Transforming Telecom: Unleashing the Power of Process Orchestration and AI

As telecommunications companies look to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI), it becomes clear that AI alone does not drive true transformation. To realize its potential, AI must be woven into the essential functions that drive the business and tackle the vast amounts of data telecoms handle daily.

Process orchestration is the foundation for this orchestration, enabling insights to flow across complex workflows, driving operational efficiency, delivering exceptional customer experiences, and accelerating innovation. This blog looks at several areas where AI can improve and streamline operations, driving meaningful change and delivering clear business value in telecoms.

AI and process orchestration in telecommunications

Combining process orchestration and AI can reshape and even revolutionize telecom operations. By utilizing these technologies together, providers can manage and simplify complex operations, improve agility, and introduce innovative service solutions.

Here are a few key areas where this combination drives meaningful impact:

• Service provisioning and order fulfillment
• Customer experience
• Service demands and maintenance
• FCC filing

Service provisioning, activation, and order fulfillment

Telecom providers can benefit from process orchestration to coordinate disparate systems, automating the complex, end-to-end processes of activating and provisioning services for their customers. Service provisioning spans several systems and departments, such as order management, billing, and network configuration. These organizations can improve customer satisfaction and accelerate service delivery with process orchestration.

Some key performance indicators (KPIs) include:

• Time to activate service
• First-time activation success rate
• Order fulfillment time
• Service activation failure rate
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) with the activation process

Introducing AI into service provisioning workflows can help intelligently automate and optimize various stages of service delivery. Immediate areas of improvement include success rates, reduced errors, and even accelerated deployment of those services, helping organizations meet and exceed their existing KPIs.

Here’s how this synergy improves service provisioning:

• Workflow automation
  With AI-powered process orchestration, telecoms can automate the entire service provisioning process, minimizing the need for manual involvement. This includes activating new services, managing resources, and configuring network components. This injection of AI helps reduce operational costs by up to 30%, thanks to effective network management.
  
  All this can be done while following predefined and established business policies and rules. Process orchestration tools manage and synchronize processes across multiple systems and departments, ensuring tasks are executed correctly and handling dependencies between systems for smooth operation.
• Error reduction
  Integrating AI with process orchestration enables standardization of workflows, ensuring consistency and minimizing errors in the service provisioning process.
  
  AI-powered orchestration can quickly identify and resolve potential errors, preventing configuration issues or service disruptions. This improves the accuracy and reliability of service provisioning processes.
• Faster service activation
  AI and process orchestration can integrate to create processes that review and analyze data and historical patterns to predict possible bottlenecks and identify potential failures in service provisioning. This combined approach enables telecom providers to provide faster service activation for configuring new customers and upgrading existing ones.
  
  Process orchestration can integrate many systems involved in provisioning such as billing, CRM, inventory, and network management systems. This ensures that all necessary tasks are completed and the process is streamlined minimizing delays.

If you look at the simple example process below, you can see where AI could achieve some of the benefits mentioned in this area by the elements highlighted in yellow and green.

For example:

• AI can determine which services may require foundational elements in addition to the one requested. For example, a wire may need to be installed underground before a service can be added to a residence.
• There may also be an option to determine if other packages could be combined for a better deal or even the opportunity to upsell different services.
• AI can review whether and when a selected technician is available to provide services in that area.
• When the technician is assigned, there is an opportunity to review what is in inventory before scheduling to ensure all the required parts are ready. This is not indicated in the image above but could be handled in the subprocess around Provide Services.
• AI can generate appropriate email notifications to the customer if services have been provided or something is unavailable in the area.
• Billing can take advantage of AI to provide invoice data for the services provided and parts required to assist in invoice creation.

As you can see, AI and process orchestration integration simplifies service provisioning in telecommunications, making it more efficient, scalable, and responsive to customer needs. This results in faster, more reliable service delivery and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Customer experience

Integrating process orchestration and artificial intelligence enhances the overall experience for telecom consumers by streamlining the customer feedback process. Examples of this include real-time updates on requests, personalized interactions, and self-service options.

• Real-time tracking and updates
  Customers can submit orders for service changes, additions, and more which will initiate a request process. With AI, visibility across the fulfillment process is improved by providing real-time updates and tracking of the order status. This includes any potential delays, minimizing customer frustration, and enhancing the customer experience.
  
  AI-powered orchestration enhances provisioning efficiency, delivering faster and more accurate services to customers. This boosts customer satisfaction by minimizing wait times and service interruptions and enabling personalized service options.
• Improved customer interaction
  In addition to streamlining service provisioning for customers, AI integrated with process orchestration can improve customer interaction in other ways. AI-powered interfaces allow customers to independently activate or adjust services, improving the user experience while lightening the workload for customer support teams.
  
  Chatbots and virtual assistants powered by AI and process orchestration can manage a broad spectrum of customer inquiries, offering immediate assistance and allowing human agents to focus on more complex tasks.
  
  Process orchestration can also simplify billing workflows, ensuring timely and accurate invoicing while minimizing manual errors and improving the customer experience.
• Automation for faster results
  Using AI and process orchestration, common customer issues can be resolved automatically, reducing resolution times and enhancing the customer experience. AI can help to uncover common issues as well as offer resolution automatically.
• Behavior analysis
  Adding AI to your processes can help you gain insight into buying patterns and more. AI can analyze customer data to provide personalized product and service recommendations, enhancing customer satisfaction and driving sales growth.
  
  AI can process and analyze vast datasets to identify customer behavior patterns, preferences, and trends, providing valuable insights that drive strategic decisions and marketing efforts. With this information, portals can be tailored to predict preferences and tailor service provisioning based on customer requirements, ensuring that each user gets the most suitable plan or setup.

AI integration with process orchestration enhances the customer experience in telecommunications by enabling real-time tracking and updates, improving interactions through personalized engagement, and automating processes for faster results. Additionally, AI’s ability to analyze customer behavior helps tailor services and anticipate needs, further elevating satisfaction and streamlining service delivery. Improvements in customer service can substantially decrease costs with reductions of up to 80% in some cases.

Service demands and maintenance

By combining AI with process orchestration, telecom companies can effectively address service demands through automated workload management and optimized resource allocation for scalable operations. It also enhances maintenance by predicting potential issues and streamlining repair workflows, reducing downtime and boosting service reliability.

• Scalability and flexibility
  With the inclusion of AI, providers can monitor customer usage patterns along with network health to predict potential issues related to outages or service degradation. Armed with this information, proactive maintenance and adjustments can be made before problems are reported.
  
  AI and process orchestration can initiate troubleshooting, dispatch technicians, and adjust routing when problems occur. Additionally, this technology integration can quickly scale operations in response to demand. Ensure a smooth experience during peak times by efficiently allocating resources to fulfill customer orders without delays or bottlenecks.
• Orchestrated data collection for automated resolution
  Orchestration platforms can integrate with data collection tools, ensuring that all relevant information flows into AI systems for more informed decision-making. This integrated data can detect and automatically fix issues during the provisioning process reducing downtime and minimizing the need for human intervention. This ensures consistent service delivery across the organization.
  
  AI can quickly analyze the root cause of provisioning failures by identifying patterns in system logs or monitoring data, enabling rapid resolution. Once a fault is identified, orchestration can automatically trigger corrective actions, such as reprovisioning or rerouting services to backup resources.
• Demand forecasting
  With access to historical workflow information and customer patterns, AI can use information to predict future demands. This helps telecom companies plan, ensuring that the necessary resources and infrastructure are available for fulfilling customer orders promptly. This advanced planning includes trends in customer demand and network traffic, enabling telecom providers to pre-provision resources and optimize capacity planning.
  
  This information can also be used to proactively monitor and perform maintenance to systems. With AI and process automation, workflows can be initiated to address issues before customers are impacted by outages or other issues. This ability to proactively address issues enhances overall service quality.

AI combined with process orchestration enables automated issue resolution, accurate demand forecasting, and scalable operations. This integration drives real-time adjustments to service demands, proactive maintenance, and efficient resource allocation, ensuring seamless performance and minimizing downtime during peak usage.

The flexibility of AI-driven orchestration ensures that systems can quickly adapt to changing conditions, improving service reliability and customer satisfaction.

FCC filing

Integrating AI with process orchestration can simplify and enhance the intricate process of tariff filings with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Tariff filings are regulatory submissions outlining rates, terms, and conditions for telecommunications services. These filings require modifications to large tariff documents by modifying sections to update rates, adding new rates or services, moving sections around in the document, and then sending the updated pages to the FCC for inclusion in the original tariff with a transmittal summarizing the changed pages.

AI can help you automate and improve each step, from document preparation to ensuring compliance.

• Document analysis and preparation
  AI-driven natural language processing (NLP) can analyze extensive historical tariff data, regulatory documents, and other filings. Automatically extract key sections, terms, and clauses needed for new and annual submissions.
  
  AI models can provide the recommended content structure and clauses required on previously accepted tariffs aligning annual and new filing with regulatory requirements.
  
  AI-based tools can also leverage data collected during the filing process to generate content for tariff documents using templates aligned with regulatory standards. This approach greatly minimizes manual effort and reduces the risk of human error.
• Automation and process improvements
  Process orchestration can automate task assignments for editing, review, and approvals. Enable tracking across departments and ensure that deadlines are met and dependencies are managed.
  
  AI-powered process orchestration can optimize approval workflows by directing filings to appropriate reviewers based on factors like document complexity, urgency, and reviewer expertise, improving time management. A standard process can also help companies adhere to regulatory requirements.
• Submissions and tracking
  Once the edited tariff is reviewed and approved, AI-enabled automation can handle the tariff submission to the FCC’s system. This could include the attachment of all required documents and filing requirements.
  
  AI-powered processes can monitor responses from the FCC, detecting certain phrases or words that may indicate a need for additional information, acceptances, and rejections. This process can forward any requests to the appropriate department for handling.
  
  Over time, AI can analyze historical submission data to provide insights into response times, approval rates, and compliance issues, offering valuable feedback for enhancing future submissions.

This FCC tariff filing process likely follows a unique flow at each company but would involve many common steps. One is the location of the pages that need to be modified and the generation of the transmittal letter, for example. Process orchestration can be implemented to notify the proper individuals to make tariff edits, assist in locating tariff areas for modification, notification, and guidance for reviewing changes, and even automate the submission to the FCC.

If artificial intelligence is injected into this process, telecommunication companies can benefit from the use of assistive AI to provide guidance and assistance to humans in finding the tariffs to change, the locations for the changes to be made, and within the review process. Some of this can be noted by the green and yellow elements in the simplified example process below.

Let’s look at some ways AI can enhance the FCC tariff filing process using the simple example above:

• The filing process can invoke AI agents that can take the rate and line changes as input to locate all the affected tariffs and even note the changes that need to be made to assist the editor when making tariff modifications.
• AI can also assist in this process by looking at skills and areas of expertise to determine the proper writer to work on the tariff changes.
• As the writer is making changes, the AI results of the initial determination process can be provided and then help the writer locate and update the tariff accordingly.
• Finally, the submission process can be enhanced by AI. For example, the transmittal letter content can be provided by generative AI.

By integrating AI with process orchestration for FCC tariff filings, telecom companies can effectively handle a complex and heavily regulated process with enhanced accuracy, efficiency, and agility.

Conclusion

Combining AI with process orchestration enables telecom companies to leverage vast amounts of data across discrete steps in workflows that span multiple systems, teams, and departments, using it to make better predictions, recommendations, and decisions. Implementing AI in the telecom sector can increase revenue by nearly 10% while cutting operating costs by up to 20%.

This improves efficiency, streamlines operations, reduces errors, elevates customer experiences, and fosters innovation. Through the automation of intelligently orchestrated complex workflows, the harnessing of data-driven insights, and enhancing network performance, telecom providers can gain a competitive edge in a fast-changing industry.