The power of mobile devices and internet speeds have made the world much smaller, with knowledge and digital experiences now immediately available to both companies and individuals.  

As data volumes and channels grow, telecommunications firms feel tremendous pressure to deliver tailored experiences to their corporate and consumer audiences. This pressure is only increasing as new service bundles emerge and 5G brings faster speeds, connectivity, and higher delivery expectations, all while price sensitivity and competition expand.  

In this fast-paced world, market leaders like Swisscom, Switzerland’s largest telecommunications provider, recognize the value of truly understanding customer needs. Swisscom has been on a transformative journey to enhance customer service through a comprehensive overview of its operations driven by data.  

Satisfying Multiple Masters  

Swisscom serves a diverse and large clientele of residential consumers and corporate businesses, delivering 59% of the mobile services and 53% of broadband across Switzerland. Each client base has distinct needs, requiring different data types and strategies to effectively meet evolving expectations. 

Residential customers prioritize affordability and broadband speeds. Businesses need dedicated customer service and technical support, often backed by stringent service-level agreements (SLAs). Swisscom operates various business units to meet these various and complex requirements, each using a range of systems from enterprise resource planning (ERP) to customer relationship management (CRM) applications. This created multiple data silos, limiting Swisscom’s ability to achieve a unified view of customer interactions, contracts, service statuses, and billing information.

Swisscom required a centralized hub for real-time operational and customer data visibility, which could help teams streamline service support requests and enhance response times.

Centralizing Customer Intelligence with Pentaho

Swisscom’s Business Customers division searched for a unified platform for data integration and validation to achieve a 360-degree view of its operations. Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) was chosen for its comprehensive feature set, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness.

“Pentaho Data Integration met all our requirements at a very attractive price point,” said Emanuel Zehnder, Head of Information Architecture, Swisscom Business Customers. “We were pleased by the comprehensive feature set and the simplicity of the workflows – particularly the streamlined integration process with Apache Kafka. Pentaho has a centralized integration process, which makes connecting business systems quicker and easier, using Dynamic SQL capabilities.”

Swisscom uses PDI to securely extract valuable information on customers, service operations, products, contracts, assets, and more from disparate systems. With all data stored in a single, easily accessible platform, users are benefiting from a unified view of operations. Over 30 business units now use the central hub to access data managed and processed by Pentaho (over 100 million data records processed daily!), including marketing, sales, quality assurance,e and service operations management. 

“Previously, if a member of staff wanted to check details about customer contracts across products and services, the data would be compiled and harmonized from up to six different inventory systems,” says Zehnder. “This was a time-consuming process that could slow us down in providing status updates and resolving issues.” 

Real-Time Data Drives Real-World Impact

Swisscom can now give stakeholders direct access to consolidated information that provides a clearer, 360-degree view of customer status and needs. “Thanks to the Pentaho solution component, we have been able to create a holistic view of all contracts, service status details, and SLAs in a single, harmonized data model,” says Zehnder. “We also let stakeholders access these details online, so they can check on their accounts and service status at their own convenience, 24 hours a day.” 

The Swisscom Business Customers unit sees significant platform usage on the horizon as new cloud environments and services create additional data integration requirements. The company already plans to integrate 20 more systems and expects Pentaho Data Integration to handle even more data records.

With a clearer operational view and teams tapping into much more of its data, Pentaho has Swisscom well-positioned to meet the evolving demands of its diverse customer base and achieve higher operational efficiency.  

Learn more about the power of Pentaho here or request a demo.