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March 15, 2016

TELUS Boosts Control through Multi-dimensional Visibility of Subscribers

By Special Guest
Joe Kiriacos, Vice President of Sales, North America, WeDo Technologies

Established in 1900, TELUS (News - Alert) is a Canadian national telecommunications company providing a wide range of communications products and services, including: wireless, data, voice, entertainment, healthcare, video, satellite television, etc.



With 8.4 million wireless subscribers using TELUS for pre- and post-paid voice and data solutions, it is the incumbent operator in the West of Canada. It also counts 1.5 million Internet subscriptions, 954,000 TV subscriptions and 3.2 million network access lines.

TELUS’ number one corporate priority is its “customer first” ethos, with a mantra of: “Listen, learn and enhance” which is celebrated culturally throughout the organization.

The company wanted to migrate its pre- and post-paid subscriptions into a single Real-Time Charging (RTC) solution in order to foster a feeling of control for the customer and avoid bill shock. It needed to be clear and simple, incorporate usage reporting, notifications and blocking and result in increased accuracy, as well as the ability to take advantage of converged service offerings.

While deploying the RTC (Real-Time Charging) solution within TELUS, the operator wanted to implement a control point to monitor the charging transactions controlled by the Mediation Platform.  So as to meet the real-time challenge and avoid revenue loss and customer impact, this monitoring needed to detect and alert within five min of a problem. This information needed to be transposed to charts, graphs, tables, reports and dashboards in a multi-dimensional manner to capture performance for better visualization. The ideal solution also needed to provide the flexibility to assess performance KPIs every five minutes, hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly.

TELUS therefore sought out a visualization tool to assist with this transformation to RTC. However, in choosing WeDo, they found they had access to a whole lot more in the way of functionality and value to the business.

TELUS looked at a range of solutions providers, with WeDo going head to head with an operational intelligence firm at the pitch stage. However, it was the product demonstration that really sold TELUS on WeDo’s solution.

“Not only did RAID pass the tests we’d set and implement the cases we were looking for, WeDo were able to demonstrate that they could change it on the fly. It was this ability to edit as and when we needed to that was the main selling point for us,” commented Alex Rootham, Service Enablement Architecture Manager at TELUS Canada.

WeDo’s role in the project was to deploy the RAID Usage Control Module in the Mediation Network Element, integrating the five- minute interval data into RAID as one of the data sources of the Network Analytics. However, network performance and the latency modelling element using diameter data was something that WeDo had never done before. WeDo Technologies and Ericsson (News - Alert) both hold strong expertise in the Revenue Assurance/Enterprise Business Assurance domain making it a valuable team to deliver and personalize the dashboards and KPIs necessary to satisfy TELUS’ requirements.

“We knew about network issues before the network guys did!” said Rootham. “And as we explored our real-time charging performance KPIs, we started to leverage those same metrics and capabilities for our RA (Revenue Assurance) initiatives since they are actually really closely linked. The dashboards for operations were easy to adapt towards RA and business purposes– true Enterprise Business Assurance,” continued Rootham.

The trial lasted for a couple of weeks and was initially implemented using a traditional waterfall deployment. However, then Rootham experimented with an “agile” approach, using a small team and gradually adding one use case at a time.

TELUS was then able to build a decision tree into the tool, leaving them one step away from automation. This enabled them to see whether teams were following processes and which stages were good / bad for those operating them.

“Creating this real-time visibility of roaming and the way in which TELUS is visualizing and consuming data is pretty unique,” commented Joe Kiriacos, VP, Sales, WeDo Technologies. “The real-time view of network performance between mediation and rating has reduced latency and uncovered problems before they manifest into customer service calls.”

TELUS found the experience of working with both the Integration Company as its deployment and consulting partner and WeDo, as its technology partner, to be extremely positive. “The triangle of “TELUS-Ericsson-WeDo” contributed to the success of the program. WeDo Technologies, TELUS and Ericsson collaborated effectively during the different stages of the project to ensure the success.

“We have a great relationship with WeDo and have appreciated being able to talk to them about the real world issues facing us to find a pragmatic approach. They’ve also been very good from a support perspective, responding amazingly quickly on anything from a minor issue to a major configuration problem. While Ericsson has been the boots on the ground, we have also had a good stream of professional services from WeDo - not just product experts – who have immediately been able to become part of our team, listening and responding to our needs. It has been an easy, comfortable relationship, with everyone working together to get the job done,” said Rootham.

TELUS also found that WeDo was able to adopt creative, flexible approaches to solving its challenges, the most significant of which was starting at a low entry point. WeDo was able to be very supportive of this need from a licensing perspective.

TELUS achieved their objectives with the deployment, gaining:

  • The ability to monitor and control charging transactions
  • A reduction of latency issues between signalling and Real-Time Charging
  • Decreased associated impacts to subscribers
  • Increased real-time revenue

The agile approach adopted meant that Alex Rootham’s team was able to show incremental benefits week by week to the company’s director level.

Roaming is important to our customers. Working with partners is the best way to extend coverage but of course then customers worry they may roam too much. With WeDo, we are able to see exactly who’s roaming, to what extent and how much TELUS is paying in charges.

“Our discovery that we can use the same KPIs for multiple target audiences and kill multiple birds with one stone means that everyone, from product development to, RA, fraud, business intelligence, billing operations and network operations will get value for money, since they can now all use the same methods,” concluded Rootham.

Having collated the case management metrics on how quickly issues can be resolved, TELUS was able to get a hands-on product training session on WeDo’s new RAID Adaptive Case Management solution at the 2015 Worldwide User Group. It is also looking into a range of other current WeDo solutions and analysing the RAID Telecom product roadmap for other WeDo products that it might be able to leverage in the future, as well as investigating some out of the box use cases such as workforce management.

As the lead for WeDo Technologies Business Development in Canada, Joe Kiriacos is responsible for driving the direction and growth of WeDo’s products and professional services in the region. Joe has over 17 years of experience within the telecom industry, spanning sales management and operations, as well as in leading multiple transformational sales engagements for telecommunications organizations.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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