Optus Wholesale is embracing Digital Everywhere

By Wholesale

At Optus Wholesale in recent years we have been quietly evolving our digital thinking and approach so we can better serve our customers with technology.

We recently sat down with Michael Raines, Senior Manager, Digital Services in Optus Wholesale to get a better sense of where Optus Wholesale is at on its digital journey and to gain some insight on where we are headed in the future.

Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional background

I am a ‘tech head’ who is customer-centric and digitally led at work and in my approach to life. I am a proud father to a 2 year-old girl and a loving husband to my wife of 10 years. I am originally a Melbournite who followed my father around Australia throughout his 30 years of service in the Australian Armed Forces, so as a family we got to enjoy and see plenty of our Great Southern Land.

My professional career in telco spans over 12 years and has mostly been with Optus. After starting in Customer Service, I progressed to more senior technical, project management and leadership roles with extensive involvement and learning in emerging technologies and systems, with particular focus on the transformation of old to new. Fast forward 5 years and I took up an opportunity in Optus Wholesale in a Dev Ops team, which ended up being a foundation stone for Digital in Optus Wholesale, and collectively we have grown to become an end to end digital delivery team.

What’s your current role in Optus?

My current role is Senior Manager, Digital Services. My job is all about delivering key transformational business outcomes and maintenance activities across Optus Wholesale’s strategic platforms and digital solutions.

I own and provide strategic direction for the Wholesale Platforms and Automation portfolio, which covers things like Robotic Process Automation, Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence, and complex digital transformation programs, to deliver on business plan outcomes, and at the same time, to enhance customer experience. In a nutshell, my team and I play a key role in enabling Digital in Optus Wholesale.

Why is your role important in Optus Wholesale?

Optus Wholesale has been increasingly active in Digital over the last couple of years. With that foundation, there’s an amazing opportunity to shape how Optus Wholesale does business going forward and how Digital supports everything we do.

That’s where I come in; I get the opportunity to listen to and evaluate ideas from customers and internal stakeholders. My job is to ‘sculpt’ a digital strategy that not only gives us great value today, but also makes us incredibly easy to do business with in the future, and also delivers an exceptional customer experience.

This ‘sculpting’ exercise takes into consideration the journey mapping of our product portfolio, and the roadmap for key technology types such as APIs, Portals, and Artificial Intelligence, and finally gives us an opportunity to review our internal architecture and move towards a digitally-enabled and governed ecosystem.  The mantra is very much “Digital Everywhere”.

What has Optus Wholesale done in the Digital space so far?

2021 marks the fourth phase in our aspirational vision to fundamentally transform the way Optus Wholesale uses Digital, going well beyond a “Minimum Viable Product”.

We try to live and breathe a continuous improvement mindset in Wholesale and every year we aspire to exceed the previous year’s deliverables and outcomes. We see this reflected in customer sentiment and verbatims, which has resulted in positive industry recognition amongst our competitors, a continued uplift in internal employee engagement, and in the expedited execution of our digital strategy.

A key focus to date has been on improving our internal efficiency and performance. This has created a great foundation for capability moving forward and resulted in a strong digital mindset that we are now applying in a collaborative manner with our customers.

 Prime examples of what we have done so far are the recent enhancements to our Portal capability - “My Wholesale Portal”, which gives customers greater visibility and control over their Wholesale products and services; the API capability which we continue to expose to customers within a digital hub to give them faster updates and simpler ordering solutions, as well as the rollout of an Optus- first attended robot called “AVA” – “Attended Virtual Agent” to further reduce manual effort and provide a richer experience for our front line Fixed delivery specialists to serve our customers better.

What’s the plan for Digital going forward?

We are aligning and consolidating our digital efforts in Wholesale into a single unit called Digital Services to ensure optimum digital outcomes. We will also continue to execute on our highly ambitious pipeline of specific projects to further streamline customer touchpoints, expand our automation and API capabilities, enhance customer functionality and provide more insight to customers.

In parallel we are also focused on creating our longer-term digital vision for the Wholesale business over the next 3 years. It’s grounded in a few key principles: utilising richer data and applying modelling so that we can we trend behaviours to develop proactive solutions that specifically benefit our customers, maturing a strong digital operations methodology with more integration of legacy and strategic product and service offerings, and further embracing Agile frameworks.

As we refine our longer-term vision over the coming 12 months, we will also continue to share more information with our customers about our approach and where we are heading in the future.  

How will this benefit our customers?

Our vision is all about our customers. It pivots around continuing to embrace our customers’ requirements and delivering game-changing digital solutions that benefit them.

And how do we do that? A critical element is using on-going customer feedback through strong engagement and relationships, and that includes regular forums to align on goals and performance and providing visibility of our roadmap.

We want to enable our customers to be more operationally efficient so that they can better serve their customers and ultimately so that they can succeed and grow in what is an ever changing and highly competitive market.

To close, what keeps you getting out of bed in the morning?

What motivates me can be condensed into a single quote from someone I admire, Elon Musk: “If you are not progressing, you are regressing. Keep moving forward”.

For me this is a really powerful statement, to which I can relate Optus Wholesale and its Digital transformation journey. In Wholesale, we are actively encouraged to think ‘out of the box’ and to always be exploring bigger and better things; this mindset permeates all levels of management and is truly empowering; it’s an environment I love, and in which I can absolutely thrive and grow. Right now, I wouldn’t work anywhere else.