CellRebel helps mobile operators transform their customer experience by embedding Tableau

Mobile operators typically spend billions of dollars annually on improving their network infrastructure, with a goal to provide the most rewarding subscriber experience. Every day, these mobile operators invest in capacity expansion, service optimisation, and the introduction of new technologies such as 5G.

However, despite the massive volumes of data available to these mobile operators, it is often difficult to understand the true subscriber experience. Moreover, mobile operators frequently lack comparative insights into competitor or market performance.

Against this backdrop, Tibor Rathonyi and his colleagues established CellRebel. “Our strategy at launch was to provide an easy-to-use solution for mobile operators to better understand their network, subscribers, and overall dynamics in the market they operate in, and take actions to improve their business,” explains Tibor, CEO, CellRebel.

CellRebel operates in the business-to-business (B2B) sector. More than 100 billion daily data samples collected from billions of smartphones, thousands of content and app providers, and more than 800 cloud providers are helping mobile operators and consultancy services better understand and improve their end-user customer experience.

Tibor explains how the service works. “A mobile operator subscribing to the CellRebel service simply logs into our secure portal and instantly views real-time metrics into a wealth of competitive intelligence – everything from market-wide network performance and competitor customer experience, to subscriber behaviour.”

The challenge for CellRebel at the launch of this forward-thinking B2B service was how to present such valuable data to their customers, in a way that was easy to understand. Tibor continues, “We’d built the architecture to collect, analyse, and aggregate the big data samples from our different ecosystem partners. However, that data is only valuable if customers can interact with it and understand it. We needed a solution for mobile operators to make fast, informed decisions based on the data.”

“As a young organisation, we didn’t have the time or resources to build an embedded solution in-house. Tableau, by contrast, answered all our needs, so we embedded it in our portal. It’s easy for business users like myself to analyse quickly. The functionality is incredibly powerful, and it connects to multiple data sources with zero fuss.”

Mobile operators and consultancy service providers can now access Tableau’s powerful self-service analytics directly in CellRebel’s web portal.

A CellRebel customer in Asia is using the portal to understand how its user experience compares with other local operators – such as average mobile screen page load times or video streaming buffering. The customer accesses the secure portal and the data is immediately brought to life through interactive analytics, allowing them to see aggregated summaries or drill down into the specifics.

For example, they can compare page load time performance by geography, time of day, type of device – even down to the granular detail of phone model or local village. By utilising the insights and knowledge from CellRebel’s solution, the operator has improved its network performance and created a faster, more rewarding experience for their customers.

“Tableau’s stand-out feature is the interactivity,” says Tibor. “Operators can instantly see what the data is telling them and ask more questions. They can share what they’ve discovered. Embedding Tableau has enabled users to find opportunities in their business that they have never seen before.”

Tableau is also helping CellRebel’s operator customers to understand more about subscriber addition and churn. A customer in Asia-Pacific, for example, relies on CellRebel to view the net subscriber movement between mobile operators. Analysing this data allows them to better target sales campaigns at customers most likely to churn – introducing personalised offers and other marketing tactics to boost loyalty.

“One of the great advantages to Tableau is how quickly we can create dashboards and let customers explore the data,” says Tibor. “If a customer wants to know about user experience in a particular cellular area, for instance, we can develop and present that back in just hours, ready for them to explore further. Customers don’t need to be technical experts to interrogate and analyse the data and build logic around it. It’s all incredibly intuitive and simple using the CellRebel portal.”

Feedback from CellRebel customers has been overwhelmingly positive. “The visual analytics is helping to make our customers more ‘sticky’, more loyal,” says Tibor. “They can ask questions of the data and head off in new analytical directions. They are continually finding unexpected insights that drive better business performance.”

Security, scalability, and flexibility are key to CellRebel’s solution. Tibor explains, “Tableau integrates into our existing technologies using single sign-on and we trust the technology for its enterprise-grade security. Tableau also scales seamlessly in line with our growth. In Indonesia, for example, we already integrate billions of data points every month, across 80 million devices. Tableau scales with whatever volume of data we put against it.”

Tibor concludes, “Tableau is really helping drive CellRebel’s growth. Customers find huge value in accessing vast amounts of data and exploring it so easily. By helping our customers make fast, effective and informed decisions on factors like end user experience and network performance, we are driving their revenue growth – and ultimately ours too.”