Increasing the relevance of special oers to
customers: The Vodafone New Zealand Story
CASE STUDY / TELECOMMUNICATION
David Bloch, manager, analytics and data strategy,
Vodafone New Zealand summarised their barrier
to progress, “We were restricted in our ability to
provide relevant oers to our prepay customers. This
prevented Vodafone New Zealand from capitalising
on opportunities to upsell and cross sell services and
products. Customers were also potentially missing
out on deals and oers that would improve their
experience”.
In New Zealand, prepay customers are not required to
register any details or provide identification to get a
SIM card for their phones. This meant Vodafone did not
have access to demographic data that could be used
to eectively market to this customer base. Instead, it
could only develop marketing campaigns according to
how much call time, TXT or data the user consumed
on the network. Vodafone New Zealand turned to
Teradata to help them use big data to accurately
predict the traits of their prepay customers.
Business outcomes
Vodafone New Zealand worked with Teradata to identify
patterns within the data-rich portion of their user base.
They could then apply those patterns across their entire
customer database.
For example, they were able to confirm what many
long-suering parents could have told them – that
young people use their mobile phones more in the
evening, post more pictures on social networking sites
and, in general, have a lot more friends that they call
over any other customer group.
Youth customers also used messaging applications
more frequently, and recharged their phone credit more
often, albeit at lower volumes. They were also more
likely to engage in campaign deals and promotions via
the SMS channel – making them ideal candidates for
a targeted campaign.
David Bloch said, “Understanding how the youth market
behaves and what drives them meant we could develop
more finely-targeted campaigns that had a higher
chance of success.”
Using Teradata Aster, Vodafone were able to seamlessly
combine network data from their Hadoop appliance
with customer profile data from their DataMart. The
resulting predictive model was highly accurate in
identifying youth customers in their prepay base.
After testing and tuning the model, they achieved
a staggering 89% Correct-Prediction Ratio.
This new solution has allowed Vodafone New Zealand
to identify a large amount of youth customers within
its base – a segment that is now being successfully
transitioning into the new youth proposition,
Vodafone Mates.
David Bloch said, “If [customer] behavioural patterns
match the youth demographic then it is likely that
these customers will respond positively to oers and
campaigns aimed at that demographic, regardless
of the customer’s actual age. By using big data to
segment the customer base in this way, Vodafone
New Zealand can be far more eective and ecient in
oering deals specifically tailored to that customer”.
How did they do it?
Vodafone New Zealand chose the Teradata Aster
appliance, which leverages the open source Hadoop
big data ecosystem, and added R analytics software to
identify likely demographic segment groups. The team
of Vodafone data scientists were then able to analyse
immense amounts of data to identify patterns.
David Bloch said, “Using Teradata Aster meant there
was a delay of just four minutes between an event
occurring and that event being available in our big data
environment, so we were working with almost real-time
information”.
TITLE OF TECH SPEC SHEET GOES HERE
2
TER ADATA .CO M
Vodafone New Zealand captured four weeks of data
between March and April 2016. This included 2.6 million
connections that generated data usage trac on the
network, 85.4 million dierent IP addresses accessed
by users, and 38.4 billion individual application
sessions by users.
With Teradata Aster, Vodafone New Zealand’s data
scientists can access both system of record information
and machine-generated data.
System of record data includes information that was
collected through the company’s billing platform: billing
history, device type, time on network, deals purchased,
average revenue, frequency of top-ups, age, gender
(if known), and total volumes of usage.
Machine-generated data includes application usage,
calling circles, calling patterns, volume of uploads
and downloads per web session, time of day for web
sessions, and category usage such as social media
versus news websites.
Using Teradata Aster, the data scientists now had all
of this rich data at their fingertips. Customers can rest
assured though, there is no drilling down to an individual
level. Instead the data scientists look at big groupings,
simply to ensure that the right messages are sent to the
right customers, rather than the spam approach that
other companies employ.
Vodafone New Zealand will continue to analyse their big
data to help improve prediction accuracy using Teradata
Aster, R, and Hadoop.
David Bloch said, “The Vodafone New Zealand data
analytics team are intuitive analysts who relish the
opportunity to work on projects that look at how to
make the customer experience better. Every day is
dierent, and using the right tools, such as Teradata
Aster, lets these scientists develop accurate predictions
and models, in turn giving the business a much stronger
basis for decision-making. This way, Vodafone NZ is
maximising the value of big data to make a dierence
in our organisation.”
About Vodafone New Zealand
Vodafone New Zealand is a leading full-service
telecommunications company with fixed and mobile
networks, with more than 2.5 million customers across
New Zealand. Every hour, Vodafone carries more than
256,000 voice calls and more than 200,000 GB of data.
They also deliver more than 21 million text messages
every day.
Vodafone New Zealand employs more than 3,000
people in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
They sell mobile phones and other products in more
than 800 retail stores throughout New Zealand.
About Teradata Aster™
With Teradata Aster™, now everyone can benefit from
the power of advanced analytics. The system allows you
to ingest, prepare, and analyse data at speed and scale,
create data visualizations and operationalize insights,
and discover untouched or unknown markets, new
products ideas, new customer segments and methods
to outsmart the competition, all within an easy-to-
use, integrated tool for the most ecient use of IT
manpower.
Discover what Teradata Aster™ can do for your business
at: www.teradata.com.au
10000 Innovation Drive, Dayton, OH 45342 Teradata.com/telecommunication
Teradata and the Teradata logo are registered trademarks of Teradata Corporation and/or its aliates in the U.S. and worldwide. Teradata continually improves products
as new technologies and components become available. Teradata, therefore, reserves the right to change specifications without prior notice. All features, functions, and
operations described herein may not be marketed in all parts of the world. Consult your Teradata representative or Teradata.com for more information.
Copyright © 2017 by Teradata Corporation All Rights Reserved.
03.16
About Teradata Corporation
Teradata delivers better business outcomes through
technology-enabled solutions in the areas that
matter most – from operational excellence and asset
optimisation, to customer experience and product
innovation, to finance transformation and risk
mitigation. We work with leading businesses in over
75 countries worldwide. Our clients include many
of the top performers and best-known brands in
telecom, transportation, consumer packaged goods,
financial services and manufacturing. We focus on
turning the most complex and challenging data sets
into high-value assets that produce high-impact
insights and tangible value for the business.
