How Vodafone automated sales and operations management

Today’s market for telecommunications services is fast-moving and extremely competitive. To differentiate themselves, communication service providers (CSPs) are focusing on two areas: providing innovative digital services and delivering the best possible customer experience (CX).

To this end, CSPs have invested enormously in enabling technologies like 5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC). Unfortunately, CSP infrastructures are a complex, interdependent web of new and legacy platforms and infrastructure technologies. Network operations teams are saddled with manual processes, limited visibility across the environment, and myriad non-standard tooling. Routine tasks can overwhelm team members so that they’re constantly playing catch-up, putting out fires in a reactionary stance instead of proactively acting to provide customers with outstanding CX. This opaque, complex infrastructure also makes developing and launching new services difficult and cumbersome.

Vodafone, one of the world’s largest CSPs and a major player in Europe and Africa, faced all these challenges. To address them, the company developed a three-pronged strategy:

• Optimize and digitize internal processes to the fullest extent possible
• Digitize and automate the channels Vodafone uses to interact with customers, such as mobile apps, ecommerce sites, and chat
• Ease the creation of new digital products and services

BMC Helix for ServiceOps has played a key role in helping Vodafone achieve these goals.

Unifying service and operations management into a single SaaS platform enables CSPs and companies in other industries to modernize business processes via a cross-platform architecture that interconnects service and operations management to break down silos.

BMC Helix integrates data and workflows across the platform to streamline operations and provide visibility. It also integrates cross-platform intelligence across operations and service management, enabling teams to leverage AI to predict service problems and identify root causes so they can be addressed — often automatically — hours before they can negatively impact customers. Finally, BMC Helix automates processes to increase productivity, accelerate problem resolution, and strengthen self-service, improving the overall CX.

With BMC Helix solutions, Vodafone has been able to automate much of its internal services and take advantage of service failure prediction to address issues before they cause harm. In operations, through automation and data capture, Vodafone is well on its way to achieving its goal of zero-touch operations. 

Additionally, the financial benefits have been tremendous. Specifically, BMC Helix has helped Vodafone to achieve :

• An 119% ROI with an 11-month payback period
• $20 million in savings realized over a three-year period

“We’ve been able to predict significant incidents two hours ahead of when the incident actually occurred,” said Scott Petty, Chief Digital and IT Officer at Vodafone. “We’re now automating the discovery of the root cause and avoiding that incident by automating the processes to fix the issues that were starting to emerge in our estate. Additionally, we’re able to create great new revenue growth opportunities and service our existing customers to improve our net promoter score and hopefully generate more revenue. BMC Helix plays a critical role in the ITSM world, arguably our most important application in operations, and can help bring along the rest of the industry in that standardization.”

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