Tech
Vodafone Greece automates deals for customers, saves 500 staff-days of work | Computer Weekly
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 its 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, 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 multiple product lines including pre-paid mobile phones, fixed contract phones, 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 It had grown through acquisitions of smaller companies over the years, leaving it with multiple databases and out-of-date software.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.
Same as the Five Senses deck above, this scratch-off card set happens in sequence, with optional “level up” cards to really push intimacy, and separate cards for each partner with secret directions. For this date, you’ll both bring a red item that you show at certain points to signify that you’re open to physical touch. Then you’ll go out to dinner and have intentional conversation, and every time a partner pulls out the red item, you’ll follow the prompts to initiate increasingly intimate physical acts, ranging from hand holding to neck kisses. So there we were, at Illegal Taqueria, edging each other over al pastor tacos (I kid).
Many of the cards urged a partner not to interrupt or solve problems, but ask questions and talk dirty. My date said, “I think this may be for couples who hate each other.” I had to agree. The second part of the date involved driving and stoplights, but since we were in Brooklyn, we walked down the trash-filled sidewalk and pretended to be a suburban couple on the fritz instead.
The rest of the date included buying things for sexy time, like whipped cream and blindfolds. I’m vegan and had no desire to lick cream from chest hair, so we came home, stripped, and did our best to keep our eyes closed (in lieu of a blindfold). It was overall a strange experience for us both, I think. If you and your partner need a lot of prompting to connect, compliment, and be physical, this set is for you.
Date: Greg, 10/10 (Note: I didn’t find this man on Hinge; I met him the old-fashioned way, in a bar at 2 am.)
Box: 6/10
Valentine’s Day is a sneaky one. It’s easy to let grabbing fun and unique Valentine’s Day gifts fall to the wayside while you recover from the Christmas holidays, but it’s not one to miss if you have a partner you want to shower with a little extra love.
If you’re feeling too wiped to shop, good news: I’ve got you covered. I’ve rounded up some of our favorite ideas for the year’s most romantic holiday, from Lego sets you can build as a date and date boxes filled with ideas to last you all year long to gorgeous flowers you can get delivered in a snap and cozy robes you’ll want to lounge in together. This guide all the Valentine’s Day gifts we’re excited to give this year.
Curious about what else we recommend? Don’t miss our Gifts for Lovers, Gifts for Moms, Gifts for Plant Lovers, Gifts for People Who Work from Home, and Best Blind Boxes for more gifts and shopping ideas.
Table of Contents
For a Gift That’s a Date
My husband and I are planning our fourth or fifth year of our favorite Valentine’s Day Date: building Lego sets together. We’ve done this for years, and then we get to enjoy the fruits (well, flowers) of our labor around the home forevermore. These sets serve as both the gift and the activity. Building the dried-flower centerpiece together was probably my all-time favorite, since you can each simultaneously work on one half and then click it together at the end, followed by each building a different-color bonsai tree.
For a Daytime Adventure
Retrospec
Weekender Crew Multi-Person Inflatable Paddle Board
Building on the idea of date activities that involve gifts, this multi-person paddleboard is a fun way to spend time outdoors while staying together the entire time. It’s massive, almost raftlike, so that it can support the weight of up to three adults, but once we got the hang of the size, it wasn’t hard to maneuver. Sometimes we’d both row together, sometimes I’d let my husband do all the work. It made for a lovely daytime adventure together, and I can’t wait for the next warm day for my husband and me to take this out on our local harbor again. It’s big enough that we could bring our son, though it’s much more peaceful as a date activity. It’s inflatable, and I’d recommend grabbing an electric filler since it takes a lot of manual pumping otherwise.
For Flowers on Demand
Photograph: Boutayna Chokrane
The classic go-to for Valentine’s Day is, of course, flowers. WIRED reviewer Boutayna Chokrane tested several flower delivery services to find the best one to get sent to your home, and her favorite is the Ode à la Rose, specifically the Edith arrangements. The business was created by two former French bankers, and the arrangements’ design choices feel distinctly chic in a way only French romance can. The Edith bouquet is entirely Columbus double tulips from Holland, and come hand-tied in a travel vase a fun pink box. The flowers ship nationwide, and there’s same-day shipping in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, Miami, and Washington, DC.
For a Jewelry Upgrade
Maybe you’ve already exchanged rings, or maybe you’re looking for your first set without committing to I do. Either way, the most popular fitness tracker to get these days is a smart ring, and Oura is the ruler of the space. The latest model is the Ring 4, and it comes in both metallic and ceramic finishes. Many of my friends love theirs. I wish I had one, but they don’t make sense for my husband and me since we’re an aerialist and rock climber duo. Live my dreams for me and get this for your valentine (and yourself)!
For Your Fave Photographer
If your romantic partner loves to capture photos, a digital photo frame is the perfect gift (and you’ll benefit, too, as likely the number one fan of their photography!). I’m the photographer of our house, and our Aura frame is my husband’s favorite gadget because it showcases photos I’ve captured of our son and life together over the years. Our wedding photos can be found on there too, as well as the occasional good photo of me that he’s captured. It’s a monthly ritual for me to go through my camera roll and add my latest favorites. Aura’s my favorite because the range of frames is beautiful, and the storage is unlimited with no fees or subscriptions.
For the Cozy Couple
One of my favorite souvenirs I have around the house is a matching robe set that my husband and I bought on our honeymoon. Our all-cotton robes are from the Ten Thousand Waves Japanese spa in New Mexico (the final destination of a Southwestern US road trip) and are great for taking to the pool or using after a shower on a hot day. But I still love a good fluffy robe during the colder season, especially since it can double as a towel. Get your partner one of these cozy robes to give them something luxurious to use after their next everything shower or quick rinse-off. Cozy Earth’s robe is crazy-soft thanks to its blend of cotton and bamboo viscose, while this flannel robe from L.L.Bean is one of our favorites for anyone who works from home.
For Your Inner Theater Kids
If your partner loves to sing along to the Wicked soundtrack and is regularly suggesting karaoke as a group activity, then give them the gift of making karaoke happen anywhere with these gadgets. The Bonaok Karaoke Microphone is one of our favorite karaoke microphones, letting you sing anywhere without lugging bulky equipment. The Ikarao Shell S2 is a portable device with two mics, a built-in screen, and support for streaming services, so you can sing along to your favorite songs on Spotify.
For the Fitness Couple
After the Christmas season, I saw a video on my For You page that roasted how every mom had clearly gotten a matching workout outfit set for Christmas and was out wearing it on Boxing Day. As a mom myself, all I could think of was how much I would love another matching workout set. I’m serious. They’re great for workouts, quick errands, and day care or school drop-off. My latest favorite set is from Bombshell Sportswear. The set is both super soft and fits securely without any annoying squeezing. It’s getting the most compliments of all my sets. I wish I’d sized up with the bolero, but as an aerialist, my lat muscles are a little bulkier than an everyday person’s.
Have a partner who doesn’t need a matching set? Try some fantastic running shoes instead, which are even more useful for both workouts and daily life. WIRED reviewer Adrienne So says these R.A.D. shoes are fantastic for a range of uses, as they’re designed for gym, HIIT, CrossFit, and hybrid workouts and are soft enough for treadmill running. They look fantastic, too.
For the Beloved Bookworms
A Kindle is always a great gift for anyone who reads in any format. Funny enough, my siblings and I are about to buy one for my dad for his birthday (two weeks before Valentine’s Day), and I recommended my favorite pick, the Kindle Paperwhite, since the standard Kindle is a little too small for his 6-foot-4 frame to hunch down over, and he doesn’t read enough illustrated books to make the Colorsoft the right jump for him. If they already have a Kindle, I’m still in love with my matching PopSockets Kindle case and grip, and they’ve since launched a new Bookish collection with beautiful designs.
For Some Bedroom Spice
Looking to spice things up? These adventure boxes can add more fun to the bedroom without creating additional mental work for you and your partner. An offshoot from the Adventure Challenge, “The Adventure Challenge … In Bed” scratch-off date book has 50 date ideas designed specifically to help facilitate fun and connection in the bedroom. The dates are categorized by activity type in sections like food, dancing, “sexploration,” and more. Each date is covered by a black box, with only icons indicating required fields such as duration, cost, and more. Meanwhile, the Fantasy Box is a date-night box service offering a range of themes, from sexy wine tasting to a kinky poker night, all designed to help couples communicate and connect more intimately. Before opening the box, each partner will fill out a questionnaire of potential intimate acts, and this box comes with everything needed for a truly kinky night in: a satin blindfold, pleather paddle, lingerie, lube, massage gel, feather wand, mini vibrator, and silky wrist restraints. —Molly Higgins
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In the early morning hours of Saturday, January 3, the roar of bombs dropping from the sky announced the US military attack on Venezuela, waking the sleeping residents of La Carlota, in Caracas, a neighborhood adjacent to the air base that was a target of Operation Absolute Resolve.
Marina G.’s first thought, as the floors, walls, and windows of her second-story apartment shook, was that it was an earthquake. Her cat scrambled and hid for hours, while the neighbors’ dogs began to bark incessantly. But the persistence of the strange hum of engines (military aircraft flying low over the city, she would later learn), as well as seeing a group of cadets in T-shirts and shorts fleeing the Army headquarters, were signs that this was not an earthquake.
Marina couldn’t rely on the typical media outlets that are easily accessible in most other countries to learn more. She didn’t bother to turn on the television or radio in search of information about the attacks that began simultaneously at 11 military installations in Caracas and three other states. The government-run television station Venezolana de Televisión (VTV) was broadcasting a report on the minister of culture’s visit to Russia as the attack was taking place. Her cell phone, however, still had a signal and she began to receive dozens of messages on WhatsApp: “They’re bombing Caracas!”
During the darkest moments of that confusing morning, there was no team of independent reporters able to go out and record what was happening on the streets. After years of harassment, censorship, and imprisonment of journalists by the government, there were instead only empty newsrooms, decimated resources, and a complete lack of security, which made it impossible to keep the public informed as the crisis was unfolding.
The fears felt by journalists were shared by many Venezuelans: the fears of arbitrary detention, of being imprisoned without cause, tortured, and extorted. These are fears that have led citizens in Venezuela to adopt some digital safeguards in order to survive. They have learned to restrict chats, move sensitive material to hidden folders, and automatically delete any “compromising” messages. Whenever possible, they leave their cell phones at home. If they have to take their phones with them, then before going out, they delete all photos, stickers, and memes that could possibly be interpreted as subversive. This state of collective paranoia has also, however, allowed Venezuelans to stay informed and not succumb to the dictatorship.
It is, largely, ordinary citizens who have created this information network. Soon after the bombs fell on January 3, the first videos began to circulate, recorded by people who had witnessed the explosions from their windows and balconies, or from the beach, where some were still celebrating the New Year. Even hikers camping at the summit of Cerro Ávila, in Waraira Repano National Park, managed to capture panoramic shots of the bombs exploding over the Caracas Valley. Shortly afterwards, international networks confirmed the news.
In the interior of the country, connectivity is even more complicated. In San Rafael de Mucuchíes, a peaceful village in the Andes in the state of Mérida, a group of hikers tried to keep up with the frantic pace of events with intermittent internet access at 10,300 feet above sea level. They learned the news from telephone calls via operators such as Movistar (Telefónica) and Digitel, not from the instant messaging app WhatsApp. They also overcame the challenges of the information desert they were in by using a portable Starlink satellite internet antenna that one of the travelers had in their luggage. During the crisis, the service developed by SpaceX was provided free to Venezuelans.
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