M1 ditches 70% of legacy systems in cloud transformation drive

Singapore telco M1 expects to switch off 70% of its legacy telco systems by the end of this year in its multi-year digital transformation journey, according to CEO Manjot Singh Mann.

Speaking on the sidelines of Dreamforce 2024 in San Francisco, Mann said M1 has migrated all its post-paid, pre-paid and fibre broadband customers to new cloud-based telco systems, enabling it to deliver products and services to customers in a personalised manner.

He added that 30% of the company’s legacy systems will still be in use for some corporate applications, but those are also expected to be decommissioned once the company completes its transition to cloud.

Besides moving its legacy telco systems to cloud, M1 has also adopted the Salesforce platform to power its sales, customer service and marketing functions. This includes a sales console that is being used by frontline staff at its stores.

“Our objective is to make sure that we can provide personalised services to customers as much as we can, and all of that is coming through now because of the effort we put in to make sure all the services of the Salesforce platform are being used,” said Mann.

Feeding M1’s Salesforce deployment is data from the company’s Snowflake data lake that consolidates data from nearly 200 databases.

“That’s become very handy, because with the Salesforce ecosystem on top of that, along with martech [marketing technology] tools and applications, we’re getting closer to the consumer,” he said.

Over-dependence on agents and AI to deliver things for you and trying to take the human factor out of it would be a wrong thing to do and we have to be careful about that

Mann said the moves have helped to stem the decline of average revenue per user, a key business metric for telcos, in what he described as a brutal telco market with four mobile network operators and 10 mobile virtual network operators vying for business in a country of 5.5 million people.

M1’s subscriber churn rate has also declined, even as it reduced the number of physical stores from over 20 to just eight and focused on enabling customer self-service through its mobile app. “Our call centre costs have also gone down dramatically because we’ve been able to digitise a lot of customer interactions,” said Mann.

However, things were not all smooth sailing. He said the first iteration of the sales console “wasn’t really great, and we had to redo and relaunch it, but those are the vagaries of transformation”.

“You can’t get away from all those, but now the efficiency, the time taken to sell, the number of services we can sell, how personalised we can get to the consumer, are now showing,” said Mann.

On the role of artificial intelligence (AI) agents, which Salesforce has been pitching all week at Dreamforce, he said that while they are powerful tools that will only get better, he cautioned against taking the view that AI can take over the human elements of customer interactions.

“There is a certain amount of intellect, emotional and decency quotient that people bring, and machines will take a lot of time to get there,” he said. “Over-dependence on agents and AI to deliver things for you and trying to take the human factor out of it would be a wrong thing to do, and we have to be careful about that.”