Sure transforms customer experience with Exos-Systems and Microsoft Azure

Introduction

Sure, a telecommunications service provider operating across the UK Crown Dependencies of Guernsey, Jersey, and the Isle of Man—as well as several British Overseas Territories like Ascension, St. Helena, the Falkland Islands, and Diego Garcia—has a mission of "connecting our island communities for a better future." Serving such geographically diverse and remote locations presents unique challenges in delivering modern, efficient, and customer-centric telecom services.

Cyrille Joffre, Chief Operating Officer at Sure, recognized the limitations of their existing infrastructure. "With a legacy and traditional 121 backend systems and batch integration, we knew we would not be able to cope with rapid demand to evolve our offerings as well as to meet customer digital lifestyle expectations," he says. The company's outdated systems hindered its ability to offer seamless customer experiences and adapt to the fast-paced changes in the telecom industry. To solve this problem, they consulted Exos-Systems, and together turned to Microsoft solutions.

Partnering with Exos-Systems and leveraging Microsoft technologies

To address these challenges, Sure collaborated with Exos-Systems, a specialist in telecommunications solutions focused on automating business and billing processes. Andrew Murphy, co-founder of Exos-Systems, emphasizes the importance of a robust technical foundation: "You need to be able to produce something that is not only technically viable but truly unleashes your organization and allows you to provide the high-quality online journeys that your customers expect."

A primary objective was to eliminate the numerous point-to-point interfaces complicating Sure's systems. "The main challenge that we were looking at was eliminating a lot of the point-to-point interfaces that Sure had. One of the key goals of this project was to have everything coming through a common microservices layer," Andrew explains. By adopting this architecture, Sure could integrate disparate systems and streamline operations.

Cyrille notes the effectiveness of this integration: "With Microsoft and Exos-Systems helping us integrating key yet disparate systems of the back office, existing or new customers can efficiently modify or add services in a single interaction." This overhaul meant that customers could manage their services more efficiently, and as needed, which meant a better overall experience.

Sure leveraged out-of-the-box Microsoft solutions and TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) features and then tailored the functionality and the user experience to their unique customer base. Key Microsoft services utilized included Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure API Management. "Some of the key services include Azure Kubernetes Service, which, for instance, provides seamless deployment for identity and access management leveraging our Azure Active Directory stack.” Cyrille continues: “We also find Azure API Management easy to use to abstract some of the complexity from API consumers, as well as protect their consumption as we can control access at an IP addresses level.”

Andrew highlights how this approach benefits both the company and its customers: "This allows you to abstract the business process, and it means that if you want to change the underlying technology at any point, it's much easier to do so. You’re not having to stitch together a whole new series of point-to-point integrations."

Enhanced customer experience and operational efficiency

The collaboration led to significant improvements in customer experience and operational efficiency. By initially focusing on "boosters" like data on-net or roaming services, Sure saw remarkable adoption rates. "To gain momentum, we initially focused on boosters, whether data on-net or roaming. The results were clear and delivered a significant take-up now respectively at 93% and 60% online transactions," Cyrille reports.

Customers now have access to a modern self-care environment, allowing them to manage their services proactively. "When issues with their service arise, this can also be managed via a modern self-care environment," Cyrille adds. This shift not only improves customer satisfaction but also reduces the workload on Sure's technical team. Andrew explains it simply: "It's allowing the customer to do the things they increasingly expect to be able to do, and all of that happens without technical team members on the Sure side getting bogged down with laborious manual tasks."

The microservices architecture enables Sure to offer a highly tailored customer journey. "The Microsoft-based solution Exos-Systems developed allows Sure," Andrew explains, "to either just discretely call those individual microservices or create a wrapper whereby you're executing a series of interactions and processes. Effectively, it produces a business logic that allows you to really customize the customer experience journey—a very highly tailored journey, without the expense of undertaking wholesale platform upgrade or replacement."

Beyond operational improvements, the partnership fostered a culture of innovation within Sure. "Internally, the technical challenges we cope with bring very valuable intellectual and learning experiences, which in turn improve the level of innovative communications and technology solutions we deploy for our customers," says Cyrille. 

An example of this is the adoption of Terraform, an open-source Infrastructure-as-Code tool. "A year ago, I asked our senior architect what new tech he was excited about and his response was Terraform. Today, we are building an Azure Stack Hub solution which we found Terraform is a key foundation for," Cyrille shares. This adoption underscores Sure's commitment to leveraging cutting-edge technologies to enhance service delivery.

Conclusion

Sure's partnership with Exos-Systems and the strategic implementation of Microsoft technologies have successfully transformed their customer journey and operational efficiency. By integrating disparate systems into a unified microservices architecture and embracing modern tools like Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure API Management, Sure has positioned itself to meet and exceed customer expectations in the digital age.

"Exos-Systems’ experience was very valuable in steering the early development and effectively supporting Sure in deploying the solution," acknowledges Cyrille. The collaboration exemplifies how leveraging advanced technologies and expert partnerships can drive significant improvements in service delivery and customer satisfaction, truly connecting island communities for a better future.