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Kris Oldland, talks to Lucio Golinelli, Senior Director of Service & Delivery with Sky Italia about the digital transformation they are undertaking and how it is helping to drive new profits....

There were a number of interesting case studies presented at the recent Maximize Europe event held by ServiceMax from companies across many different industry verticals.

However, one that really caught the eye was that of Sky Italia who worked closely with the field service management provider as part of an ambitious company wide digital transformation program.

As Europe’s largest Pay-TV company with dominant presence in the Pay TV sector across five European countries (UK, Ireland, Germany, Italy and Austria) Sky is a household name that resonates across the continent. However, the Pay-TV vertical has become increasingly competitive over the last few years and customer experience and satisfaction are two key differentiators in the sector.

So it was perhaps no surprise that improving customer experience through digital transformation was at the heart of the organisation’s move to dramatically change their business operating systems.

Indeed, Lucio Golinelli, a Senior Director of Service & Delivery with Sky Italia who has responsibility for both field services and the supply chain explained that the key benefits his organisation sought through the digital transformation - whereby they moved away from their traditional processes of field service delivery to a more digital centric process, were equally centred around both customer experience and financial KPIs.

However, from Golinelli’s side of the business this meant working closely with ServiceMax to find a solution that worked across their whole supply chain rather than simply adopting an off the shelf solution.

The main reason for this is that when it comes to installations, Sky Italia operate within the framework of an outsourced model.

“We have a multi level approach in that we have 400 company partners, which tend to be smaller companies or ‘entrepreneurs’ rather than large organisations - who then manage for Sky approximately 2500 installers,” Golinelli explained to me as he talked me through the challenges he faced throughout the transformation process.

“For Sky Italia, installation is not a revenue stream but a cost stream,” he continued. “Because for us the installation is just an enabler to provide the services to our customers.” So whilst traditional benefits of increased installer productivity may be a side effect of the implementation this was never an end-goal for Sky Italia.

Perhaps the biggest challenge Golinelli and his team faced was how to fully integrate their own needs - as an effectively B2B organisation dealing with the partner ecosystem, and their end users - who are a B2C market. Success here however, would provide Sky Italia with granular levels of information that can allow them to discover new up-sell opportunities.

 

In order to best achieve this Sky Italia simultaneously replaced their old FSM, CRM and marketing tools bringing them all together on one new Cloud based solution and working alongside ServiceMax to find a customised solution for their FSM tools.

Currently in the process of undertaking this transformation program, digital visibility will be built across the whole chain from Sky through to their end customers. This is vital as it means they are not just changing the way they interact with their customers, but even changing the interface with which they undertake such interactions.

Of course, the main challenge for any company that outsources its service is that they essentially need at least two flavours of the same solution. From a Global operation with a nationwide presence, Golinelli’s team will need different dashboards, KPIs and control rooms to those that the majority of their partners will require.

It has taken Sky Italia working directly with ServiceMax over two years to develop a solution that works across Sky themselves, their partners and their customers but it seems that all that effort is now beginning to reap it’s rewards.

They have already launched the initial phase of the development with almost 1,000 installers already on track - and Golinelli appears immensely proud to see his team flourishing.

“There are two aims, “Golinelli explains.

“Firstly, the real benefit of improved efficiency for us is less errors,and in particular less mistakes in administration - that has now been largely overcome and is being dramatically reduced.”

Secondly, it is also important that if Sky Italia’s new processes are to succeed, that the various new tools used in isolation.

“We moved from customised platform for CRM, custom FSM software, and a customised platform for marketing to a common cloud solution shared across all divisions,” Golinelli expands.

“Now we have all of the key operations based on the same cloud platform. This is very effective as the power of this system is the real-time exchange of information, from installer to an operator in a call centre or vice versa. We can also pick up a lot of anecdotal information from the installers and then feed that back to marketing, again in real-time.”

 

It is in this last concept that Sky Italia are truly seeing the largest benefit, the shared platform gives them a much better opportunity to upsell their products.

For example let’s say an installation is being undertaken and the installer can see there is a Manchester Utd flag. In real-time he can then check if the customer has the subscription for Sky Sports and can either try to make the upsell himself or feed that information straight back to his marketing department.

Although only mid-way through the process, the results so far have been impressive to say the least. The field service division is now responsible for generating more revenue than any other part of the business having seen a rise in the percentage of revenue generated by installers leap from 11% to 21%.

For Golinelli, the significant factor in their success so far is the easy movement of data from one business unit to the next. Meanwhile, for Sky Italia, the shift to a digital workflow is already beginning to reap it’s rewards as they move field service from a cost model to a cost + revenue model whilst customer satisfaction levels increase at the same time. Perfecto!

 

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