Vodafone Spain supports expansive business and marketing initiatives by managing Amdocs CRM data growth.

Focus on customer service and support

Vodafone Spain is part of the Vodafone Group Plc, which provides a full range of telecommunications services, including voice and data communications. With a customer base of over 100 million and a presence in over 27 countries, Vodafone Group is becoming the world’s leading provider of mobile communications services. The company continues to channel a massive investment into building a worldwide telecommunications network, allowing customers to make more calls from more places.

Over 12 million Vodafone Spain customers benefit from next generation technology that enables individuals, businesses and communities to be more connected in a mobile world. From provisioning coverage and capacity, to call handling and billing, Vodafone Spain is focused on quality, reliability and providing customer service that is “second to none.” The company strives to retain a competitive advantage by investing in new technology to lower operating costs and to deliver more value to its customers. To achieve these business objectives, Vodafone’s senior management implemented Amdocs CRM to manage and maintain enterprise information necessary to support its expanding customer base.

CRM application vital to business expansion
The Amdocs® CRM solution is vital to Vodafone’s daily business operations. Every business unit, from Customer Service and Support, Marketing and Sales to Contracts Administration, Billing and Accounting, relies on Amdocs CRM to address customer inquiries, sell new service contracts and expand the business. Vodafone’s IT Group is responsible for maintaining the Amdocs CRM application and its numerous databases (including Oracle® and Sybase®) to ensure optimal performance and enable superior service.

“Amdocs CRM allows us to track every customer interaction on a daily basis,” said Juan Antonio Gonzalez Aranda, Manager de Sistemas de Gestión de Clientes at Vodafone Spain. “We can easily accumulate over 31 million interactions a month. Interactions represent only one of many types of customer information needed to respond to service requests, process orders and much more. If customer service representatives, sales account managers and technical support staff cannot access this information, they cannot respond to customer needs. As a result, we cannot expand our business and revenue suffers.”

Challenges limit business initiatives
As Vodafone’s business continued to expand, the Amdocs CRM application accumulated more customer information. In spite of this growth, the IT Group was fairly successful in maintaining Amdocs CRM performance levels for marketing campaigns and other critical business initiatives. However, continual database maintenance and tuning were only providing temporary improvements. Adding to the complexity, customer information had to be saved for five years to comply with data retention requirements. As a result, years of historical data were being managed in the same database environment as current transactions, increasing storage requirements and slowing response times.

In particular, data growth was having a negative impact on critical marketing initiatives. Vodafone Spain conducts a minimum of four to six large seasonal campaigns and dozens of smaller promotional campaigns throughout the year. Each campaign generates millions of new customers and offers new services to existing customers, with a direct impact on revenue. Hundreds of millions of customer records were being added to the Amdocs CRM database with each marketing campaign.

As awareness heightened, there were concerns that if Vodafone could not find a solution for managing data growth, they would not be able to support new marketing efforts and other business initiatives. Allowing the situation to continue would negatively impact sales and severely limit business growth and revenue generation.

Build versus buy decision for archiving
Initially, the IT Group considered developing an in-house archiving solution to remove historical data. However, they wanted a way to archive and store the customer data cost-effectively, while still retaining access to comply with data retention requirements. They also wanted capabilities to restore archived data if needed for reporting. Any archiving solution would have to be easy to implement, use and maintain.

“We had to compare the cost to develop the in-house application versus the costs associated with increased capacity to accommodate the data growth,” said Aranda. “In addition, the time required for development would have delayed implementing an urgently needed solution, and data growth issues would have a more severe impact on our objectives for business expansion.”

At the same time, Amdocs representatives introduced IBM® Optim™, with enterprise data management capabilities specifically designed for Amdocs CRM. “It made good business sense to consider a proven vendor solution to speed implementation and lower overall costs,” said Aranda. “We really needed a solution that included archiving capabilities tailored to Amdocs CRM.”

From concept to reality
The IT Group accepted the opportunity to conduct an evaluation engagement. The evaluation agenda was designed to validate Optim’s capabilities to archive historical data safely and accurately, based on user-defined business and retention policies, and selectively restore information for customer inquiries and service requests.

The IT Group also wanted to be able to schedule and automate archive processing. The goal was to maintain a zero growth pattern by archiving, removing and storing large volumes of historical CRM data, as fast as new data was being entered into the system. In addition, archive processing had to be compatible with Vodafone’s business continuity plans, which included mirrored, high–availability shared process servers.

“IBM Optim met all of the evaluation criteria and provided the most cost-effective and safest choice,” said Aranda. “In addition, Optim’s enterprise data management capabilities offered scalability across additional applications, databases and platforms. This was an important consideration for our continued business growth.” The IT Group selected the Amdocs and IBM Optim proposal as the winning bid.

Archiving delivers business value
“Implementing Optim progressed very well. Archiving historical interactions has been almost transparent to customer service and support representatives, sales account managers, marketing staff and other business users,” said Aranda. “This was very important. We wanted a solution that would not interrupt the routine workflow or require extra training, especially for our customer service representatives. Now, service staff can view both current and archived data through the Amdocs CRM interface.”

Noted Aranda, “Controlling data growth has increased our ability to support more frequent and aggressive marketing campaigns and to increase business and revenue opportunities, while continuing to provide expected service levels for superior customer service.”

The IT Group maintains the Amdocs CRM application and manages routine archive processing. Initially, the plan was to archive historical interactions that were more than six months old. However, after automating daily archive processing for a few months, they decided to apply more aggressive selection criteria and archive interactions that were more than four months old. The next goal is to expand the business benefits by archiving Amdocs CRM case data.

“As a result of implementing archiving, it is much easier for us to maintain application performance levels to meet our business requirements because there is less data to manage,” said Aranda. “Application maintenance also takes less time. We have successfully achieved the zero data growth level we wanted, and database capacity is maintained at a manageable size.”

“Currently, we are using a tiered storage strategy by managing archives on disk in a file system for lower costs,” noted Aranda. “However, in the near future, the plan is to centralize data management and storage activities at another location. When that decision is made, Optim will provide the needed flexibility and scalability to store archived data on a variety of cost-effective storage media, based on the type of information and access requirements.”

Future enterprise initiatives
One of the reasons that Vodafone’s IT Group selected IBM Optim was because it provided enterprise data management capabilities across applications, databases, operating systems and hardware platforms. The IT Group is satisfied with the results of implementing database archiving to control data growth. By extending the use of archiving capabilities across other applications in its enterprise portfolio, Vodafone Spain will derive greater ROI from their investment in Optim’s enterprise data management capabilities.

“Archiving was necessary to continue with vital marketing campaigns, as well as daily business activities, and Optim provided the best solution for managing our CRM data. We are now able to make more focused business decisions about archiving data. Even the newest staff members have remarked that the software is intuitive and easy to use,” commented Aranda. “Most importantly, we now have a solution that can help us manage continuous data growth in our IT infrastructure, and we are in a better position to support our future business initiatives. We are looking forward to working with IBM’s experts to expand the implementation of Optim so that we can use its comprehensive enterprise data management capabilities to the fullest.”

About IBM Optim
IBM® Optim™ enterprise data management solutions focus on critical business issues, such as data growth management, data privacy compliance, test data management, e-discovery, application upgrades, migrations and retirements. Optim aligns application data management with business objectives to help optimize performance, mitigate risk and control costs, while delivering capabilities that scale across enterprise applications, databases and platforms. Today, Optim helps companies across industries worldwide capitalize on the business value of their enterprise applications and databases, with the power to manage enterprise application data through every stage of its lifecycle.

For more information

To learn more about IBM Optim enterprise data management solutions, contact your IBM sales representative or visit: www.optimsolution.com.