Success Stories : Vodafone UK
Vodafone UK is part of Vodafone Group Plc, the world’s leading mobile telecommunications company. At the end of September 2006, Vodafone and companies that it owns had 191.6 million customers for its voice and data services across 27 countries.
Automated Risk Assessment
The Business Challenge
One of Vodafone’s most important dealers planned to discontinue sales of Vodafone Airtime contracts because:
- Vodafone insists that each customer who is connected to their network is credit vetted and approved before an account is created. Before this project, the process involved printing and faxing so was slow, manually intensive and error prone.
- The process of creating a new billing account and connecting a handset to Vodafone’s network used to be slow.
- Vodafone had only three months to improve the situation or the relationship was to be terminated.
What ThoughtBreak Did
Developed a solution based on our Flow software that:
- Enabled dealers to submit orders through the web as secure XML messages
- Automated the agency credit vet through the Transact product
- Workflowed the order through the process of credit vetting and connection
- Interfaced with Vodafone’s back office systems to automate the creation of a billing account and connection to the Vodafone network
- Gave access through web screens for agents who could handle exceptions
The solution was delivered to budget and plan and saved Vodafone’s relationship with their dealer which was worth £5 million per year in new connections.
Mobile Number Portability & Customer Retentions
The Business Challenge
Vodafone wished to provide facilities for customers to move to their network from other telcos
whilst retaining their existing mobile number.
Equally important as gaining new customers is the retention of existing customers.
Vodafone’s objectives were to achieve:
- A reduction in calls and requests made upon contact centre
- Improved customer experience through greater accuracy and better flow of information
- Improved dealership experience of dealing with Vodafone
- Empowerment of dealerships via self-service
- Real time responses
What ThoughtBreak Did
ThoughtBreak acted as prime partner to Vodafone driving the project from inception through requirements workshops to implementation and post go-live support. Key roles performed include:
- Project Management
- Business Analysis
- Design & Development
- System Testing
- Test Support - Functional, User and Dealer Testing
- Implementation Management
- Post Go-Live Support
Strategic Vendor Sales Platform
The Business Challenge
Having seen the success of the Vendor Automation Platform automating credit vetting and Singlepoint integration, Vodafone decided to migrate all indirect sales to B2B platform to realise the following benefits:
- Reduce cost of sale to Partners by avoiding dual-keying and speeding up the process
- Reduce the cost of sale to Vodafone by automation and referral workflow
- This platform would also support all connections acquired through the Vodafone.co.uk website
What ThoughtBreak Did
ThoughtBreak developed the Vendor Automation Platform to be Vodafone’s strategic platform for indirect sales against fierce competition. ThoughtBreak accomplished the following:
- Rebuilt the Vendor Automation Platform based on our own common workflow engine used previously in Vodafone and Lloyds TSB
- Upgraded all Vendor interfaces to Industry Standard SOAP
- Added support for Consumer and Business Customers
- Continuous operation resilient to core system outage
- Credit Vetting though Direct Equifax and Dunn and Bradstreet connections with local Credit Decision Rules and Polices
- Introduction of Tibco for integration with back office systems
- Automated MIS reports
- Project Management
- Business Analysis
- Design & Development
- System Testing
- Test Support - Functional, User and Dealer Testing
- Implementation Management
- Post Go-Live Support
The Outcome
An automated platform for all Vodafone indirect sales was created on time and to budget. A program of recruiting Vendors onto the platform was embarked on. By Q3 2006, new connections per month being acquired through this route equate to nearly £60 million of revenue for Vodafone.
Retail Sales Platform
The Business Challenge
Selling a new contract in a Vodafone store meant the sales person using several different systems to complete the credit vet and the network connection, meaning that each transaction took approximately 40 minutes, as well as requiring expensive and time consuming training for retail staff on each application.
Vodafone wanted to introduce a store-friendly single user interface to front all its back office systems.
What ThoughtBreak Did
ThoughtBreak designed and built a touch screen web front-end for Retail stores for new contracts, additional handsets Pay as You Talk (PAYT) and port-ins (from other networks).
The Vendor Automation Platform was vastly extended to provide a large number of new back-end integrations to support the Retail activities. This project is ongoing and ThoughtBreak will continue to deliver Retail functionality through 2007.
The Outcome
All Vodafone stores were using ThoughtBreak’s software for all new handsets, contract and PAYT by the end of 2006. Together with the other projects based on the Vendor Automation Platform the outcome of this project was - all retail, dealer and website sales of Vodafone contracts and PAYT connections were completed using software developed by ThoughtBreak and based on our workflow software toolkit. This equates to over 80% of Vodafone new contract sales and supports revenue of about £200 Million per year.