Telefonica O2 Slovakia

Organization

Telefónica Slovakia, part of the Spanish group Telefónica Europe, is a mobile service provider occupying the challenger market position in Slovakia under the O2 brand. Introduced as the third mobile services operator into the Slovak telecommunications market in 2007, Telefónica held a count of 1.1 million active mobile subscribers in December 2011 and rising due to main company principles of customer approach: fairness, simplicity and transparency. These are highly valued among customers, helping Telefónica continuously achieve the highest Customer Satisfaction Index among all competing operators.

Challenge – Increased Customer Convenience

As part of its online company strategy, Telefónica Slovakia decided to replace its legacy proprietary PHP solution with a next generation self- service platform (ePortal) offering a comprehensive range of functionality to their mobile subscribers. The ePortal project was driven by the following objectives:

• Transformation into a customer-centric organization
• A value proposition that focused on simplicity and convenience through multi-channel access and cross channel distribution, to increase customer convenience and thus loyalty
• Extend its online service offering via consolidation and integration of all its online portals into a single framework and point of access for its customers
• Move customer service management traffic from costly call centres to the online self-service space
• Shorten time to market by introducing modern portal technologies designed for rapid new services implementation

Liferay emerged as the most suitable technological fit to meet the project business goals, and the Emeldi Group was selected by Telefónica as Liferay implementation partner to deliver the portal.

In addition to the original project goals, he following challenges needed to be addressed:

• Maintain continuous operation of the existing applications, as opposed to employing a big bang approach
• Execute a seamless cut-over of the portal integration to a newly introduced CRM backend system

Challenge – Increased Online Sales

An equally important part of Telefónica new business transformation was to enhance its online sales channels capabilities with the goal to significantly increase online sales’ share of Telefónica’s overall revenue.

Emeldi Commerce® – Enterprise Portal Suite; a comprehensive Java-based full-fledged enterprise e-commerce solution aimed for deployment into tier-1 telecom, banking, & utilities enterprise service providers. The key decision factors behind the introduction of Emeldi Commerce® – Enterprise Portal Suite were:

• Ready-made ecommerce product fully deployable into Liferay, requiring only local customization to Telefónica lines of business
• Enhance customer experience
• Simplified and standardized 3rd party integration
• Ability to upgrade and further develop the solution and solution flexibility
• Targeting a new category of clients (“digital natives”) with advanced web 2.0 functionality and targeted marketing campaigns
• Improve online product availability
• Utilize synergy of single framework for ePortal (self-service) and Emeldi Commerce® (ecommerce)

Resolution

A wide range of portals were evaluated for optimal fit to drive Telefónica’s new online landscape, however, following an lengthy feasibility study, Liferay emerged as the most suitable technology due to the following factors:

• State-of-the-art in front-end layer and rich on features
• Easy integration with J2EE, group development standard
• Optimal fit into landscape and total cost of ownership

Throughout the project delivery, the choice of portal platform proved to be correct, as Liferay was able to perfectly fulfill both business and technological expectations and overcome all challenges encountered along the way.

Following the initial successful deployment of ePortal’s Liferay framework and self-care functionality, the next step was taken to greatly enhance Telefónica’s ecommerce capabilities and deploy a fully integrated and customized installation of Emeldi Commerce® – Enterprise Portal Suite into Telefónica’s portal platform.

Business value added

Following the successful deployment of ePortal integrated with Emeldi Commerce®, Telefónica has continued to work with Liferay and their implementation partner the Emeldi Group on new development and enhancements on their portal framework. Today Liferay and Emeldi provide and support the entire enterprise portal framework for Telefónica reinforcing its competitive edge on the telecommunications marketplace in the Slovak Republic.