiple tools to create one standardised platform, increase automation and efficiency, and break down barriers within the organisation."
Service delivery automation
POPX provided M247 with a fully managed and integrated MSP platform to deliver customer service and IT support. The POPX platform, powered by ServiceNow, enabled M247 to redefine the customer support model with an automation first approach, delivered through a new industry redefining portal.
The POPX implementation of a fully managed and integrated platform for Telcos and MSPs, enabled M247 to onboard faster with a clear understanding of required outcomes, timescales and associated value. This approach significantly reduced risk to M247 compared with going it alone on a notoriously tricky SaaS implementation or compared with using expensive professional services.
"Our POPX platform implementation has improved our time to market for new solutions and provided a platform to deliver automation throughout our business. This has paved the way for the broader adoption of increased automation at M247," comments Paige.
Reduced resolution times
Engineers can now focus on spending more time adding value to customers due to transparency and the focus on automation to drive increased productivity and faster case resolution. Paige says, "By starting to bring our customer focused service delivery processes onto a single platform, M247 will have a complete overview of cases, giving teams clear ownership and accountability. Digital workflows are facilitating the fast resolution of over 2-3,000 cases each month and, with the help of device discovery, we can be highly proactive in notifying customers of issues.
The end goal is enabling our engineers to step back from repetitive and unnecessary tasks, allowing them to focus on more complicated challenges, where they can add increased value to our customers. The way POPX will enable us to do this is by looking to continually optimise processes through automation of many repetitive tasks. Working together in this way we will focus on reducing the number of customer cases opened each week and reducing the average time needed to resolve a case.
Self-service portal
Building a customer service portal on the pre-built POPX framework has delivered a vastly superior customer experience and the customer feedback has been unanimously positive. M247 now has a single self-service portal that centralises services and enables faster, more automated customer requests.
Martin ford, POPX CEO says, "At POPX, we have pre-built hundreds of portal features and components that are specifically designed for service providers like M247 to offer an enhanced experience. This means our clients can pick and choose the features and services they offer through their portal without the usual lead times or complexity of developing everything from scratch."
Communication with customers has become more efficient too. In the case of planned engineering works, automated notifications are sent out to customers in advance and customer service agents have complete visibility of the works. Proactive monitoring is now automatically suppressed during these works and notifications from M247's suppliers can themselves be automatically processed.
Ongoing optimisation
Paige and his team see a long-term relationship with POPX, whose roadmap is closely aligned with M247's business priorities, making it a strategic partner for the future. "Phase one has been highly successful regarding the speed of implementation and adoption of POPX. We will continue our digital transformation by delivering new solutions through the POPX MSP Platform and Portal. Our ongoing relationship with the POPX team means we have a service provider who truly understands our needs and is capable of delivering on them," says Paige.
It’s estimated that implementation of the POPX platform has already increased resource capacity between 10-20% but by collaborating to continually optimise operations it could be possible to push this up-to 40%.