Telia – The birth of a new gen telco

Sonera, one of the major telcos in Finland merged with its subsidiary Tele Finland during fall 2016 and winter 2017. At the same time the newborn operator adapted the brand and name of its parent company Telia.

The main goal was to transform the old company into a new, market defining actor. This meant changing everything from the name to the branding, from the products, services and customer experience vision to the physical and digital touchpoints.

Digitalisation rewrites everything from business models to the way of working. What this means is often finding the obvious, and crystallising that into a vision – a north star that drives the whole organisation forward into the future. The transformation into Telia wasn’t just a rebrand, but a holistic change and a journey towards a genuine new generation teleoperator. During the nine months mostly everything has changed, and still we know we’re just getting started.

“The biggest impact of this project is the change in viewpoint that has permeated the whole organisation. Everyone is now working towards a vision that puts the customer in the center”,
– Vanessa Lehtinen, Head of Digital CX at Telia Finland.

Telia customer experience vision included four distinct elements:

1. A new, market defining way to see how our products and services link to the customers.
2. A new retention model, which is based on rewarding interactions in addition to transactions.
3. A new ecosystem model, and a view on how Telia becomes a true platform
4. A new way of working based on a responsive organisation model and end-to-end teams spread gradually throughout the organisation—focusing on autonomy and agility.

How it was done?

1. Making the process visible – Put the people in the center
Talking to every level from mailroom to customer care to C-level enables the business-to-customer and business-to-business silos transformation into a unified business-to-people model.

2. No client, no vendor, just us.
We took the usual client-vendor model and broke it down into high paced, singular and inclusive teams.

3. Let context define the tools.
Tools and methodologies such as co-creation, qualitative interviews, observation, data science, back casting, rapid prototyping, usability and user acceptance testing were utilised whenever needs arose.

4. Connect with the end users
A co-creation tour in three cities around Finland gave invaluable insight about values and opin- ions of the customers, and also created culture of going where the users are.

The output touched on multitude of touchpoints inside the company as well as in the customer interface, including but not limited to: The Customer Experience Vision, Organisation and the structure; Principles for the way of work- ing; HR and strategic focus areas, including design; Transformation metrics for 2017-2020; Website and ecommerce platform Telia.fi; Minun Telia / My Telia mobile app; All internal systems and interfaces; Onboarding new customers in-store;Onboarding new customers on web; Style guide for the web and mobile.