Vodafone is dialling up its customer experience across the globe with AWS

A radical reframing

Today, telco customers have high standards. They expect service that matches the speed and flexibility of modern life. Recognizing this, industry leader Vodafone UK sought to radically reframe their offering, transforming from a “telco" to a “techco" that could provide a best-in-class digital experience to their customers and employees alike. To achieve this, they partnered with Accenture and AWS to become a cloud-based, digital-first company.

Now, as a cloud-native business, Vodafone offers a personalized customer experience wherever their customers need them, not just from a call center or high street shop. Their world-class technology team can develop and launch products more quickly, responding swiftly to changing market needs. Most importantly, digital now constitutes nearly half of all Vodafone sales—an exciting shift that marks a new chapter for their business. Vodafone UK was rated #1 for customer experience in its industry.

After the phenomenal success of the Accenture, Vodafone and AWS partnership in the UK, the market-ready solution was ready to go global. Next stop? Ireland.

Vodafone Ireland was the first market to adopt the company’s new global strategy of deploying simple, reusable technology. By building once and reusing the technology across multiple digital touchpoints including the Vodafone Ireland website, app and market-leading AI customer service bot, TOBi, it has created a seamless consistent journey for its customers, and it can get new products to market faster.

By redeploying components and frameworks from the UK solution, Vodafone is maximizing its technology investment while also delivering better outcomes for its customers.

Better experience for customers and engineers

In both the UK and Ireland, Vodafone has moved foundational services to AWS's cloud to embrace an agile, flexible model built on microservices. This allows teams to develop new products and solve problems in parallel, dramatically reducing time-to-market. Vodafone was also able to modernize their network and replace outdated functions with accelerated cloudnative services. And to support these changes, Accenture helped Vodafone break down personnel silos and upskill its teams.

So, what does this mean in practice? For Vodafone’s UK and Ireland customers, it means a smoother, faster experience. Historically, Vodafone customers had to call in or visit a store to get new products, change their service, or find answers to questions. Now, they can do all these things at any time from the comfort of their home. The digital experience is more intuitive too – with streamlined ordering processes, simplified messaging and shorter user journeys making it easier for customers to navigate Vodafone's services.

For the engineers in both markets, cloud architecture has provided better tools and a much-improved work experience.

They can invest time in driving value, not maintaining legacy technology. Consider a Vodafone product launch. Before Vodafone's cloud migration, a team of 20 people worked 24 hours a day to ensure the company's IT infrastructure would hold up. Today, that same work can be done by five people. Engineers can identify and address problems much faster, so the entire organization can focus more on business outcomes. New deployments can be made without any downtime at all. Automated testing ensures product releases are problem-free and cultivates trust between the business and technology teams. And soon, a generative AI ‘Intelligent Search’ solution will replace legacy static webpages, reducing the need for costly maintenance. All of this has enabled leadership to eliminate redundancies, identify efficiencies and reduce costs.

Setting a new industry standard, globally

Vodafone’s work with Accenture and AWS has already yielded impressive results for the company in the UK, enabling the release of 2,300 new products and delivering a superior customer experience.

For Vodafone Ireland, a similar success story: The newly developed digital environment is high-performing and secure, easily meeting customer expectations.

With a ‘build once, use many’ approach, Vodafone will continue to replicate this success in markets around the world. By building up a global community of engineers and reusable assets for the Vodafone brand, it is moving ever closer to its goal of creating a better, more consistent customer experience across all markets.