Optus scopes GenAI additions to ServiceNow

Optus is starting to deploy a telecommunications industry-specific module of ServiceNow that it hopes will help it serve its business-to-business (B2B) customers better.

Speaking at a ServiceNow World Forum Optus director for digital technology Brendon Williamson said the telco has "just embarked on a TSM journey".

TSM stands for telecommunications service management and is designed "to deliver proactive care and maximise ... quality-of-service," according to ServiceNow documentation.

One of the components of TSM is Service Bridge, which Optus intends to use to create integrations between its own ServiceNow instance and those of its major B2B customers.

Service Bridge is also promoted as a way that product and service catalogues can be published and shared with customers.

"I'm most excited about Service Bridge and rolling that out to our customers quite aggressively, connecting and integrating to as many of those [customers' ServiceNow environments] as possible," Williamson said.

He said Optus had previously created its own integrations so that its biggest business and government customers knew what was happening with their service tickets.

"We've traditionally built our own, we call them ATEs -automated ticket exchange - API-based integrations to our customers, the bigger FSI [banking] customers and federal government customers, but Service Bridge can give us [a] very quick way to do," Williamson said.

Outside of adopting TSM, Optus is also starting to think about use cases for the generative AI capabilities built into the recent 'Vancouver' release of ServiceNow.

The release became generally available on September 20.

"With 'Vancouver' coming out, the real opportunity is to start thinking about what we can do with Gen AI - how we can overlay GenAI and really enable our agents on the frontlines to give an even more elevated experience with a 'lighter touch', helping elevate them up the value chain so they can focus on what's more important to the customer and not doing the heavy lifting when they really don't need to," Williamson said.

Optus has used ServiceNow to manage ticketing and support in its B2B managed services operations for about a decade.

It originally had an on-premises instance but switched to the cloud-based Now platform to resolve some challenges with supporting its managed services customers, and to make upgrades to the platform itself easier in future.

The switch from on-premises to cloud took a year-and-a-half, because the on-premises version was heavily customised, and Optus also took time to redesign its support processes.

Williamson said a number of enhancements had continued to be made with the Now platform over the years, culminating in the latest works around TSM and - into the future - Gen AI.

He said that around 55 percent of customer interactions via Optus' Now platform are "zero-touch" and fully automated; some of these cover orders for new handsets, provisioning of new SIMs and enrolment of those new services in mobile management and security tools.

“We've seen a lot of value by driving these processes and these process transformation into the platform and working very closely with our partner Infosys as well on that journey. It really set us up for the future.”