Telia uses Tableau embedded analytics to improve urban planning and innovate product development

As you might imagine, Telia generates vast volumes of data from our mobile network. Telia Division X was launched several years ago to capitalize on that data opportunity and incubate innovative new growth services. What we’re doing today will be part of our customers’ experiences tomorrow.

Telia Crowd Insights is among our most powerful innovations. It uses location intelligence based on anonymized and aggregated mobility data from the Telia network. The data set comprises over 16 million subscribers across the Nordics. That’s equivalent to billions of data points every day.

A 2019 Ed Sheeran concert in Helsinki, for example, used Crowd Insights to understand where fans came from, how much they spent in the Helsinki area in connection to their visit, and their movements before and after the concert. The city of Helsinki gained valuable insights from this to help plan future events and provide a better experience for concertgoers.

We’ve used Tableau from day one, and it is at the core of Crowd Insights. Tableau is intuitive, easy to learn, and adaptive. We can quickly create dashboards, drill down into exciting new insights, and surface new ideas to our customers. Without a doubt, the visual analytics platform is an important part of enabling new data monetization products and revenue streams for Telia.

Telia Crowd Insights, offers huge scopes for innovation and data-driven decision making. Telia City Vitality Insights, for example, help cities across the Nordic and Baltics to improve the urban experience by revealing anonymized and aggregated crowd movement patterns from the network data. By comparing historical data with what’s happening right now, cities can measure the impact of decisions made and actions taken. Tableau makes it easier for people to explore and understand data, leading the teams to discover and share insights that make a positive impact on city planning.

Likewise, when the Helsinki Regional Transport Authority, HSL, completed a €1.2 billion subway extension, it wanted to measure the commuter experience, making sure the new subway was used by as many as possible. A traditional survey would have taken years and cost thousands of euros. Telia Crowd Insights, with Tableau embedded analytics, was also able to show that the increased subway use had reduced car traffic by 8%, equivalent to 13 tonnes of CO2 per day.

When we began, some argued we should develop our own analytics tool or use a solution like Power BI. However, that would take time and resources away from the true purpose of Telia’s Division X: innovative product development.

Tableau’s embedded analytics platform allows us to focus on building new Telia services. We can integrate and customize Tableau into our external applications, providing dashboards so customers can ask questions and find meaningful insights themselves.

The Swedish Public Health Authority uses our anonymized and aggregated insights with Tableau embedded analytics to understand how groups of people move in society, for example, between municipalities and regions or within a city. They can then visualize patterns that would otherwise have been difficult to detect and enables them to assess the effectiveness of measures to minimize the spread of infection.

We have only scratched the surface with use cases. We will extend further into retail, for example, analyzing anonymized and aggregated data from Telia mobile networks and from retailers’ Wi-Fi networks to identify crowd movement patterns within and around ‘bricks and mortar’ stores. Retailers will get an unprecedented view of their complete conversion funnel, where to put up new stores, and how the indoor movement flows truly look like.