About Movistar

Movistar is a Telefonica brand and service offering. Its mission is to deliver the best communication and media services to its customers. To achieve this, Movistar offers easy-to-use products and services through the delivery of fixed line, mobile, broadband, and television services.

End-to-end platform requirement

When Telefónica launched Movistar+ TV, marketed as a unique television offering providing the best content for the best price, it joined an ongoing industry trend that has seen telecoms operators now taking more than a fifth of the pay-TV market. With more than three million homes subscribed to the Movistar+ service, television has become a key service for Telefónica. This is a highly competitive market, making customer satisfaction and retention of the utmost importance.

To improve the customer experience, Telefónica wanted to use data and analytics, as Clara Casas, E2E Service Quality and Operative Improvement Manager at Telefonica explains: “We used a variety of tools to check the performance of the different elements of the network and the decoders in our customers’ homes, but we couldn’t track the user experience and it wasn’t always clear to us when there was a problem with the quality of the images shown in the individual customer’s TV. This only became apparent when customers called our help desk to report problems. In our quest to improve our customers’ quality of experience in our service, we were looking for a single, unified view into our quality of service, enabling us to manage network issues and customer calls much more efficiently and anticipate and even prevent problems.”

It was important to Telefónica that the platform included all the links in the chain, from loading the content at Telefónica’s end all the way to delivery in customer homes, with an emphasis on monitoring quality throughout this process.

Several options were evaluated, but only Devo could effectively collect, correlate, and analyze the data going through the Movistar+ services and deliver the much-needed real-time insights to make a tangible difference to customer quality of experience. Clara Casas emphasized the need for a scalable solution: “Movistar+ TV is a fast-growing service, and the data we generate continues to grow every month. We needed a solution that could grow from Terabytes to Petabytes of data. This was a key requirement for us.”

Leveraging Real-Time Streaming Data

Clara Casas adds, “Introducing Devo into our environment enables us to review all customer-related data at a glance, such as fault logs; all architectural elements; service quality; and the quality of the images offered by the decoder at customer homes. This helps our help desk staff immensely. All the information to effectively support an incoming customer call is right there at their fingertips. We have dramatically reduced average client call time as a result, which in turn improves our quality of service.”

Leveraging Devo’s real-time analytics capabilities, information can be accessed by helpdesk staff to solve problems quickly. The Devo platform provides information on the customer location to determine signal strength; fibre optic installation; router and decoder; DSLAM/OLT to which the customer is connected; and the numbers of video errors and restarts the customer has attempted. Access to information about the most recent configuration changes or faults gives the helpdesk further insight into how the problem may be resolved.

Visualizations and dashboards make it easy to correlate and isolate problems related to connectivity and performance issues by infrastructure, location, or operator.

Increased Customer Satisfaction through Data

Since many reported problems are now managed through the help desk service, the number of technician home visits has been reduced substantially. Previously, if a problem could not be solved by the help desk, a technician would be dispatched to the customer’s home. Because the information required to identify the problem wasn’t available, the default solution was to swap the decoder for a new one and reset the system. Research showed that a high number of the swapped decoders were actually fully functional, so having real-time data to help solve the problem without sending a technician resulted in substantial cost savings. In fact, support costs have been reduced, home visits reduced, customer churn reduced, and operational expenses have been reduced, while at the same time customer satisfaction has increased.