Data drives more personalized communication services
- 1M+ Queries per day
- 200 Sources of information
- 1,000 Business users, analysts, and data scientists
For many companies, product differentiation is the path to growth and profitability. But in telecommunications, product differentiation can be fleeting: For example, early providers of Apple’s iPhone or the first to deploy 5G networks saw short-lived differentiation. So, what’s a company to do when operating in a commodity-based category?
Competing on price may lead to a race to the bottom. Companies can invest heavily in advertising in the hopes of creating image and reputation differentiation, but those efforts are hard to measure and shouldn’t be done alone. Most turn to a services-differentiation strategy. The best commodity-market players deliver value across their customers’ value chains. Consistently delivering quality experiences by optimizing customer support functions like call centers, technical support, and service and offer personalization leads to a stronger value proposition in the market. These commodity leaders increase loyalty while reducing churn, creating more revenue per customer.
Telefónica Spain is the leading telecommunications company in Spain by access, including voice, data, television, and internet access services operating under the Movistar and O2 brands. Its mission statement brings services differentiation to bear: “At a time when technology is more present than ever in our lives, we cannot forget that the most important connections are human connections.”
The operator is breaking out of a generic communications category by shifting value creation to consumers’ increasingly digital lives. Using the cloud, data, analytics, and automation, Telefónica Spain’s customer centricity is resulting in a double-digit increase in net promoter scores (NPS) year over year and an industry-leading churn rate well below average.
Reversing the commoditization trend with digital transformation
Telefónica Spain is undergoing its largest digital transformation, recognizing that it’s not enough to anticipate the future—the company must create it. To do so, the provider must respond to consumer needs, foresee changes and shifting behaviors, and be ready to act on market shifts.
Ignacio Charfolé, head of big data architecture and governance, puts it into the customer context: “Since telecommunication services are, more or less, a commodity, differentiation comes through loyalty rates. We need to have a good experience for consumers, so that they prefer us over another commodity player. We see customer experience as being in the middle of everything we do in the commercial setting.”
By adding new capabilities and treating technology as a source of value creation, Telefónica Spain is achieving growth through price actions, NPS, churn management, and the best value proposition in the market.
It's not without its challenges: Telefónica Spain’s customer base has changing behaviors. “They’re demanding very personalized services,” Charfolé says. “We’re moving beyond everyone receiving the same communication, via the same experience, with the same offer, because the customer is demanding personalization and real-time engagement. The only way to do that is with data.”
There’s no shortage of data for real-time decisioning to innovate and grow revenue per customer effectively. Integrating data across omnichannel customer interactions (such as those on the web, with call centers, and via mobile) facilitates Telefónica Spain’s ability to build, test, and model complex predictive analytics across its enterprise.
“We have more than one million queries per day—even close to two million queries per day,” Charfolé says. “With more than 200 different sources of information, petabytes of data are ingested and formed every day, so that 1,000 business users, analysts, and data scientists can launch queries that help make business decisions.”
Best-in-class analytics scale real-time decisioning
With data from all the parts of the company, analytics help Telefónica Spain create efficiencies, sell products, and make better use of its data. Telefónica Spain uses Teradata’s ClearScape Analytics™ for real-time decisioning for next best action, and even speech analytics of its customer service and call centers, to deliver memorable customer experiences.
Charfolé shares that predictive customer analytics lead to greater customer value. “You need to understand their behavior and be one step ahead of their needs or issues,” he says. “We use analytical models for next best action to provide recommendations in real time, using the most relevant real-time data. The intention is to offer the most suitable product, communicate the right message in our call center, or simply take care of the consumer’s unique needs and situation.”
That level of personalized treatment demands the rapid rollout of AI/ML to streamline business processes and scale. ClearScape Analytics operationalizes model development with the most robust in-database functionality to solve complex problems.
“Every time the consumer contacts us—for example, on our website—their clicks are analyzed to help determine what to offer up on the next webpage,” continues Charfolé. “It also changes depending on the last behavior of the consumer. To be so focused on that consumer, all the behaviors and actions must be ingested and integrated for use in an analytical way. Teradata VantageCloud on Google Cloud is the platform that helps us to integrate all this information together and build a customer view.”
As evidenced through its increasing net promoter scores and industry-leading lowest churn rates, “a happy customer means more loyalty, and that directly affects the revenue per customer,” says Charfolé. “That’s why we continually test and adjust the value of our models so that our next best action efforts are always improving.”
Telefónica Spain does all this while complying with customer consent for use of personal information and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standard.
By leveraging new technology capabilities, Telefónica Spain applies speech analytics to reveal new insights for business decisions beyond direct call-center interactions.
Charfolé explains that there’s insight “not just in the unstructured text data itself, but within the data. The way that consumers speak—the rhythm. There's a lot of information hidden in that. Analytics help us to extract this value and further inform next best actions and offers. When you integrate all this data about the consumer, the value becomes much greater. This not only helps us position new products or services, but also helps us improve NPS.”
As part of its digital transformation, Telefónica Spain is harnessing the cloud for the flexibility to test and trial new offers, messages, and services without risk to infrastructure costs.
“Everything is moving to the cloud,” Charfolé says. “The real way to be efficient and reduce bottlenecks is to be in the cloud.”
According to Charfolé, Telefónica Spain sees three primary benefits in moving to the cloud:
- It's more elastic, allowing for automatic scaling
- It’s more efficient and increases capabilities
- It enables an open platform that can connect efficiently and directly with the rest of the cloud ecosystem
VantageCloud on Google Cloud simplifies and modernizes Telefónica Spain’s tech stack to streamline its business processes and scale to demands.
Superior innovation, easy integration, and the lowest TCO drive performance
Teradata’s Native Object Store (NOS) connectivity with Google Cloud Storage supports data harmonization through ingestion into cheaper cloud storage that optimizes total cost of ownership (TCO). “The NOS capability with Teradata helps us to easily store and access data centrally in the cloud,” says Charfolé. “It can be ingested directly to VantageCloud, which helps us to be more open and efficient, saving time and energy.”
The open analytics and data platform provides the access Telefónica Spain needs to seamlessly manage data in a safe environment, control cloud costs, and extract increasing value over time. With unprecedented performance, accuracy, and efficiency in the cloud to improve speed to market, Telefónica Spain is turning its mission of human connection into a reality.
“Every morning, our data analysts and data scientists need to have data that is accessible, ready to use, and of high quality,” says Charfolé. “Every time we have new data, we know the customer better. And fortunately, Teradata is the platform that helps us to integrate all this information together to build a customer view.”
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