In the space of just two years, Lebara has transformed its business strategy by utilising data. By shifting from prioritising offline volumes to online, digital-first data driven customer relationships the Lebara team delivered five times as much data in a 12-month period, increased the customer base by 44%, reduced churn by 15% and has increased the active online customer audience.
“Powerful demonstration of change driven by data and technology also referencing culture change and business change.” – Judges’ comment
Lebara started this transformation with no analytics team and a rudimentary KPI reporting warehouse – which is a common occurrence for small telecommunications businesses that have limited resources and budgets in a world of rapidly developing technologies. The business predominantly acquired customers through offline retail stores and had no ability to track or engage with customers, leading to a limited understanding of consumer needs, and could not tailor special offers to reward loyalty, creating shallow customer relationships. The legacy platform had no way to measure profitability, meaning an inability to focus on high value customers or understand how varying propositions impact margins. There were also sector-high churn rates, especially with new customers in France, leading to considerable revenue loss, but with no analysts within the business, there was a drastic limiting the capacity to generate insight and drive decisions with data.
The decision to move from a legacy on-site data warehouse to a cloud-based datalake created 5.3% uplift in active customers and nearly half a million Euros in additional value. Prior to migration, the siloed, outdated technologies reported only high-level KPIs, and the data pipelines lacked automation, resulting in decisions based on data up to 11 days out of date. Since shifting to the datalake, the new architecture provides five times the volume of data prepped for analytics, up-to-date data and a new analytics team of 15 members was formed.
Revenue has grown 39% year-on-year since the migration, the implementation of machine learning and proactive intervention reduced customer churn by 15% and the 44% increase in customers was complemented with a Trustpilot rating of 4.4 out of 5 across all markets, with a category leading score of 4.8 in the UK.
