Deutsche Telekom Grows Customer Engagement with Cloud Observability

Telecommunication services have become a utility to their customers. Unlike other utilities, such as water provision, telecommunication customers have the ability to change providers, often with ease. Like all utility services, customer engagement is low in the telecommunications sector. However, for Deutsche Telekom, the opposite is true. 

This international firm, best known for its T-Mobile services, has a highly engaged customer base, and it is, in large part, down to the modernization of its cloud infrastructure and the applications and services that have been delivered on top of this program.

Five years ago, Deutsche Telekom realized it had to tackle this engagement problem. Especially as many of its customers have multiple accounts with the business, fixed and mobile services, for example. In a number of cases, these accounts were not connected by the telecoms firm, and the customer did not feel understood. 

"We started a digital journey to offer all our customers a seamless experience, whatever product they use,” Laurent Donnay, Deutsche Telekom CIO Platforms, Sales and Service, said.

“That may sound basic, but it was very disruptive in our market."

Deutsche Telekom set itself the ambition of having a single view of the customer and being able to serve customers no matter the communications type chosen, whether through the app, email, contact center, or social media. 

"We would like them to have exactly the same experience," he says. This was no easy task for an organization that has grown and expanded internationally over 30 years. 

"We are in 12 different countries and have 300 million customers," Donnay said. 

That expansion has made for a complex business and technology infrastructure as the networks grew country by country. 

"So it is one very large company that is an assembly of various companies," the CIO Donnay said.

Building a Customer Service App

Despite the complexity born of its growth, Deutsche Telekom decided it needed one customer service app for all types of customers and in all markets. The app was initially developed for one product in one country, Donnay said. Further products and countries were then added. 

"We are the only telco with a digital ecosystem that is one code baseline," he said. 

The App provides Deutsche Telekom customers with a digital assistant; the CIO explains how it can identify if a customer's router is too far away from the device, and thus impacting the connection. 

"It is able to make real-time recommendations on how you could improve your own network because of the knowledge about the customer," Donnay said.

That customer insight is possible because of the high levels of engagement, with two million users who regularly use the service. 

"In Germany, we have customers coming to the App on a weekly basis, and we are pretty proud of that. They are coming to get recommendations, but also concert tickets.” 

This demand meant the App could not fail, because if it did, then all the good work on improving engagement would unravel. 

"Customers are coming onto your system to check their bills and believe me, Germans are pretty picky at checking their bills, you can expect a peak load," Donnay said.

An infrastructure modernization delivered alongside the new App was also central to the digital transformation taking place. Deutsche Telekom has been moving to software-defined networks and increased its use of application programming interfaces (API) to provide more connections to partner services. This will ensure the firm can meet consumer demand for a high-speed network at home and on the move while business customers are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Moving Forward with Cloud Native Technologies

Deutsche Telekom is moving to a cloud-native IT infrastructure, using microservices and APIs in a mix of AWS and Google Cloud Platform hosting that will provide flexibility. Along the way, Deutsche Telekom has had to decouple legacy systems. Donnay explained that decoupling can lead to organizations losing their end-to-end view of the technology estate and services. This creates risks of service downtime and poor customer service.

To avert that situation, Deutsche Telekom has implemented a monitoring system from Nutanix partner Dynatrace. 

"We felt that the tools we had from the past were not helping, and we really needed to shift gears," Donnay said. 

“To assess our IT landscape, we would have to review six to seven individual applications across three to four different cloud infrastructures. Dynatrace's platform allowed us to bring all this information together in a single source of truth to allow our teams to resolve problems early and quickly. More than 70% of our applications are in various clouds, and there's no human that can have a complete view across all of them."

Multiple teams collaborated and understood the connection between technical monitoring and the impact on customers and business processes. Donnay explained that root cause analysis (RCA) has been reduced from 3.3 hours to an hour, and the mean time to resolve an issue is also down from four to one hour, which means customers face less downtime.

Looking ahead, Donnay sees observability as the way for Deutsche Telekom to develop AIOps, and further improve its operations and customer service. 

"We would like to move away from having an incident and fixing it fast to avoiding the incident,” he said. “So we are extending the platform to our service management through a set of pilots. We also want to think about cases for auto-remediation." 

In this case, the technology platform would roll-back to a previous iteration without human intervention and ensure the service the customer receives is seamless. 

By focusing on the needs of the customer, Deutsche Telekom has modernised its cloud computing infrastructure and pulled off the holy grail for utility companies, increasing customer interaction and loyalty.