How Telstra Helped a Country Stay Connected in 2020 | Leading Through Change | Salesforce

Rainbow.

What do you do when you've got a big challenge ahead of you? Something like a big project at work or one of those house projects like the wardrobe that hasn't been gone through for years or that wallpaper in the second bedroom that you can't stand looking at. If you're anything like me, you procrastinate and you leave it to the last minute, am I right? But if you're the country's biggest communications company with not one but two crisis, well, you just have no choice. You have to face the challenge. Good morning, everyone. I'm Jess O'Reilly, and welcome to another one of our live weekly conversations as part of our Leading Through Change series. This is a chance for you to hear from leaders who are doing their best to to get through these challenging times while supporting their communities. Now, before I hand it over to my colleague Gavin, I want to give you a bit of a flavor for what we've got coming in the next hour. Now, Gavin will be interviewing Andy Penn of Telstra to discuss how they united their company around their customers with the Salesforce customer360 number one CRM. We're then going to pass to Rowena who's going to take us through a really exciting demo highlighting how our customers use service cloud and experience cloud to empower their employees to provide a great experience for their customers, getting closer to that single source of truth. And then after that, we'll be treated to a really special conversation and musical performance by the Black Panthers. I'm really excited. But before we begin, I want to make sure you check out Leading Through Change on the360blog for more information on Leading Through Change trailblazers our customers and really getting to understand how they use the Salesforce tools and gain a load of benefits. Now, as we do on every Leading Through Change series, we want to help those who need it most. Millions of people already rely on United Nations World Food Program for the food they need to survive. And COVID 19 is making conditions even worse. This pandemic could double the number of people suffering from severe hunger by the end of the year. So to help prevent a hunger pandemic, the World Food Program is scaling up to reach 138 million people across 83 countries. It's clear they need our help. So if you can, please head to salesforce.com wfp and join us. Ensuring that the world's most vulnerable people have enough to eat during this really critical time. Once again, salesforce.com WFP now it's my pleasure to kick over to that conversation that Gavin had with Andy just the other day. I really hope you enjoy it.

Thank you so much, Jess. And thank you everyone for joining us. Leading Through Change is all about how we can learn from each other and lead through these challenging times. 2020 was a disruptive year around the globe for every industry, every business, and I expect every one of us. Our guest today has been focused on how to turn disruption into positive change for his customers, his company and the communities they serve. Andy Penn is the CEO of Telstra, Australia's largest communications provider. In 2020, Telstra helped around 2.6 million customers stay connected. During COVID 19, the company reached all time high levels of employee engagement. They partnered with five major universities in Australia to build new skills for the future and they certified as carbon neutral across their operations. Telstra is an incredible Salesforce customer and Andy Penn is an incredible leader and visionary. Andy, thank you for joining us and welcome.

Thanks Gary. Great to be with you.

I have to say, Andy, if Telstra achieved all that in a year punctuated by COVID 19 and a bushfire crisis in Australia as well, just think what you could do in 2021.

Well, 2021's certainly a very pivotal year for us because we're midway through this very significant transformation journey that we've been on prior to COVID 19 affecting us all. And it's really been about transforming the company through completely re platforming our digital environment and with the help of Salesforce as well as really taking a leadership position in 5G. And in fact, we just went through 50% 5G coverage and by the end of this year we will be at more than 75% population coverage and we'll be a long way through the migration of our customer base to this new digital environment, which is going to create huge opportunities to transform the experience that we provide them.

I want to spend some time talking about these challenges and how you see things evolving as we go forward. But let's start on a personal note. Tell us about your personal journey.

Look, I think last year for me was unusual and unique in the sense that we've all been involved in various crises over the years. Particularly when you're running a telco, as you, you can attest, Gavin. Whether it's a bushfire or a flood or a cyclone, an outage, there's always something happening. So we're pretty adept to responding in a crisis. But it's the first time I've been through a crisis where I've been personally impacted and that's, I think the Unique thing about COVID is that every one of us has got a personal story. We've had family affected, whether it's family overseas that we haven't been able to see, or family that have actually, unfortunately had a challenge with the, with the pandemic. But, you know, it's one of the things I found last year that it did is it built a lot of empathy and intimacy with our people and with our colleagues. And I felt that it brought a newfound humanity into doing business and working. And that's one of the things I hope that we can take with us into the future.

The challenges of 2020 underscored the importance of connectivity in our society, whether that's in education or healthcare or work, or even within our families. That's driving a massive focus on the digital imperative. How do you see this digital transformation accelerating and what impact do you anticipate that having on your customers?

Well, I think one of the remarkable things about 2020 was just how seamlessly the world was able to move to working virtually. I know in our case, we literally moved 25,000 people to working from home over the space of a weekend. Now, if you imagine if that happened 10 years ago, the connectivity that existed 10 years ago would just not have been able to support the fact that we have all worked virtually. And so I think that's been incredibly exciting. And I think it's highlighted the importance of that connectivity, but it's also highlighted the importance of building that into the future. And so I think one of the key challenges and opportunities for governments and for companies globally, telcos is painting a vision for the telecommunications networks of the future which are going to fuel the growth of the digital economy. Because the digital economy is ultimately, I think, for many, many different countries, it's the opportunity for a fast track out of the financial implications of COVID Well.

Let'S widen our lens on that a little bit. Economists talk about V shaped recovery from COVID or a W shaped recovery, but I'm keen to understand more about your belief in a D shaped recovery. So what's D?

Well, the D stands for digital because if you think about what happened in the last period of time, one of the remarkable things is that we saw digital adoption increase more probably in the space of a few months than we had done in a space of five years. And the one thing that that says to me is that the barrier previously wasn't the technology, because if it was the technology, we would not have been able to build it that quickly to enable that level of adoption. And in telstra's case, we went from 40% digital engagement to more than 75% literally within the space of a few months. And I believe it's that digital economy that is going to enable companies to be successful in the future. And so I think the thing that will distinguish between the companies and the countries that are successful in the recovery from COVID is their ability to really accelerate the digitization of their businesses and their economies.

Let's go a little deeper on this. The world has fundamentally changed and we're not going back to the way things were. As we enter this period of adaptation, what will be the new normal? One thing is clear, I think when we look at that digitalization in all its forms will be more important than ever. How do you see businesses, governments and communities coming together on this?

Look, I think that one of the great paradoxes of our time is that we need to continue to make our strategic decisions with a focus on the long term, but that our ways of working decisions much more in the moment to be spontaneous. Because the reality is, as you said, I think many of us got to the end of 2020 looking at Christmas as being the finishing line, hoping that 2021 was going to be different and easier. And I don't think 2021 is necessarily going to be certainly not going to be any clearer and it's certainly not going to be some nice neat glide path back to normal. So we have to be flexible and spontaneous in terms of particularly how we work, because I think we're going to see rolling natures of restrictions depending on how this pandemic plays out and how vaccines make a difference. And I think, therefore, working with our people, working with government, working with other businesses to ensure maximum flexibility to how we can keep businesses and the economy going in that environment of a lack of certainty about what restrictions may be in place next. And again, it is all underpinned by digital enablement effectively.

Now, Telstra and Salesforce share a belief that business is the greatest platform for change. It's that we have a leadership role to play for all of our stakeholders around important social issues. That's in global issues like sustainability and personal issues like parental leave. How do you approach this responsibility to your stakeholders?

Look, I think, Gavin, we're great advocates of doing business responsibly and particularly for a company like Telstra, which is so deeply embedded in every single community in the country providing such a critical service, we cannot remove ourselves from everything that is going on in those communities. And so we very much think that it is only where all of our stakeholders win, whether it's our people, our customers, the communities in which we operate, and also of course, our shareholders. It is only when all of us win that everybody wins overall. And I think therefore responsible business has changed over the last two decades and the level of expectation on companies from the communities in which they operate has transformed, as you mentioned, in areas such as the environment, in areas such as cybersecurity, in areas such as equality, diversity, inclusion. And of course one of the things that happens when we see great strides forward in new digital technologies, it's often those that can least afford to be left behind that are. So I think one of the key things that we all have a responsibility for is to make sure that we take the whole of society forward at the same time, which means we need to focus on inclusion.

Lots of great insights there, Andy. We really appreciate your time and more importantly, your partnership with Salesforce. Can't wait to see where our journey together takes us from here.

Thank you.

Okay Jess, back to you.

Wow, what a great conversation. Now I'm excited to hand off to Rowena who's prepared a demo of on how Salesforce Service Cloud and Experience cloud can help your company to empower your employees to serve your customers even better. Over to you Rowena.

Thanks Jess. So you've just heard from Andy and Gavin how important connectivity is now and in the future to have that digital first approach to continue to surprise and delight your customers. For telcos like Telstra, this has meant an organizational wide digital transformation, upgrading business technology and reorienting their whole approach around the customer. All on the Salesforce Customer 360. Salesforce Customer 360 allows organizations like Telstra to bring together a single view of their customer across sales, service and marketing interactions. Integrating all of their digital channels such as web chat and messaging as well as native cloud telephony. For Telstra's customers, this means it becomes effortless. Effortless to connect and engage with them on on a variety of channels from anywhere. So let's see how organizations like Telstra are doing this. I'd like to introduce you to Jenny Smith. Jenny is a long standing customer of trailblazer Communications. In fact, she has her Internet mobile phone and her family's mobile plans all with trailblazer Communications. Like most of us, Jenny has been working from home as a result of the COVID pandemic and her home Internet and mobile telecommunications are very important for her to run her business business, keep in contact with her team and more importantly ensure that her kids are also homeschooling. Online successfully. So today has not been a great day for Jenny. Her Wi fi keeps dropping out while she's preparing for a presentation she has to give in just a few hours and her kids are trying to participate in their lessons online. Jenny goes to the Trailblazer Communications website as she knows they have some great self service community to see if she can fix the problem herself. She searches for Wi Fi not working and this brings up the knowledge articles that allows Jenny to self serve. You can see here that there are a number of articles for her to work through and I'm going to double click on this one for troubleshooting Wi fi. What's great about this is Jenny can try several ideas herself from downloading a dashboard app from the Trailblazer Communications to going through some detailed diagnostic. It turns out in this particular case the recommendation is to contact support so an assisted support agent can continue to assist Jenny. Jenny can phone or engage in a number of different channels and one of those is built right into the self service community. It's the ability to chat with an expert. So Jenny clicks on this and because she's authenticated into the community it already knows who she is and she can simply type in that she has a Wi fi issue and start chatting. And this is going to connect her to an assisted service agent. Now let's jump to what the agent sees. This is Lightning Service Console. As an agent I can make myself available for all types of work across digital and voice channels. I'm available for chat and I can see that Jenny's chat has come through to me for pick up. Because Jenny is authenticated on the Trailblazer communicator as it opens up the chat. It also brings up Jenny's full account profile with the Salesforce Customer360. The agent can see all of Jenny's history information in a single view. No more switching tabs, browsers or systems. The agent can see at a glance all the different spilled and subscription services that Jenny has to make it simple and easy to change. Those key indicators on the left hand side of the screen also alert me to Jenny's various interests and preferences. And this is really important for delivering a personalised service. On the right hand side I can see historical interactions that Jenny has had with us. All of the orders she's placed, the cases she's raised and the actions she's taken with us. In the middle of this page I can see Einstein Salesforce's artificial intelligence which is built right into the customer360 and it's recommending the next best offer which is relevant for Jenny. If we jump to the case that's been open for Jenny's Wi Fi issue, we can do so fully informed of her background and her experience. The case is presenting us with a customer centric lifecycle view which allows us to bring together multiple interactions across chat, email and phone calls into a single case to resolve Jenny's Wi Fi issues. Jenny doesn't need to repeat herself every time she engages with us, so I'm able to access all the same knowledge base that Jenny did online. I can see the knowledge base article she's already viewed. As her agent, I can offer her smarter, faster and more efficient services, including leveraging Einstein's Next best actions. To resolve Jenny's issue, I recommend her start with a WI Fi booster. This is Einstein at work. The agent lets Jenny know the location of her closest trailblazer communication store to buy and install a WI Fi booster so she can have it up and running before her important presentation later today. To recap, you've seen how Salesforce is providing a single source of truth to trailblazer Communications with experience, Cloud service, Cloud knowledge and Einstein Next Best offer. You can also use the full power of customer360 to deliver wow to your customers, and we encourage you to discover more@salesforce.com and with that, I'm going to hand back to you, Jessica.

Thanks, Rowena. If you'd like to hear more about Telstra's transformation or other stories from our Anz Trailblazers, please join us online for Salesforce live ANZ from March 24.