AT&T E-Commerce

AT&T Inc. is the world’s largest telecommunications company and the second largest provider of mobile telephone services.

More than 15 years ago, the multi-billion dollar telecommunications company purchased the ATG commerce platform (Oracle) to enable consumers to purchase phones and wireless plans online through the AT&T website. Over time, the company obtained new media services in addition to phones and wireless plans, but their monolithic commerce platform was not built for true omnichannel selling, nor was it designed to communicate with completely different systems. In order to support cross-platform and cross-brand selling, it became clear to the digital leadership team that they needed to modernize and migrate to a more modern, agile architecture.

CHALLENGE: Overhauling the integration strategy

The main problem is that AT&T lacked — one integrated platform that ensures customers have a common experience as they move through the sales and support process. Simple customer interactions were challenging because service agents needed data from more than 50 separate systems during a single call. This resulted in long wait times, slow time to resolution, and wide-spread customer dissatisfaction. It also hindered the company’s ability to sell relevant products and services to their customers. Multiple systems were connected via point-to-point (P2P) integrations making it difficult to access and share data.

OJECTIVES: Improving the customer experience through digital transformation

AT&T needed to modernize the digital experience for customers and service/sales team members by:

Replacing P2P connections with API-based integrations.
Aggregating customer information from 50+ systems of record into one holistic, scalable, and secure solution.
Establishing a unified, seamless view across all customer interactions.
Providing 9,000 Mobility Services and Support agents with systems powered by Salesforce and MuleSoft to help manage call interactions with 180 million customers.

SOLUTION: Connecting 50+ systems across the enterprise with APIs

AT&T selected the commercetools cloud-native, API-first commerce platform. This gave them the flexibility to upsell and cross-sell on any of their online properties, as well as the agility to build and customize microservices to meet the needs of the business.
To support its digital transformation objectives, AT&T deployed the Salesforce Customer 360 platform powered by Salesforce clouds (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud) and MuleSoft. AT&T also built a Business Sales CRM Platform on Salesforce to enable the sales team to view customer data and recommend actions or upsell opportunities.

RESULTS: Saving 2 million work hours every year with API-led connectivity

AT&T is also able to reuse the same APIs as they add new products. So far AT&T has built 30+ reusable integrations with 75% reuse. For customer accounts, products, billing and payments, orders, Salesforce case creation, Salesforce data extraction, and data sync with Einstein Analytics.

MuleSoft API-led connectivity has streamlined and fortified customer support across all channels at AT&T. By integrating systems via APIs instead of P2P connections, and connecting Salesforce to multiple legacy systems, AT&T reduced the time it takes service reps to access customer data, enabling them to provide a better customer experience. AT&T also accelerated time to market for new products. While it previously took a year to onboard a new product, now it takes 6 weeks thanks to MuleSoft and API reuse. Each time AT&T introduces a new product, the company is able to reuse the APIs that were already built. Currently, AT&T offers 120 different products that have been built with the support of API-based integration.

These new capabilities decreased the number of customer calls and delivered shorter call times, allowing AT&T to reduce staff and enabling the company to predict USD 1.5 million/quarter in savings just in their call centers. And, while it took hundreds of developers to build, replicate and test offers across disparate systems on their monolithic platform, the commercetools platform is able to push updates out across all systems automatically and seamlessly, using 75% less manpower.

Our goal is to keep improving the platform to help them deliver a better, more integrated customer experience across all touchpoints. We capture experience signals which are created via customer interactions in person, digital, and IoT and applies their AI technology to deliver predictive insights. Companies can use this information to quickly create action plans aimed at better serving their customers.