We mentioned recently our work with porting automation and our aims there. We took a big step last week which I wanted to update you on.
It is important to note that this is not us integrating with some mythical API, or even porting counterparties integrating with our API. While our customers enjoy APIs which give consistency and a data schema, the porting process behind the scenes doesn’t. It is humans emailing spreadsheets to each other, making some changes to those spreadsheets, and sending them back. Every porting order is a new spreadsheet and mail thread, of course involving at least two operators where the numbers have already been ported. This is why I use the term ‘robot’ and not ‘API’, and why receiving a mail from a customer congratulating the team on improved turnarounds due to ‘about time’ automation, makes me smile.
We’re not the first to deploy robots to porting. BT have had one for years – Mogi, which processes simple port requests of a very specific type – and Sky have one too. They’re quite limited and one of the two even requires a specific font to be used in a single format of Excel file or ports will fail. But when tuned to what they expect (which they have the market power to mandate), they’re pretty responsive.
Our goal is to go far further and automate all port types in both directions, with our customers submitting via API on the one end, and enjoying webhook updates, while our robot(s) do the heavy lifting on the backend. That means Vicky and the team can deal with the exceptions – the high value work humans should do.
And herein lies the rub. Our robots are mostly interacting with humans. Humans have bad days and might miss random fields, forget what year it is or even that we have years in dates, put ‘yes’ where there should be reference numbers, change references just for a giggle, or respond forgetting to change anything at all. There is very little consistency save for the fact that some losing providers are constantly awkward and others will go to alarming lengths to frustrate the process.
However, we’re making progress bit by bit. Exports have been automated for a while, and for a year or more we have automatically tested ported numbers. More recently you’ll have noticed your submissions are, with a few exceptions, automatically processed and as of late last week we turned on processing of responses for basic orders for all customers bar one. This is processing acceptances and rejections from counterparties, obviously 24×7.
While our own porting team keeps some funny hours when volumes are high, so do other desks, especially those which are offshored. Other robots are 24×7 too, Crowdstrike permitting. This means when you submit a port out of hours, we’ll now process it immediately and we’ll process the response as soon as we get it, whenever that may be.
Some examples over the weekend (not that I have a Slack channel for dopamine hits or anything like that) showed customers submitting requests to us on a Saturday afternoon and getting a response, yes, Saturday afternoon. That’s a response Saturday afternoon for a port which otherwise wouldn’t have been processed by our team until Monday, with a response whenever volumes allow, which then also has to wait to be processed by our team. The record so far is 19 minutes, from submission to processed response, with 0 minutes of human input!
While industry lead-times remain as they are, getting the port finalised and ready to go gives you certainty, and getting rejections more quickly enables iterative submissions within lead times. This bodes well for Ofcom’s desire to reduce porting lead-times.
Pareto has never been so cited though – we’re dealing with the intersections of the majority of our porting requests, for the majority of customers, to the majority of LCPs with the majority of order types. 100% coverage is a long way off because we cannot impose a schema on the industry and humans are anything but consistent, but even 90% is transformational for your experience and our costs.
I hope you’re noticing the difference and as always we look forward to any feedback.
