Vodafone Ireland uses network data to improve customer experience with help of Teradata

Vodafone worked with Teradata and Anderson Harvy, and is also using tools from MicroStrategy, Tableau and IBM

Vodafone Ireland has worked with Anderson Harvy and Teradata in order to use operational support system (OSS) data in a bid to improve customer experience.

The company had been working with Teradata for more than 10 years, and therefore had a mature enterprise data warehouse. However, Donal Gahan (pictured), head of management information at Vodafone Ireland, explained that despite the company keeping track of why customers were ringing Vodafone's customer services team, the telecoms company did not have any information on the customer's actual experience with the network.

"The project we've been working on is integrating the OSS network information into the data warehouse. So we engaged with the networks team and brought in Teradata, and by bringing in information from the networks into the enterprise data warehouse, we now have a much greater insight into customer experience than we had before," Gahan told Computing.

This data is loaded at the lowest level into the data warehouse and then integrated into numerous processes across the company.

Now Vodafone Ireland can track how many calls a user has that turn into "silent calls", in which they have to hang up and dial again, as well as dropped calls, and other network connectivity issues. "We can look at someone who is at a high propensity to churn and add this in, and it will enable us to take action swiftly," Gahan added.

Gahan had met with Anderson Harvy at last year's Teradata Universe and, soon after, went forward with a proof-of-concept to determine the value of using OSS data.

Now, Vodafone Ireland is integrating it into retail stores. But Gahan said that the company would like to have the data available in the call centre, too, so that support staff could be better informed about a customer's reason for calling, and divert them quickly to the right queue and, ultimately, help the customer faster.

The company also wants to gain more information on a customers' experiences using 3G and 4G data services as, at the moment, the OSS data is based only on voice and SMS.

"With data there are a lot of different experiences that a customer can have, and some are to do with the handset of course. But we are going to look at users' experience and feedback to see how we can improve it," he said.

The project was rolled out over the past six months and Vodafone Ireland is currently aiming to ensure that people within the business can get access to the data when they want it.

"As we go out to enterprise customers, the people dealing with these accounts have got the details and from the front-end, the customers have this data available either automatically or through agents who can show them what experience they are having," Gahan said.

Next up is the use of social media comments from Twitter.

"If you understand that people are having issues with the network we can match that up with the information we have, and it can also be a trigger for us to take action," he said.

Gahan added that as well as Teradata's data warehousing tools, Vodafone also uses Ab Initio's ETL software, MicroStrategy's BI tool, IBM's SPSS predictive analytics software and Tableau.

"Because of the amount of data we have, you need a good visualisation tool to do some data discovery and look at trends. We use MicroStrategy to do a lot of our visualisations. Then, to get it out to the front-end we would be integrating it with our bespoke CRM system," he said.