Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 06 | Page 36

FEATURE: BIG DATA FEATURE: BIG DATA "Given the extent of poverty and disease on the continent, two key uses would be in infection and crop monitoring." Nokia’s Do Vale explains that, a key inhibitor is the cost and effort sometimes required to deploy new analytics capabilities. There are different approaches to deploying analytics solutions, some of which require large investment and significant effort to upgrade existing network infrastructure. In addition, some service providers lack the in- house resources and expertise often required to monitor and interpret the massive amounts of analytics data. Another inhibitor is that it can be quite difficult to decide where to begin with analytics deployments. There are so many areas that can benefit from analytics, that service providers can be at a loss as to where they can benefit from analytics most in the short and long term. “Nokia addresses these issues by offering communication service providers the best bang for the buck solutions that delivers appropriate level of analytics intelligence to meet key business and operational needs, without requiring major infrastructure upgrades. Nokia analytics products are designed to be intuitive and easy-to-use so customers do not require in-house data scientists to make sense of the analytics data,” says Nokia’s Do Vale. Similar to any business transformation project, implementing a project around Epicor Data Analytics requires skilled resources with a good understanding of the industry. While cloud may have removed most of the technology challenges of requiring a technology infrastructure to be in place, there are still challenges during the implementation. “You are addressing a business challenge, not just a product challenge and your resources need to be aware of that business. You need to have qualified senior resources to drive such an engagement,” says Tohme. End user enterprise organisations from South Africa, UAE and Saudi Arabia fall into a tier-one slab in terms of their IT maturity. “Customers from these regions and definitely vendors are very well matured. The customers have specified budgets. They have very specific requirements. They know what they want to achieve. They have defined projects, defined budgets, defined timelines and typically the resources they have are senior and mature,” continues Tohme. The rest of the countries from Africa and Middle East fall into a tier-two slab. In this slab, large enterprise organisations do have large IT teams to drive technology implementations. But for medium sized enterprise organisations, the IT teams are invariably a single-person show. While they may have significant IT procurement budgets, success of a project is largely driven by the skilled resources of the vendor and the implementation partners. “This is where the vendor plays a major role in making sure the project is a success,” reflects Tohme. ¡ SAFARICOM USES NOKIA CEM ON DEMAND TO DIFFERENTIATE SERVICES IN KENYA Kenya-based Safaricom is using analytics from Nokia to improve its response time for customer queries and network complaints, as well as productivity and efficiency improvement. Customer demands are constantly evolving and will not slow down. To keep pace with this, operators have been managing digital transformation, seamless omni-channel experiences and embedding the voice of the customer into their operations. However, with technology evolving faster, growing competition and greater consumer standards, it is increasingly difficult to maintain pace with customers. This is all making operators connect with customers in new ways, through new channels, with new products. Safaricom, the largest integrated telecommunication service provider in East Africa, has chosen Nokia’s Customer Experience Management on Demand (CEMoD) to differentiate its services in Kenya and take its connection with customers to the next level. Safaricom uses Nokia’s CEMoD to understand and improve the daily network experience of each individual customer. It prioritises network investments based on customer experience insights including MSISDN level details that guide decisions like which sites to upgrade first to 3G or 4G. Nokia’s CEMoD has greatly improved investigation processes and insights for fraud and security teams. Nokia’s solution is used to improve services for more than 25 million subscribers in Kenya by using big data technology to derive real time insights from network, customer and revenue touchpoints. With these insights, Safaricom is able to provide proactive customer care, resolve network issues and prioritise capital expenditures. Safaricom uses Nokia’s CEMoD to derive insights on voice, SMS and M-Pesa traffic, processing 214 billion data points per day. The team is currently adding mobile data capabilities. Bob Collymore, CEO Safaricom. The solution was deployed within 12 months, with a pilot running in the first six months in western Kenya. By using the CEMoD, Safaricom has reduced the time it takes to: • • • • The telco is using Nokia’s CEMoD with six content packs, including Customer Experience Index, Customer Quality Insight, Customer Care Insight, High Value Customer Insight, Over the Top Insight and Service Quality Insight. Individual use cases for each user department are built on these content packs. The Cognitive Analytics suite is powered by Nokia Bell Labs’ machine learning algorithms, which enables software to increase accuracy over time. (Image courtesy of Nokia) 36 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com Nokia’s CEMoD allows Safaricom to collect every customer’s network experience from network probes and is integrated to other internal systems including financial, customer data warehouse, customer relationship management and M-Pesa. The insights are actively used by Safaricom’s technology, customer care, finance, marketing, sales and strategy teams. www.intelligentcio.com Retrieve subscriber records for customer care from 2 to 6 hours, reduced to 15 minutes Obtain customer satisfaction scores for the entire network, reduced from 30 days to near real-time Determine root causes for service degradation from 24 hours, reduced to 10 minutes Ensure network-related issues are put into context with a real time understanding of the customers impacted and their value to Safaricom Safaricom has started to proactively reach out to its customers who experience challenging network conditions assuring them that their concerns are known and being dealt with. As the biggest communication company in East and Central Africa, Safaricom services 25 million subscribers, providing over 200,000 touchpoints for its customers and offering over 100 different products under its portfolio. Safaricom has harnessed its proprietary fibre infrastructure to build a dedicated enterprise business, which provides managed IT services to clients in the East African region. ¡ INTELLIGENTCIO 37