Swisscom taps Hitachi to improve network-based customer service

In a bid to improve customer service, leading Swiss IT services provider Swisscom Business Customers, a division of Switzerland’s largest telecommunications company, has centralised its significant data archive into a single view through the deployment of Hitachi Vantara technology.

Swisscom provides mobile, broadband and IT services to private households and businesses of all sizes in its domestic territory. These types of customers have drastically different needs, which makes managing data and delivering services challenging.

Over time, these different business areas have generated numerous data silos across the enterprise, leading to complexities that made it nearly impossible to gain a unified overview of customers, contracts, service status, billing positions and products. As a result, the silos are said to have hampered timely, coordinated responses to customers.

With its software, Hitachi said that instead of needing to check multiple data sources for a single request, Swisscom Business Customers service reps now have the essential data at their fingertips in a holistic, easy-to-use view, helping them to provide tailored services and resolve issues faster to improve customer experiences.

Swisscom’s Business Customers division worked with Hitachi Vantara to create a centralised hub for real-time data access and service support requests. Using the Pentaho data integration and analytics platform – designed to enable organisations to access, prepare and analyse data from numerous sources – Swisscom Business Customers created a single view of customer and operations data from across more than 30 business units, including marketing, sales, quality assurance and service operations management.

Instead of needing to check multiple data sources for a single request, customer service reps now have the essential data at their fingertips in what Hitachi Vantara claims is a holistic, easy-to-use view. This is said to help Swisscom Business Customers provide tailored services and resolve issues faster to improve customer experiences.

“Like our range of service offerings, our systems landscape is complex, with dozens of data management platforms used across different departments. We wanted a single, 360-degree overview of service operations across the whole enterprise to help our staff to serve customers even more effectively,” said Emanuel Zehnder, head of information architecture at Swisscom Business Customers.

“Thanks to Pentaho, we have been able to create a holistic view of all contracts, service status details, and SLAs [service level agreements] in a single, harmonised data model,” he added. 

Looking ahead, Swisscom Business Customers anticipates Pentaho will soon manage beyond the more than 100 million data records it currently processes daily.