Vodafone’s UK business serves more than 19.5 million customers. To stay ahead of the competition, the company needs to deliver field-leading, innovative and nimble customer service, with efficient streamlined processes. Maintaining the company’s product catalog, however, was falling short of those ambitions.
There were three separate systems: one for upgrades, one for the website and a third for the master product catalog. Even trivial changes could take days and often had to be done at unsociable hours. Self-Serve streamlined that process into a single system and fully automated it.
There were three distinct phases to implementing Self-Serve.
Phase One was about understanding the different needs the business had of the system and determining how we’d meet those from a technical perspective. We took each of those business units through a series of sprints to assess the functionality that they needed. Next was working with Accenture’s teams in India to prototype and iterate the solution to find out what works best.
Finally, after agreeing on the prototype, the team scaled up and went into full-blown implementation. They developed eight fully-automated functions, ranging from creating new products to changing prices.
“Self-Serve is the one-stop shop for putting all our product cataloguing information into one place. In just seven months we've revolutionized our processes.”
— Ben Arnold, Vodafone Configuration Design Manager
People and culture
Self-serve is helping Vodafone by cutting down on wasted effort, processes and focusing only on what is going to deliver value to customers. It has reduced the amount of time it takes to make changes in the catalog from days to hours. For a recent smartphone release the team delivered 3,000 changes in under a minute. They do it once, check it once, and it’s accurate to all the systems at the same time.
Value delivered
Vodafone team members who were once burdened by mundane tasks are now free to explore ideas and therefore actually challenge the business. Management believes Self-serve has given the team a whole new lease on life and unleashed the brain power to identify what “the next big thing” is going to be and give it to the customers.
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