Tableau helps Swisscom sustain its position as Switzerland’s market-leading ICT provider

‘Data beats opinion’. That’s the tagline for Swisscom’s strategy to change the way people use data to solve problems. Switzerland’s leading telecommunications provider aims to connect different silos – unifying data on everything from network antenna performance and TV broadcast quality, to marketing campaign effectiveness.

Here, Swisscom’s team responsible for the analytics platforms that underpin the data-driven strategy share how Tableau is helping 3,000 employees to trust data as a strategic asset and use it for timely decision-making. The results have led to improved customer experience and business growth. They also highlight how Tableau Blueprint is playing a vital role in creating a flourishing, fast-growing data community. Pradeep Fernando, VP Product Management, Data, Analytics & AI, Swisscom emphasizes, “Tableau plays a key role in driving Swisscom’s data-driven company transformation, already helping add more than 1,000 monthly active users within a span of 1.5 years.”

Swisscom is shaping Switzerland’s digital future. The company is one of the most popular and trusted brands in Switzerland, providing mobile and fixed network telecommunications, Internet, digital TV, and IT solutions to millions of business and residential customers.

Many people at Swisscom are advocates for Tableau: evangelists for using interactive, visual analysis to quickly reach the root cause of a problem and find answers. This includes Eric Bugnon, the original inspirer for introducing Tableau into Swisscom. “It’s the speed to insight that impresses everyone,” says Eric, Product Owner, Tools for Analytics at Swisscom. “Before Tableau, it could take weeks to extract data from a database, prepare the data, and create a report. Now it’s dramatically faster. Owing to this decision-making agility, Swisscom is more responsive and is able to innovate new telco and IT solutions faster.”

One particular line of business showing tangible transformation is the business-to-business (B2B) channel. In the past, customer sales orders were mainly transacted via a live call center agent owing to the complexity of the product portfolio. Tableau is now used to track each customer engagement and understand how customers navigate the sales process. By tuning the digital sales order process, Swisscom has increased the volume of self-service order transactions by 15%.

This improved customer experience is cascading throughout Swisscom. An important B2B customer, for example, recently needed to increase the number of concurrent users of Swisscom’s Enterprise SIP communications solution during the Covid-19 pandemic. With many employees working from home, they urgently needed to correlate the number of concurrent calls with virus cases and other news events to ensure communications supply met with demand.

Eric continues, “We presented the daily actualized data to the customer in an interactive Tableau dashboard. The customer was amazed at how quickly we delivered the report, its simplicity, and drill-down insights. The outcome being that the customer bought additional SIP licenses, enabling staff to work from home with confidence, and we extended the trust shared between both organizations.”

In Swisscom’s IT, Innovation, Network and Infrastructure division, Tableau is helping to shape the next generation of digital telco solutions and ensure the current technologies operate at peak efficiency. Eric explains, “Tableau helps us see and understand everything, from the location and performance of network antennas, to where maintenance is needed and where issues are most likely to occur. Swisscom’s network infrastructure is consistently ranked the best in the country – and Tableau has an important part to play in that success.”

At Swisscom TV, employees use Tableau to support live operational service performance, in pursuit of flawless broadcast quality. It is used for service operation management processes, such as incident and problem management. And marketing teams use Tableau to create on-demand and standardized reporting that transforms broadcast marketing analytics, whether TV use insights, churn and sales orders, mobile payment insights, and promotions.

Tableau Server is also integrated into the Swisscom B2B extranet portal, as an embedded analytics service branded ‘Business Analytics’. Customers are able to view dynamic dashboards of service performance via the portal, and the versatile dashboards can also be published as part of an individual customer project. “The flexibility of Tableau allows us to react quickly and generate insights that can support a migration. ‘Business Analytics’ also establishes a common ground for transparent service assurance between Swisscom and its customers,” says Eric.

The Tableau Blueprint methodology is helping to broaden and deepen this data-driven culture. The Tableau community they have built, for example, is helping to drive adoption and continuous learning. Its landing page features assets to help guide people who are new to Tableau, such as step-by-step tutorial videos. Advanced employees are active participants in the community as well, answering other employees Tableau queries, offering tips, and showcasing their own Tableau success stories internally.

“There’s a real urge to analyze data,” says Eric. “We regularly have people coming to us saying, ‘I want to learn about Tableau’. We point them to the community portal – and their data-driven thinking and journey start there. In fact, our community is among the largest data organizations in Switzerland. Everyone wants data for their decisions.”

New talent is drawn to this modern, analytics-focused business. Jaime Ramirez, a BI Architect comments, “People enjoy using Tableau. It is perceived as modern, disruptive, and easy to use. When we needed support to improve the community functionality, for example, we quickly found two graduates eager to work with Tableau. After all, uncovering unexpected insights in this intuitive, visual environment is empowering.”

Swisscom’s technical architecture deserves a success story in its own right. The company recently migrated multiple Tableau instances to a single, enterprise-wide instance, residing within Swisscom’s own cloud infrastructure. “This migration maintains Swisscom’s rhythm of innovation,” says Eric. “Security and data privacy are vitally important Swisscom. The new architecture is not only transparent to the 3,000 end users, but gives us significant improvement in availability, performance, and, most importantly, security.”