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Reaching back out to the customer

Anthony Christie

CTO/CIO/Global Crossing

Published  Friday, October 16, 2009

During its corporate restructuring after emerging from bankruptcy at the end of 2003, Global Crossing implemented tighter, more centralized decision making controls, to help it get through the storm. The company became more customer centric than ever and managed to hold on to 90% of its existing clients.

Now with its finances on an even keel and seeing strong growth, Global Crossing has allowed itself to decentralize slightly its decision making, establishing a series of customer-facing units (CFUs) to manage business in EMEA, Latin America and North America.

CFU leaders have greater regional accountability for key components of the business, such as sales, pricing, service-delivery and access, which are actions that the company claims create a closer relationship with customers and provide greater visibility of their needs.

To oversee this new focus, Global Crossing called in Anthony Christie, who had been heading up the company's operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and who now holds the joint position of chief technology officer and chief information officer.

BNamericas spoke to Christie about the new structure and how the company sees the development of technology in Global Crossing's market segment over the next five years.

BNamericas: Having centralized command of the company in the post bankruptcy years, what made you decide to spread some of the responsibility again?

Christie: We had to work our way out of a tough match in early 2000. The way any company restructures itself is to buckle down to make sure that the organization’s structure is very tight with respect to how decisions are made and how cash can be spent.

One of the things we worked hard to preserve during the bankruptcy was our global value proposition and the global network, and the services platform on it. Because that was a key touchstone of the strategy, how we preserved that was to have global functions in one place - one global head of sales, one head of global operations and one head of global service delivery. And there are pros and cons to that.

We have made a couple of acquisitions, one with Impsat in Latin America and one in the UK. You’re adding scale because of organic growth, you’re adding scale because of acquisitions, and customer requirements are changing as well, all the time. You look at that global business model and you say, are there ways to optimize that to take advantage of some of the more regional or local requirements while still preserving the value proposition?

That's what we have done. We've moved towards customer facing units [CFUs] in Europe, Latin America and the rest of the world, so we have three enterprise CFUs, plus a global carrier CFU.

Inside a CFU are three key disciplines: sales and support, service delivery and access management. Those have been localized, by region, at a global level to maintain that global value proposition. And the glue, if you will, to hold the CFUs together, is my function, which is the CTIO - that is, the systems technology process and customer experience.

BNamericas: So what do the CFUs do?

Christie: The areas in which you can touch customers, you put closer to the region. The stuff you need to retain centrally to maintain your global value proposition, you hold that corporate.

We really had the technology function in a number of pockets around the company. We’d been so focused on margin management and profitability that we’ve decided to pull out IT and to elevate the technology office in order to evaluate and take a position on key technology issues 3-5 years out.

For the past several years we have been investing in customer experience. We define customer experience as the touch points in a customer’s lifecycle. From the first point, when a sales person goes out and gives a quote to a client, to the point in time when that client comes up for contract renewal. And it’s everything in between - service assurance, service management, quote management, event management, inventory management and billing management.

We’ve broken that down into key pieces and that’s the formal customer experience function that we have, and we have a series of initiatives that we are executing in a very methodical way for 2009, 2010 and 2011.

BNamericas: What have you been doing?

Christie: We have been measuring our customer satisfaction for over seven years now with an independent party and we continue to do that, not only because of the emphasis on experience but because 66- 75% of our new orders come from existing customers.

We really want to make sure they remain happy captives. So we have taken this a step further. 96% of customers were satisfied in the last survey we did in Q2, 70% were very satisfied and likely to recommend Global Crossing to another customer. And this is based on a series of different criteria, such as account management, billing, reliability and total value relative to our competition. That compares to only 55% of our competition's customers as being very satisfied.

We view customer experience as the new battleground of our industry. We hold that right up there in the top pillars of our strategy.

It is not uncommon for our c-level executives to accompany sales people on first meetings. We’ve put an analytic around that in terms of our customer experience, and broken that process down into actionable programs. A lot of these are delivered through our customer portal through which they [customers] can interact with us, they can see their network and be proactively notified in the event of an outage or an order completion and ultimately schedule work though that portal. This is all focused on breaking down that lifecycle of the customer.

BNamericas: What will this mean specifically for Latin America? I presume each CFU will have a particular focus for each market?

Christie: There are two ways to think of it. In Latam we've been fortunate with steady growth and profitability due to the business model we have, and the market there is still pretty robust. Emerging markets like Brazil and some of the smaller countries, like in Central America, are growing fast with respect to data services and IP services.

So we would expect our data center business - which is integrated into our wider area network - to continue to perform and produce well. And we would expect to continue to invest in those IT capabilities and data centers. Additionally, there are synergies between what that business was, which was largely regional in nature, and what it is becoming, which is more of a global entity. So the rest of the portfolio that Global Crossing has, we would expect that to grow as well in Latin America.

BNamericas: You said that with the technology office, the idea is to try to look into the future to see what is coming in the next 3-5 years. Where do you think things will be going?

Christie: I think that cloud computing is an area where our industry, as well as our supply chain, ie the equipment manufacturers, can provide real value for customers.

The infrastructure element, which has always been fixed costs, is now turning into more variable costs for enterprise customers. Those are strong value points, whether it's storage, security or server management capabilities.

BNamericas: What is the value of cloud computing for customers?

Christie: I think there are three or four things that make very good sense. It's the ability to make costs variable, which is important in today’s economy. It’s got to be secure as hell and I think there needs to be a scalability element. You don’t want to get to the point where you're sinking your enterprise customer because you don’t have the ability to scale.

So if you mention security, scalability and variable costs, I think that this is where telecoms operators and telecoms carriers, which provide IT services like us, want to focus on and create offers around.

Another area is in unified collaboration. That area is exploding with innovation and acquisitions. You have four or five domains that are coming together: web-based communications, video, audio and desk top collaboration in terms of software tools like sharepoint where people are collaborating in real time. So that is an area that is key to existing customers and key to our future growth as well.

Then we can’t forget that a tremendous part of our business is infrastructure-based. So the movement of layer one services from 10Gig to 40Gig to 100 Gig is very real. There is investment that needs to happen and that is what we are watching and doing.

BNamericas: Do you think you would be able to draw on any of the experiences in the UK and other parts of the world and implement them in Latin America? The data center business was something that was strong in Latin America and then applied elsewhere.

Christie: Yes, you’re right, we did export our data center methods and procedures from Latin America to Europe and we did bring in some people from Latam to build that team in London, Frankfurt, Madrid and Amsteram.

What we have imported into Latin America has been integration into our global IP network, the integration into the ASN, IP domain and the integration of Latam into our VoiP network. We also utilize a number of Microsoft tools for collaboration and for desk top productivity. So there are some tools and some infrastructure we are bringing into Latin America.

Then the final thing is the managed services aspect of a managed network that is sold in the UK. Having the same look and feel in Latam is something we will continue to develop.

ABOUT THE COMPANY:

Global Crossing is a telecommunications company that provides computer networking services worldwide. It maintains a large backbone and offers transit and peering links, VPN, leased lines, audio and video conferencing, long distance telephone, managed services, dialup, collocation and VoIP.

In January 2002, the company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Under the guidance of a new CEO and a strict restructuring program, the company came out of bankruptcy 22 months later. Global Crossing sold off non-core assets and in May 2007 completed the purchase of Impsat, which helped diversify the company's portfolio with a series of datacenters in Latin America - used for offering managed services - which is now Global Crossing's fastest growing business.

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