MasOrange improves the quality of service and customer experience

Improving telecommunications customer experience for the most satisfied users

MasOrange is the largest telecommunications operator in Spain with 39 million broadband and mobile lines. In addition, it offers TV, insurance, energy, alarms, consumer finance, health, cybersecurity, and cloud services for private and business customers.

The company's goal is to be the operator with the most satisfied users, consolidate its position as a benchmark in attracting talent, and make its technology increasingly accessible to a broader audience.  In recent years, the operator has enhanced its data, AI, and “big data” analytics capabilities, resulting in a significantly improved customer experience.

The challenge: An immense volume of data and demand for advanced analytics

MasOrange's operations generate a vast amount of information, both related to its telecommunications infrastructure and the requests and services it offers to its customers. 

Due to the immense volume of data, the operator identified the need for a data and AI platform that could scale to process and analyze this information, to extract its value, and promote use cases that would improve its solutions and infrastructure..

For almost a decade, the company has been shifting its strategy to place data at the center, exploring its potential, and developing the first use cases. They needed to apply analytics capabilities to understand and leverage customer data efficiently, enabling their business areas to make informed decisions that would result in improved service. But the first challenge was creating an architecture to handle massive and diverse data volumes, from many sources. 

In a telecommunications company like MasOrange, the amount of data on calls, messages, and user interactions with the network is extremely high. At the start of the project, its network recorded between 600,000 and 800,000 events per second, 24 hours a day. These events include data on calls, network saturation, antenna status, and other relevant information, such as customer satisfaction metrics, which help identify the risk of churn. 

Choosing a platform that adapts to continuous technological evolution

MasOrange opted for Cloudera because it provides an end-to-end solution for all data lifecycle needs, integrated governance, auditing, and lineage capabilities, built-in analytics and AI capabilities, and constant innovation, evolving technologically as new use cases have been implemented. In addition, the expert support of Cloudera’s Professional Services team has been crucial over the years, as they have understood the operator's challenges and offered effective solutions as new needs arose.

The functionalities of Cloudera's platform have been fundamental in guaranteeing data quality and enabling continuous monitoring to facilitate the detection of potential failures in the processes. 

In particular, the vast volume of data generated by user calls necessitates effective filtering to identify relevant information through appropriate models, a particularly complex task when performed in real-time.

The information managed in this industry is often sensitive and subject to compliance regulations not only at the local but also at the European level. Therefore, data governance is crucial, and through Cloudera's platform, the group ensures that this information remains secure.

Powering use cases from customer experience to network planning

One of the most critical challenges of the project was the ingestion and processing of large and growing amounts of data. Thanks to Cloudera Data Flow and other built-in data movement capabilities, the company has been able to manage it efficiently, securely, and from a unique control point.

This has enabled more than 50 use cases in production, with more planned. Some of the highest value use cases focus on customer experience and network planning. 

• Churn risk was one of the first use cases the telco deployed. By analyzing user behavior, heat maps are generated that identify customers with a high probability of churn, allowing preventive measures to be taken. 

• Improving customer service from the call center was another successful use case. Thanks to near-real-time processing and better analytics, agents now have access to up-to-date information. This enables them to recommend the most suitable portfolio of offers for each user, tailoring their recommendations to their specific needs and offering personalized proposals.

• Optimizing antenna distribution has also been a critical use case, impacting costs and customer experience. With more data and better analytics, MasOrange can now identify which ones need to be reinforced and which ones are underutilized, allowing for better resource allocation and a more efficient network infrastructure, which, again, translates into better service for the customer.

Expanding to the cloud for a hybrid architecture

As part of its continuous process of innovation, MasOrange decided to evolve its platform, initially on-premises in a data center, to a hybrid architecture on Cloudera. This allows them to choose where new use cases are executed – cloud or data center – without the need to rewrite and/or migrate them. This hybrid architecture promises numerous advantages for MasOrange in terms of cost management, flexibility, and system integration.