As a mobile virtual network operator serving customers across Western Europe, Lebara faced the familiar pressures of the telecom sector: high churn, limited margins, and intense competition from larger rivals – but its biggest handicap was internal.
The company’s data estate was outdated and fragmented, limited to a ten-year-old on-premises warehouse that reported only top-level KPIs. Insights arrived with an 11-day lag, leaving leaders blind to emerging issues. With no data science team, engagement was one-size-fits-all. Churn in France was among the highest in the sector, and dissatisfaction showed in a Trustpilot score of just 1.9.
It was clear that to survive and grow, Lebara needed not just new systems, but a wholesale transformation of how it used data.
“Lebara’s transformation is a textbook example of strategic, enterprise-wide impact driven by data and AI… The cultural shift is clear, with senior leadership embedding data-driven decision-making throughout the business.” – Judges’ comments
The Steps to Thriving
Lebara’s leadership embraced analytics as the “single biggest differentiator” for the business. In under 18 months, they migrated to a Lakehouse architecture on Azure, using Databricks as the unified engine for processing and MLflow to manage the machine learning lifecycle.
This shift unlocked nearly five times more data for analysis, reduced reporting lag from 11 days to next-day and created the conditions for AI to be embedded in customer engagement. A new 15-strong analytics team (data scientists, analysts, and engineers) was formed to develop models, lead adoption of generative AI, and embed a culture of test-and-learn.
The transformation quickly moved beyond infrastructure:
- AI-driven chatbots now resolve more than 50% of enquiries, saving €2,500 per month in the Netherlands market alone.
- GenAI co-pilots assist call centre agents, cutting average handling times by 17 seconds in the UK and reducing compliance overheads.
- Natural language processing tools translate, summarise, and categorise reviews, helping operations teams to close customer pain points at speed.
The impact has been profound across customer experience and business performance:
- Customer Base Growth: Active customers up 44%, to more than 5 million.
- Shift to Digital: 66% of customers are now active online, up from 40% pre-transformation.
- Churn Reduction: Down 15%, where machine learning models predict and pre-empt attrition.
- Revenue Growth: UK net revenue rose 46% year-on-year in 2024.
- Customer Satisfaction: Trustpilot scores surged to 4.4 in France, from 1.9 just two years ago.
These improvements translate into nearly €500,000 of additional annual value, alongside significant efficiency gains.
A Cultural Shift
Perhaps most importantly, Lebara has made data central to strategy. What began as a technology overhaul has become a company-wide cultural transformation, with executives and front-line staff alike adopting a data-driven mindset.
As Chief Data Officer Matthew Crawley put it: “It’s not just an analytics transformation, it’s a business transformation. Everyone from the CEO down has embraced data from day one.”
For Lebara, the award for Transformation with Data (Europe) recognises not just improved metrics, but a reinvention of how a challenger telco can compete through agility, intelligence, and a relentless focus on the customer.
