IOH Digital Transformation Delivers Healthy Dividends

The merger formed Indosat Oredoo Hutchison (IOH), the second largest Indonesian telecom operator, serving over 100 million subscribers across 51,000 physical sites in 17,500 islands.  Post-merger accomplishments include the integration of networks, site consolidation, and implementation of AI and digital tools to drive operational efficiencies and enhance customer experience.

In a recent interview with Telecoms.com, Luthfi Auzan, IOH vice president and head of Strategic Operations & Analytics, said the company made great strides over a year and a half toward its digital transformation goals. “In this kind of digital transformation, our aspiration and ambition is to make a zero-touch operation,” he said. “This zero-touch operation is not something built overnight.”

IOH enlisted the help of partner Huawei to remove site duplication, optimize locations, and consolidate assets. For site optimization, IOH leveraged AI to digitally survey 13,000 locations. The process took 40 days, about a third less than without AI, accelerating the tasks associated with design, planning and deployment.

Three Areas of Focus

Auzan said IOH has focused its digitalization on three areas – the Network Operations Center (NOC), field service operations, and network and design optimization.

In the NOC, the company automated a system to query alarms and ticket dispatching. Leveraging digital tools, the system can sift through a high volume of alarms to prioritize those that need immediate attention and discard the ones requiring no action. “This really makes our operation much more efficient and creates a better customer experience,” he said.

In field service operations, Auzan said IOH has substantially improved the way it dispatches service tickets to technicians. “Now, with digital transformation, they are getting a ticket dispatched in a very efficient way. And on that ticket, they get a very clear statement of what they need to do, and when to escalate it.” The approach accelerates issue resolution and enhances customer experience, he said.

The third area of focus – network design and implementation – evolves around implementation of a Service Operations Center, Auzan said. “We are optimizing the network based on the service, not anymore based on the network KPI.”

Establishing KPIs to measure service rather than network performance shifts the focus from network metrics to service performance indicators, such as the effectiveness of technicians and service call length.

AI-driven Enhancements

AI has played a pivotal focus in sharpening IOH’s focus on service quality. Auzan said IOH is using AI algorithms that measure customer satisfaction to prevent customer churn. For instance, customer experience data from users traveling between their offices and home helps to forecast churn.

“If we know that, we can avoid that churn so we can be able to retain this kind of user better and better. Nowadays we know that the telecommunications business is not really growing very big anymore. It is quite saturated,” Auzan said. As a result, carriers have to focus more on driving value and customer retention.

Another AI use case involves the creation of a “Chat Ops. Instead of sifting through extensive libraries and databases, technicians now can find information to queries quickly through chat. “They just simply write it on the chat conversation and some intelligent helper gives them an answer about any network issues.”

Technicians can pinpoint specific network issues, their root causes, and how to solve them. As a result, technicians become more efficient and complete repairs faster. Auzan said

AI, the company says, allows IOH to place QoE at the core of its operations with end-to-end optimization of its wireless, transport, core and CDN domains. The company’s QoE rating has increased to 91 from 85. In the future, IOH plans to leverage spatio-temporal digital twin technology and AI to proactively identify dissatisfied customers and provide root causes and suggestions.

Reaping the Benefits

Thanks to the changes completed so far, IOH says its TTM decreased by 30% and user satisfaction grew by 6.7%. At the same time, the customer base and network traffic grew 27% and 22%, respectively, while end-to-end latency decreased by 36%.

IOH says its service has become more reliable across the board. Major incidents have decreased by 82% traffic loss by 8.4%. The partnership with Huawei has played a significant role, as the companies have collaborated on managed services to build a service-oriented approach leveraging AI for end-to-end fault remediation automation and proactive service impact mitigation. Future plans call for using an AI co-pilot to digitalize field support operations, improve fault rectification and further shorten MTTR.