GCP – How Vodafone puts customers first with an environment built on data intelligence

Parts of this blog post were taken from a webinar hosted by LightReading with stakeholders from Vodafone, Quantexa, and Google Cloud. Please follow this linkto view the webinar in its entirety.

Vodafone is a great example of a company that is pioneering and investing in technologies to better understand and serve its customers.

“Data is everything when it comes to knowing your customers,” says Miryem Salah, Chief Data Officer and Head of Digital & Transformation at Vodafone Business UK. “Putting customers first means offering the best possible experiences. Our digital transformation is built on knowing our customers and offering them incredible experiences through their favorite channels.”

To support its efforts, Vodafone created a data team to inform user experience (UX) design, customer relationship management, product alignment and other business priorities. As the team identified challenges, it became clear that the company needed to gain a more complete, real-time perspective on each customer’s interactions, product use and more.

Therefore Vodafone partnered with Google Cloud and Quantexa to power its 360-customer insight strategy.

Centralizing and optimizing customer data

In recent years, Vodafone has used Google Cloud. Throughout that time, Google Cloud and Vodafone have worked together to make the most out of customer data and align data analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to address the challenges and opportunities facing a major technology communications company.

Communications service providers (CSPs) have a massive appetite for technologies to better harness their data and put it into the hands of business users. With the help of Google Cloud, Vodafone has unlocked the value of data through key solutions including BigQuery and Quantexa’s Decision Intelligence platform.

Vodafone has centralized anonymized source data from millions of customers to gain a single source of truth. Having centralized data enables the standardization of data models across markets, while substantially reducing Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) costs for structured and unstructured data.

These cloud-based benefits combine with a culture of innovation and partner collaboration to drive even more value across Vodafone’s business.

Fuzzy logic, clear customer insights

“We decided to partner with Quantexa to address our most complex problems faster and deliver a system to best serve our customers,” says Miryem. “After moving all our anonymized customer data to Google Cloud, we leveraged the power of Quantexa.”

Vodafone uses Quantexa’s contextual Decision Intelligence platform with BigQuery, Dataproc, and other Google Cloud solutions to better understand how and why customers engage with the company. This is done using Quantexa’s ability to standardize, parse, and enrich data through sophisticated AI-based matching, coupled with Quantexa’s Entity Resolution capability which helps de-duplicate and minimize ambiguity in the data to reveal a high-quality view of entities such as businesses, addresses, individuals and assets.

“Having all data in one place doesn’t mean that it’s usable and properly connected,” says Alastair Masson, Head of Telco at Quantexa. “We build context within the data by connecting different entities so that elements like addresses, personas, and products are aligned. From there, we focus on deriving valuable and actionable decision intelligence.”

Vodafone achieved the 360-customer view it wanted by working with Google Cloud and Quantexa to improve the quality and value of customer interactions by empowering customer-facing staff with trustworthy decision intelligence. Network analytics, or the process of understanding connections between different interactions and data, has been especially important.

“We can now have really targeted, relevant conversations with customers,” says Miryem. “The ability to understand our user needs in real-time via network analytics changes how we work. As we scale out our adoption and empower more teams with these insights, we will continue to improve customer experiences.”

Looking ahead, Miryem and the Vodafone team intend to continue working to enable groups across the company to become more data driven.

“We’re looking at how we can decrease business costs, which will also enable us to offer customers more competitive prices on products and services,” says Miryem. “We’re focused on innovation and will continue to find ways to align data models across regions to offer customers the best experience every time they interact with Vodafone.”

Check out the Google Cloud Marketplaceto find powerful partner technologies like those offered by Quantexa.