New “AI of Things” strategy helps customer create new revenue streams and business opportunities
Billions of data points from 345m customers anonymised, aggregated and analysed as a service
Interactive insights help improve customer relationships and reduces churn globally
Global network provider, Telefónica, is one the largest telecommunications companies in the world, with 345 million customers (in 2020) and a comprehensive service offering. The company launched Telefónica Tech, headquartered in Madrid, to unlock the power of integrated technology, combining expertise around IoT, Cloud, Security, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data to create innovative new solutions for B2B customers.
While many companies collect large volumes of data, turning it into actionable insights and creating new revenue streams can be challenging; requiring the expertise of data scientists and a dedicated analytics platform. Individual businesses also lack an industry-wide context for their data, which Telefónica has access to via its vast sources of cross-sector anonymized data. We spoke to Elena Gil Lizasoain, Global Director of Product and Business Operations, and Francisco Celeiro, Global Head of Product Development, in IoT & Big Data Telefónica Tech, about the role of Tableau in unlocking insights that bring new opportunities and services, customer-centricity, and higher revenues to customers across multiple sectors globally.
Tell us about the opportunities you can unlock for your customers by leveraging IoT and big data
Elena: Our vision is to help customers to use data as a differentiator. As part of Telefónica, we have access to an enormous volume of data from billions of data points, including connected devices, customer technology, and mobile data. Many customers don’t have the resources to be able to analyse such large volumes of data in-house, so we offer professional services to help them define a strategy and give them access to data scientists and analytics capabilities. We can even aggregate their data with our own anonymised data to get more accurate insights in their industry.
Francisco: After processing data, our centre of excellence works to deliver a use case for each customer. We’re uniquely placed to help our customers to really push boundaries with the endless opportunities from real insights, and we can do that across any industry. To give you some examples, our mobile phone data can be leveraged to track the movement of millions of people anonymously, which could be useful to help transport companies plan new routes, or to help governments plan how much budget to allocate to tourism. As we build smarter cities we have the scale to bring together all those different data streams and to turn them into actionable insight.
Tableau is a very important partner for us and an essential part of our service offering. It simplifies collecting, aggregating, and visualising data, allowing customers to explore and analyse their data.
What are the challenges your customers face around making data actionable, and how are you using Tableau to address them?
Elena: Now more than ever companies are realising the importance of collecting data and extracting meaningful insights to drive smarter decisions, but as more services are digitalised, diversity of data is also growing at a rapid rate, which can make it hard to collate and process that data. Tableau is a very important partner for us and an essential part of our service offering. It simplifies collecting, aggregating, and visualising data, allowing customers to explore and analyse their data.
Francisco: You can't understate the importance of being able to deliver insights to the customer in a clear and attractive way. We translate a huge amount of data into a format that any employee can understand. We're also a multinational company and using Tableau Server allows us to create templated dashboards that we can adjust for every case to give customers consistency, and also personalisation.
You can’t understate the importance of being able to deliver insights to the customer in a clear and attractive way. We translate a huge amount of data into a format that any employee can understand.
How are you using Tableau internally to support Telefónica?
Elena: We use Tableau across all functions of the company, from making programme recommendations to customers with a TV package, to optimising our infrastructure, streamlining product management, and even identifying where employees could use more training. Tableau is at the very core of our business.
Francisco: Hundreds of millions of global smartphone users are Telefónica customers. From a business intelligence perspective that’s massive. We can cross sell, use insights to manage the customer relationships, reduce churn, and understand next best actions for our customers and our business. It makes every part of our business more efficient and helps us achieve our goals, while guiding employees to make smarter decisions. Data supports all our strategies at Telefónica, it is the powerhouse that fuels all of our decisions now. Our culture has changed completely. Our data culture has become intrinsic to us.
Data supports all our strategies at Telefónica, it is the powerhouse that fuels all of our decisions now. Our culture has changed completely. Our data culture has become intrinsic to us.
What’s next at Telefónica Tech?
Elena: Tableau will continue to complement our capabilities as we grow and enhance our service offering. We really value its versatility, ease of use, and how scalable and flexible it is. It’s also a very stable platform, which is great to help us deliver on our commitments with customers. In terms of where we go next, we’re still in the process of unlocking the full potential of IoT, Big Data, and AI. There’s going to be a huge amount of data from sensors out in the field that will reveal a lot of useful insights – we call it the AI of Things. Tableau is going to remain an invaluable platform and a strategic partner for us as we extract the value from these technologies and expand our services to more sectors and customers.