The never-ending race for the best digital customer experience has taken its next interesting turn in UK Telco - this time for Cloud Technology Strategies. BT EE announced their renewal of AWS agreements in August, while major rivals VodafoneThree previously committed to Azure. Naturally, this is going to create "different" technology future for both (at least short-term until an open-source future achieves truly advanced democratised sophistication).
So, let's make some predictions for how these technology decisions will impact digital customer experiences and network-service leadership. Being bold, let's look at who will "win" the race in the immediate future!
Digital Customer Experience (CX)
VodafoneThree’s Azure AI integration will supercharge conversational interfaces. They already have the powerful TOBi chatbot (which we've built with Vodafone back in 2018). An enhanced chatbot powered by Azure OpenAI will be able to handle complex queries more intuitively, perceptively, and naturally – backed by deep personalisation.
The deployment of "SuperAgent” human care agents will reduce customer servicing wait times and drastically increase first-contact resolutions, through an ability to surface context-rich insights, in as near to real time as possible!
BT EE’s AWS-backed microservices will modernise the digital front end. Cloud-native APIs, following TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture, will unlock new features like a one-click service upgrade, which will facilitate faster service roll and higher reliability.
AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and data lakes can harmoniously unify customer profiles, meaning a greater ease of delivering hyper-personalised portal experiences.
Who is ahead in the Digital CX race? VodafoneThree will nudge ahead with their AI-driven personalisation, but BT EE will close the gap through agile microservices and rapid feature releases.
We should remember though, VodafoneThree has reputational strength in agile, microservices-driven digital releases - something our MMT team has made significant contribution to. Over the past few years, Vodafone (now merged with Three) have significantly invested in CX enablement in both their operating model (i.e. cross-functional squads that own slices of the customer journey) and crafted a highly advanced tech infrastructure that unlocks incredible speed to market, and a rapid service evolution capability.
Network Resilience and Automation
VodafoneThree VodafoneThree's migration of virtual data centres to Azure will significantly improve global coverage.
This, as and when supported by investment and smooth integration into physical infrastructure across legacy systems, will unlock a more robust network self-healing capability.
Azure’s distributed PoPs will open up and elevate peering options, but deeply advanced telco automation tools are still maturing, which could limit immediate benefit realisation.
BT EE BT EE's capabilities in AWS machine learning and Generative AI will drive a self-healing network roadmap that has the potential to anticipate faults before customers even notice.
Embedding AWS into both their Core and RAN will accelerate autonomous load-balancing, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of predictive maintenance.
Who is ahead in the Network Reliability race? BT EE may just have the slight lead at present, but will need to leverage AWS’s mature operational AI and edge-optimised services to stay on top. Importantly, we should note that Vodafone is not really second here, it is pretty even - as is the case across most of UK Telco. Considering the importance of network reliability for building customer loyalty, Telcos double down on this area and invest heavily, so everyone is running at a good comparative pace.
Innovation Velocity
VodafoneThree VodafoneThree's 10-year, $1.5 billion partnership between two of the leading UK telco brands, will surely unlock a culturally-enabled, supercharged joint R&D on IoT, cross-continental capability expansions, and open APIs for third-party developers.
The cross-selling of Azure services to Vodafone enterprise customers could create opportunities for significant growth and accelerate solution roll-out across hundreds of millions of customers, across the globe.
BT EE BT EE's five-year AWS ProServe engagement will unlock a great ability to modernise legacy stacks into microservices, which will shorten development cycles from months to weeks (we know this works, MMT have supported Vodafone in achieving this!).
Access to AWS Wavelength and 5G edge computing promises to deliver newer, low-latency services for gaming, AR/VR tools, and ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC).
Who is ahead in the innovation velocity race? Vodafone is currently well positioned. They have already got a Tech infrastructure that unlocks rapid prototyping. When you deepen this with Azure, this creates scale with cross-continental potential. BT EE could look to close the gap with a true commitment to an agile, microservices-first strategy.
Who is winning the race, overall?
Customers. Healthy competition is already driving faster roll-outs, more capable, feature-rich and effective self-service. Moreover, increasingly reliable networks are being realised across the board. The UK telco landscape is entering a new era of digital and operational excellence, regardless of the technology and cloud strategies. This will only make life better, and will make the experience more resonant and meaningful for the end customer. Naturally, if we look ahead, VodafoneThree and BT EE will increasingly blur lines between network and application, as they look to flow and integrate AI automations across more touchpoints. From a tech perspective, we might expect to see convergence of telco-grade Kubernetes platforms (e.g., Azure AKS, AWS EKS) powering real-time network analytics. The deciding factor in the race, long-term, may be which ecosystem can cultivate the largest, thriving developer community and partner network - in pursuit of unlocking real-world, end customer-facing innovations.
