Heads-up – something big is about to change in porting, and I don’t mean One Touch Switch.
For us, porting has always been a loss leader. It is a ridiculously neglected and broken industry process which is hugely expensive to do. That is exaggerated by others exploiting the broken-ness for competitive advantage. Rather than fix the process (which isn’t in their interests), they’ve offshored it as was and made it worse, i.e. harder and more expensive for competitors to win business. Those of us who have kept porting onshore are paying, by my estimates, 25x as much to accommodate the consequences of this.
This isn’t an acceptable situation for consumers either. Remember during COVID when no ports took place at certain operators until offshore agents could get set-up to process your customers’ personal data working from home on personal laptops! Nothing ever did come of that, frustratingly.
I’m not by any means saying offshoring is bad, and to be perfectly honest, the commercial risk posed by a Starmer Government has forced me to look into setting up an office outside the UK for future expansion, but using offshoring to make a broken process cost your competitors more and putting consumers at risk is abhorrent. Some of us in this industry believe customers deserve better, wherever service is delivered from.
In other quarters, they’ve sought to make the process simply cost less by deploying broken robots. They’re the kind who send us the same porting request 25x with no changes, despite it being rejected 24 times previously, or the kind which haven’t worked since Crowdstrike.
Neither of those approaches seem right to me. For our part, we’ve invested a lot in developing technology around porting this last year. We’ve had to simply in order to cope with burgeoning volumes. And we’ve made an important strategic decision: porting is no longer going to be a loss-leader, porting is going to be a competitive advantage. While everyone else makes it worse or more expensive, we’re going to make it better and cheaper.
We start with a massive advantage: 100% of our import requests come in by API. Even if you use the Carrier Services portal, that feeds into the Carrier Services API. Even if you use our Hosted solution, that’s back-to-back with the Carrier Services API. What we need to do therefore is to make the subsequent process as streamlined as possible.
Counter-intuitively, we started with exports. They’re not API originated (although we stand willing and able to do so), but rather human-crafted emails from other operators with Excel attachments (NPORs). Thankfully we have an order of magnitude fewer of them than going the other way. In the last year we’ve heavily automated the processing of those, so humans do what humans should do: make high quality decisions. There’s some more to do there as workflow analysis shows opportunities to improve and sensibly automate this further.
Imports have also had a lot of attention and for Q3 I’ve set the porting team the objective of improving their productivity 10x, the heavy lifting of which will be achieved by new tooling already in place. However, we have more changes in flight for this quarter which are going to reduce the need for human involvement further, for example auto-approval of import requests. Save for a limited number of exceptions – porting from IPX scrotes under Scenario 7 being the main one – ports will not need to wait for human validation; they’ll be systematically checked and pushed straight through to the losing operator (or their host). By the end of August we expect to be auto-processing the responses (i.e. the email with the updated NPOR sent back) too, at least for those operators capable of being vaguely consistent. Where the other operators have deployed robots themselves for certain scenarios, this should lead to massively improved response times, especially for those who like to submit batches at 1 minute before 5!
As well as improved throughput, we want to pass on the improved costs to you by reducing our porting fees materially which we expect will be disruptive. We’ll announce this when we can but an important caveat is that these reductions won’t apply to those who force human involvement; in fact, it is likely we’ll dramatically reduce the standard import charge but increase rates where human involvement is necessary, e.g. because you like to argue with us over the rejection code another operator has used, or chase a port by phone 3 minutes after submission, or cancel a port 10 minutes before it is due to be activated by the other operator. There are lower volume scenarios we can catch and improve in due course but our priority is passing on the majority of benefits, for the majority of scenarios to the majority of customers. Exceptions will remain but they should be ever fewer!
One negative consequence potentially for some customers is that some of you rely quite heavily on our team quality-control checking your submissions and rejecting them before they go to the other operator. This is a cost we’ll be eliminating and whilst we intend building in many checks to catch common scenarios, and avoid what we see the other way which is robots sending us the same request 25 times unchanged, there is elevated scope for garbage-in, garbage-out with any more automated system.
It does feel somewhat Terminator-like where we’re battling naive robots and Mechanical Turks with a combination of advanced technology (our own) and highly skilled humans. The losers will be those who, like us historically, have relied on very expensive humans alone, subsidised in part by high porting fees. The high fees are going, technology is the only way.
Lastly, while this is related to Carrier Services which, of course, underpins our Hosted service too. For those of you making use of Hosted, there is so much more already in place which you might not be aware of. We have some huge high volume customers who need to automate. Be it ordering securely pre-provisioned hardware through our hardware API, with drop-shipping direct to your end-users, or using our APIs to drop user credentials into your own TR-069 template, this can be zero touch. When it comes to porting, did you also know you can allocate users a temporary number which’ll be swapped out when their real-number ports? Again, this makes new users touchless as their new hardware works, even if the port hasn’t completed when it arrives. This is a hidden API feature live today for high volume customers but which will be visible in the Partner Portal any day.
We’re committed to helping you be as efficient and competitive as possible through the smart use of technology which those with a lower brain-to-weight ratio do not have. As always, we’d welcome your feedback.
