Vodafone Albania Builds World-Class CRM Platform on Single-Vendor Software and Hardware Stack, Cuts Server Requirements by 50%
 
 

Vodafone Albania Builds World-Class CRM Platform on Single-Vendor Software and Hardware Stack, Cuts Server Requirements by 50%

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Vodafone Albania is part of Vodafone Group Plc, the world’s largest telecommunications company, as measured by revenue. Vodafone Albania’s GSM mobile network covers 93 % of the country, reaches up to 99.7 % of the population, and serves almost 1.7 million customers with a wide range of high-quality voice and data communications services. The company’S 130 retail outlets offer customers a wide range of pricing plans; services; and products, including handsets, and accessories; as well as technical assistance. It was the first communications company to obtain a 3G license in the country in 2010 and is a leader in the 3G coverage, products, and services.

Vodafone Albania needed to replace its standalone customer management tools to serve its expanding user base and growing product and service portfolio. The company has used Oracle’s Siebel portfolio, Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management, and Oracle SOA Suite, to deliver a real-time customer view and end-to-end service integration from the initial customer inquiry to billing throughout the customer lifecycle. Vodafone Albania has increased performance and resilience while reducing operating costs by running its customer relationship management (CRM) suite on Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise servers and Oracle Solaris.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Vodafone Albania

  • “Oracle’s Siebel portfolio, billing and revenue management solution, and SOA middleware give us an end-to-end integrated platform for improving the customer experience and supporting growth.“ – Enri Prodani, Business Support Manager, Vodafone Albania

  • Gain a single, integrated, real-time view of all business and residential customers, including their service history, pricing plans, billing records, and interactions with the company
  • Standardize, streamline, and automate order management, service provisioning, complaint handling, and bill processes at the company’s contact center and 130 retail outlets
  • Enforce consistency and best practices by decreasing service provisioning time, bringing new voice and data products to market more rapidly, and launching innovative new mobile plans ahead of the competition
  • Adapt processes dynamically to meet fast-changing market conditions and client demands while ensuring compliance with new regulatory requirements
  • Ensure 100% uptime, 24/7 availability, and unrivalled response times for customer management processes to improve service and increase loyalty
  • Manage growing customer base and expanding product portfolio while reducing operating overhead by optimizing efficiencies throughout the entire technology stack that supports the company’s customer-facing activities

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Replaced disparate, standalone, legacy CRM tools with Oracle’s Siebel’s portfolio of CRM applications for the communications industry
  • Created a single, enterprisewide customer database and suite of automated, workflow-routed processes for 100 contact center agents and sales and service teams in the company’s 130 retail outlets
  • Managed, qualified, and tracked leads faster and followed the process through to customer conversion with Siebel Communications Sales
  • Captured and fulfilled product and service orders more quickly using Siebel Customer Order Management
  • Deployed Siebel Configurator to enable contact center and retail staff to offer mobile customers more targeted and flexible product and plan configurations, while conforming to corporate business rules
  • Used Oracle SOA Suite for Oracle Middleware, and the prebuilt content and templates in Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack Extension for Communications to link Siebel and third-party solutions into end-to-end processes, customize the company’s invoicing and payment collection needs, and adapt to changing regulatory requirements
  • Deployed Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management to evaluate cost and profit margins of each service offering, pricing plans tariff, customer demographic, and payment method, to identify how to maximize revenue streams
  • Developed an implementation plan for Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, Enterprise Edition to monitor key performance indicators, such as length of customer calls, time to resolve customer issues, and call center productivity levels, to spot problems early and track key performance indicators to ensure continuous customer service improvement
  • Benefited from having a single view of the customer lifecycle―and the resulting streamlined processes and timely customer insight―to reduce complaints, lower customer churn, and reduce time to market for new product and service offerings, while increasing the productivity of customer-facing employees
  • Built a Siebel-based platform on SPARC Enterprise M3000 and SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers running on Oracle Solaris to ensure high performance, reliability, security, and scalability from pre-engineered, integrated hardware and software, designed to work together and supported end-to-end by a single vendor
  • Leveraged efficient Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise servers to build a virtualized environment for increased availability, and consolidate from three to two servers, reducing hardware costs, overhead, and power consumption
  • Ran Web-based user front-end on Oracle Web Server 6.1 to provide secure, reliable access to the company’s CRM platform for contact center teams and managers and customer-facing staff in retail outlets
  • Benefitted from a unified software, hardware, and operating system to simplify deployment, ensure easier upgrades, and benefit from optimum performance and high availability for a mission-critical system with a growing workload

Implementation Process

Oracle Consulting assisted Vodafone Albania’s local partners throughout implementation of the Siebel-based platform to provide expertise on solution design, ensure best-practice deployment, and configure the applications to Vodafone Albania’s needs.

“Oracle Consulting’s in-depth Oracle knowledge and experience with similar implementations helped us meet most of our needs using standard functionality, “ said Enri Prodani, business support manager, Vodafone Albania. “Oracle Consulting also enabled us to link existing applications to build integrated process flows using Oracle SOA Suite for Oracle Middleware, which greatly reduced our reliance on third-party tools.”