SKY Italia
            

SKY Group Limited was founded in 1988 and operates in most of Western Europe, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Vatican City and San Marino. The group has more than 30,000 employees. SKY Italia S.r.l. is the Italian satellite television platform owned by the American media conglomerate Comcast.

The media industry has probably been disrupted the most by digitalization. The switch to streaming, subscription services and on-demand TV has redefined viewing preferences, purchasing habits and—with it—the entire customer journey. Credit to it, SKY Italia has more than kept up. In 2018 it launched a series of subscription-based terrestrial channels and in 2020—Sky Wifi—its ultra-broadband service. But the pace of change hasn’t slowed since. If anything, with its goal to be net zero carbon in 2030 and pressure to deliver on a connected customer experience—it’s even more intense.

“If you’re a customer who wants to purchase a TV package,” Customer Digital Transformation Director explains, “you purchase the product on the website or app, and you’re done. But for us, that’s just a first step that kicks off a number of internal processes. We need to provide to our customer the best and fast experience ever to get their service up and running. In the last 3 years we faced a challenging business transformation where we launched different new products and partnerships with the main streaming services. We needed agility and flexibility to be able to respond in time to the new challenges. ARIS was the enabling technology to shorten the time to market of these new products, from business requisition to implementation.”

As one of the premier television platforms in Europe, customer experience is top priority for SKY Italia. Some customers were signing up for packages online and were having to wait weeks for setup and installation, which was unacceptable given their commitment to driving great customer experiences. But typical of any large organization, the response to this problem was siloed, with a lack of communication between departments. And the marketing department, who were working on the customer journey, were focused on UI design.

“We needed our processes to be as seamless as the user experience” says Head of Digital Process and Experience Design, “so establishing a standardized customer journey framework became our ultimate goal. The issue, though, was where the company should start.” SKY Italia had different teams, using different processes, with different views—all striving to deliver on different metrics and KPIs. There were 15-20 types of customer journey schemas, meaning that everyone was designing their own processes often using different schemas and reinventing the wheel. Sky Italia needed a business process platform which could be centrally governed but easily used by everyone across the business for agile process management.

BPM to the rescue

Working together with partner GN Techonomy, SKY Italia set to work searching for the right tool for the job. After scouting different ones, even those already being used in-house, they chose ARIS. “It was the only platform where it was possible to define a customized methodology, and we used this capability to build a totally new model for the customer journey in line SKY Italia’s own established structures, which really made it stand above the other options,” Dario Ambroggi, GN Technology says. “The team also appreciated features like built-in customer journey mapping and ARIS connect—which allowed them to share process information in an easy-to-understand way.” An additional challenge was the number of internal tools still being used. “But ARIS makes it possible to unify these tools under a single process framework—so it could serve as a central point straddling our process architecture.”

The key to an improved customer experience

Even though the process management tool is still being rolled out, the process management team already has 50 designers and provides viewing access to over 300 stakeholders. New process implementation and customer journey mapping is already around 30% faster. What’s more, the shared language and tool methodology have much improved communication between departments.

Strategically, it’s easy to generate reports and analyze information that used to be quite difficult to collect. This makes it simpler to provide top management with key business insights. Moreover, the central process repository means that changes can be easily implemented company-wide, giving SKY Italia more flexibility and agility to react to changes in the market and keep up with the competition. This has already translated into faster service and a better customer experience.

When in doubt, start with processes!

For SKY Italia, establishing a common process culture has eased communication between departments and enabled a common language around the customer journey. Based on these unified foundations, ARIS ensures the company can reliably scale, enter new markets, and innovate around the customer experience. SKY Italia has been so pleased with the results that ARIS is now used by the IT department as the tool governing its system architecture. And it’s very likely it will even become the single point of truth within the SKY organization, after all: “If I want to watch my team play football on Saturday and I complete my order on Tuesday, I don’t expect to miss my game! ARIS powers a customer journey that can be trusted.”