Vodafone Greece automates deals for customers, saves 500 staff-days of work
Vodafone Greece claims to have saved 500 staff days a year in manual work after rolling out technology to automate previously labour-intensive marketing campaigns, as it seeks to win new customers and keep existing ones.
The telecoms company has rolled out software that allows it to send tailored deals and offers to customers based on their history and interactions with the company on its website, mobile app, in stores and in call centres.
The project has helped Vodafone Greece become one of Vodafone’s top three performing markets, decision strategy chapter lead Georgios Papadas told Computer Weekly.
Since it was founded in 1992, Vodafone Greece has acquired more than three million customers and has grown its revenues to more than €1bn. It is part of the wider Vodafone Group, which operates in 21 countries, and boasts 12,000 shops and more than 350 million customers worldwide.
Vodafone as an organisation has been rolling out software supplied by Massachusetts-based Pegasystems across its business operations for some years, as part of a programme to ensure it can give its customers the same personalised offers on phones, broadband and other services, no matter how they choose to interact with the company.
Vodafone Greece began its own programme to deploy Pega’s platform in 2020. Vodafone’s Greek operation previously relied on its marketing staff to devise and run multiple marketing campaigns every month.
The campaigns covered several product lines including pre-paid mobile phones, fixed contract phones, and broadband and television packages. However, they were often overlapping, and did not always target the right business priorities.
Vodafone Greece was also grappling with an untidy estate of sometimes inappropriate technology. It had grown through acquisitions of smaller companies over the years, leaving it with multiple databases and out-of-date software.
The company relied on IBM’s SPSS Modeler, a tool designed for data mining and analytics to model its monthly campaigns, a task it was not designed to do. It was a complex piece of software, and few people in the organisation had the knowledge to make changes to campaigns once they had been created in the tool, says Papadas.
Each campaign took three to five working days a month to develop, test and execute, and with up to 10 campaigns running a month, it was also resource intensive. If a campaign manager was off work sick or left the company, there was no backup plan. And because each campaign operated independently, monitoring and reporting on the results of campaigns was difficult.
Learning from Accenture
Vodafone Greece set its sights on building an “omni-channel” that would ensure it could communicate with customers in a consistent way no matter what communication channel they chose.
The company hired Accenture as an implementation partner to roll out Pega’s Customer Decision Hub software, while Vodafone’s own staff learned how to use the technology. Over time, Vodafone was able to take on more work in-house while reducing its dependence on Accenture. That led to significant savings in fees.
In 2020, Vodafone started a project to bring mobile phone product campaigns into Pega and began migrating data over from existing databases into the Pega platform. Its staff spent much of the first two years learning how to use the software.
By 2022, Vodafone felt confident enough to set up a dedicated Pega team to build databases and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The team also set about linking Vodafone’s CRM system and its customer service Chatbot, and Viber, a messaging service widely used in Greece, into Pega. Vodafone’s internal project team started with six or seven people and at its peak reached 40 or 50.
Six months later the company went live with its first campaign developed entirely by Vodafone staff, scoring an early success with a conversion rate into sales that was two or three times greater than previous campaigns.
Vodafone now manages all of its Pega work internally. “That gives us the agility, ownership and confidence” to focus on the needs of the business, says Papadas. “We have really decreased our time to market compared to how it was done by [Accenture],” he adds. “I think that has been one of the biggest successes.”
Finding the right skills
Papadas says that one of the biggest challenges of the project was finding people with the right technical skills. IT professionals with skills in Pega, a specialist technology, are difficult to find, so Papadas opted to hire people and train them from scratch.
He told recruits they had three learning curves: learning how to use Pega; learning the telecommunications industry; and learning Vodafone Greece – its people, technology and datasets.
“I describe Pega in our operation as a car,” says Papadas. “It needs to keep moving while we tweak the engine. The question is finding the right people and training them fast enough.”
The company set up a “buddy system” so that every new recruit had an experienced person to guide them. That was combined with video training and, for more technical issues, written documentation – but with a focus on real-world tasks.
The end of spam
The project means that Vodafone’s customers receive the same support no matter how they approach Vodafone, says Papadas.
In the past, a customer could receive an offer for a product from Vodafone by phone, visit a shop and receive a slightly different quote for the same product, and then be quoted a different – potentially higher – price on Vodafone’s app.
The technology also ensures that customers do not receive large numbers of spam messages. Pega has enabled Vodafone to set rules so that if a customer has received, say, a message today, or three messages in the past week, they will not be prompted with further marketing messages.
Vodafone is also able to send better targeted messages, says Papadas. For example, if the data shows there are people who never open the Vodafone app, they will be taken out of the campaign. “The success rate will be very much better,” he says. “It’s maths, not rocket science.”
What is the next best action?
The software is able to recommend the “next best action” that Vodafone call centre staff or shop assistants can take to encourage a particular customer to stay loyal or buy extra products based on that customer’s history and real-time interactions.
That tailored approach has allowed Vodafone to move away from “carpet bombing” customers with one or two standard offers in the hope they appeal to enough people.
The company is able to send real-time offers to customers on the Vodafone app. “It is the right message at the right time, and then the customer is more likely to say, ‘Okay, I will accept that’,” says Papadas.
The software, which is used by 1,000 Vodafone staff each day, also warns agents if they are at risk of going over budget by offering customers too many generous deals.
Vodafone’s deployment means that for the first time, it has a record in one database of the behaviour of its customers, which means the company can look at its transactions with each customer, across every channel, and see what messages have been sent to the customer and how they responded.
Real-time offers
Vodafone already has the ability to monitor when a customer looks at renewing their mobile phone contract, or look at deals for, say, mobile phones or TV packages – information that is fed into Pega in real time.
The next step is to offer customers real-time offers and notifications. For example, a customer looking at broadband TV packages on Vodafone’s website could receive a text or email offer to have the Disney channel included for less than the cost of buying the two packages separately.
“If you are looking at the retail price, we can come back to you with an offer which is better most of the time,” says Papadas.
“It’s about the right timing, relevance and contacting you at the right time. The offer arrives at your app, and you can activate it there and then.”
Vodafone also plans to deploy Adobe Analytics. It’s a powerful tool, he says, because, rather than messaging large volumes of customers with general offers, customers will receive targeted offers triggered by their activity on Vodafone’s website or app.
The company also has plans to harness the artificial intelligence capabilities in Pega to help it refine marketing campaigns.
Pega’s “adaptive” technology is able to “read” the behaviour of customers and “score the probability of the customer accepting the offer”.
The system gradually learns how to make small improvements to campaigns when it has enough data.
For example, Vodafone found that in one campaign, by changing its marketing strategy, it was able to make an average of 70 cents more on each sale. But with sales of this particular product line running to 10,000 a month, small improvements can add up.
Vodafone Greece also has plans to move its Pega operations from Google’s cloud platform to Pega’s cloud service, Pega Infinity, providing Vodafone with better support from Pega.
Learning from suppliers
One thing Papadas says he would do differently is have a stricter agreement with its implementation partner, Accenture, to make it clearer that Accenture’s role included training Vodafone staff as the project rolled out.
“If I was about to turn the time back, Vodafone teams would be fully included in the delivery plan, so it would be more or less a joint delivery,” he says.
Papadas says he would advise other IT professionals carrying out similar projects with a supplier, to make sure they learn from the supplier as quickly as possible.
“It’s very good to have a vendor because their expertise is essential, but make sure you learn as fast as you can from the vendor, both technically as well as [learning] the whole ecosystem to take it in-house, because then you have the power in your hands,” he says.
There is an inevitable conflict of interest with using suppliers to train in-house employees in the services they offer, says Papadas. “It’s difficult for vendors to bring the knowledge in-house because they want to sell to you; they want you to rely on them,” he adds. “I don’t blame them. I know how this works.”
How to get buy-in
Papadas says it’s important to involve people who are going to be impacted by the project together, including business experts, technology experts and the people who will be using Pega’s Customer Decision Hub to run campaigns.
“If you don’t have the people right from the beginning involved in designing, giving their input and saying what works for them, what doesn’t work for them, then it’s more difficult to get people on board,” he says.
It’s also important to have at least one person at the executive level to act as an enabler for the project, to keep the project team accountable for meeting deadlines and budgets, and most importantly to act as an “unblocker” when the project runs into hurdles.
In the case of Papadas, an executive responsible for commercial growth and Vodafone’s IT directors acted as high-level sponsors.
“Those two people were in every single review, in every point meeting to assist us or put us under the spotlight if we or the supplier were delayed,” he says. “Those two people were critical. Without them it would be more difficult to deliver.”
Vodafone held weekly reviews with the leadership team to review the project plan, what had been delivered, what had not been delivered, and what the challenges and obstacles were.
“We engaged all sides to ensure not only are they kept up to date on where their money, effort and people are, but also to assist us if there were problems,” says Papadas.
