TELUS: Improving connectivity through data-driven experiences
About TELUS
TELUS Communications is a Canadian telecommunications company offering households and businesses internet, voice, entertainment, video, and other connectivity services.
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About Accenture
Accenture, the Google Cloud 2019 Industry Solutions Partner of the Year, is one of the world’s largest professional services companies, with specialties in digital transformation, cloud services, data management optimization, and IT modernization.
TELUS worked with Accenture and Google Cloud to optimize its data supply chain and empower its data scientists with the tools to constantly enhance customer journeys.
Google Cloud results
- Increases success using automated systems to resolve customer issues by 50 percent
- Accelerates data processing times by 20x
- Reduces customer service costs while improving customer experiences
- Enables data-driven decision-making for investments in network infrastructure, customer journey enhancements, and more
Increases app users from 400,000 to 1.2 million
The pressure is on for communications service providers (CSPs) to continue to create the fastest, most reliable, and easy-to-use networks. With a focus on delivering new services and standing out from competitors, CSPs are rethinking their approach to transforming their IT environments to provide customers with valuable services at every touch point. One area key to this success is improving data management.
TELUS, a leading Canadian telecommunications company, embarked on a data supply chain project to overhaul its approach to managing and sharing information. Like companies of similar size, TELUS struggled with data silos and a lack of data management across teams.
“We have some of the largest datasets in the world,” says Monty Hamilton, Chief Digital Officer at TELUS. “By strengthening our approach to management through cloud, we can enable our world-class data analytics professionals to unlock the value of information to devise more effective strategies to serve customers.”
With a massive amount of data and a public commitment to becoming a data-driven business, TELUS needed strong partners. Through Google Cloud's Partner Success Services program, Accenture and Google Cloud Professional Services engineers worked side-by-side to collaboratively and cohesively deliver a best-in-class solution for TELUS. The Partner Success Services model provided a bridge between Accenture and TELUS through the necessary support from Google Cloud to implement with confidence and speed.
“People used to run simple queries that could take 48 hours or longer. Now, our processing times are up to 20 times faster, which completely transform the insights we gain and the actions we can take. We can combine data from many sources and get a complete view of our customers in real time.”
—Steve Choi, Principal - Data Analytics, TELUS DigitalFrom data silos to data synergy
TELUS initially needed to connect datasets that map customer experiences across multiple touch points. Traditionally, that data was siloed in applications across the business, making it difficult to gain a single view of the customer experience.
Mapping the customer journey was the first step, but that had to be completed in parallel with an overhaul of the backend infrastructure on which data is generated, stored, and analyzed.
Accenture, TELUS, and Google Cloud Professional Services Organization (PSO) engineers collaborated to stand up the new Google Cloud instance through a thorough review of infrastructure-as-a-code practices, data and CI/CD pipeline decisions, network connectivity, security, and more. Accenture and Google Cloud also helped design application layers across Google Cloud, adjusting ingestion patterns to optimize the data supply chain.
“Google Cloud analytics and data management solutions helped expedite initial setup of this new supply chain and bring data from the source into the hub with ease,” says Andrew Marchant, Managing Director, Communications and Media at Accenture in Canada. “Having that comprehensive stack available really made all the difference in this project.”
All in all, the project included putting two customer-centric data pipelines from three sources into production for a real-time perspective on customer intent within interactions. Accenture’s extensive technical competency, understanding of TELUS data architecture, and business insights drove this coordinated implementation. This helped expedite the process of establishing methods to extract, manipulate, and apply algorithms to data within the pipelines.
“People used to run simple queries that could take 48 hours or longer,” says Steve Choi, Principal - Data Analytics at TELUS Digital. “Now, our processing times are up to 20 times faster, which completely transforms the insights we gain and the actions we can take. We can combine data from many sources and get a complete view of our customers in real time.”
With this increased visibility into the customer journey, TELUS can now make more insightful, data-driven changes across its business.
“The scale and speed Accenture offered made the difference in this project, and they continue to support our team. By combining Accenture’s expertise and the data unification we’ve achieved with Google Cloud, we can accomplish truly great things.”
—Dinesh Mahtani, Director, Digital Analytics & Insights, TELUSA proactive approach to customer experience management
As a primary area for improvement, TELUS targeted customer interactions with business units—specifically agents—and the available information during customer engagements.
“Customers don’t want to repeat themselves,” says Monty. “In a pragmatic sense, we wanted to capture customer interactions, synthesize them, and make others aware of them at the point of contact. This reduces the need for a customer to tell us something is going wrong more than once and prevents wasted time in our own handling of customer issues.”
With limited insight into data, the company’s data scientists found it hard to uncover ways to improve customer experiences. Now, with unlimited storage through Cloud Storage and tools such as BigQuery and Dataflow, data scientists can explore countless query iterations and receive results faster.
The TELUS team also optimized the application it uses to log customer interactions. Since making changes, the app’s user base has grown from 400,000 to 1.2 million, translating to more data and faster insights delivered to agents and decision-makers.
“Our ability to integrate our data supply chain with all the people who need it has directly saved our customers’ time, which is a big win for us,” says Monty.
By bringing transcripts from live chat and bot chat interactions into Google Cloud, TELUS can create customer profiles that offer employees a deeper understanding of customers. This has already improved chatbot resolutions significantly, cutting the number of times the bot needs to hand a customer off to a live agent in half and augmenting live agent performances as needed.
Now, TELUS is working to preemptively adjust the customer journey itself to remove sticking points for customers and further accelerate troubleshooting service issues. All of this work yields a better experience for customers and employees, saving time, money, and resources while improving engagement.
“With everything happening in today’s world, it’s never been more important to be connected. Our work with Google Cloud and Accenture allows us to make the best investments in high-speed wireless and wired internet infrastructure without losing sight of the impact on our customers.”
—Monty Hamilton, Chief Digital Officer, TELUSA foundation for continuous improvements
“The scale and speed Accenture offered made the difference in this project, and they continue to support our team,” says Dinesh. “By combining Accenture’s expertise and the data unification we’ve achieved with Google Cloud, we are unlocking new business outcomes through deeper insights and automated action from our data.”
TELUS is building off its core competency of keeping Canadians connected by increasing the services it offers organizations in healthcare, agriculture, and other industries. Through this data supply chain project, it has further positioned itself to be a leader in content moderation services, while investing more in its network infrastructure.
Given its ability to make real-time, data-driven decisions, the company has a better understanding of where investments need to be made to expand services and how to better serve more customers.
“With everything happening in today’s world, it’s never been more important to be connected,” says Monty. “Our work with Google Cloud and Accenture allows us to make the best investments in high-speed wireless and wired internet infrastructure without losing sight of the impact on our customers.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About TELUS
TELUS Communications is a Canadian telecommunications company offering households and businesses internet, voice, entertainment, video, and other connectivity services.
About Accenture
Accenture, the Google Cloud 2019 Industry Solutions Partner of the Year, is one of the world’s largest professional services companies, with specialties in digital transformation, cloud services, data management optimization, and IT modernization.