Vodafone strengthens client experience with MRI Contract Intelligence

Vodafone is the largest pan-European and African telecommunications company, delivering mobile services to over 320 million customers and fixed services reaching 28 million customers across more than 170 countries. Over 7 million organisations worldwide use Vodafone’s business services, spanning the energy and utilities, logistics and transport, insurance, automotive, retail and manufacturing industries. 

Managing telecom user contracts is incredibly complex – and incredibly challenging. Telecoms serve millions of users worldwide, with B2B telecommunication service agreements containing a broad range of pricing and billing structures. What’s more, these contracts are always changing, with service terms and costs evolving to match customer needs and market trends over the long term. 

To ensure accurate invoicing and provide the best possible client experience, telecoms must align billing information with a client’s unique contract terms. But contracts are often stored across disparate systems, with loads of unstructured data getting entered into billing software. Without proper organisation, the risk of data inaccuracies increases. (One study showed contract error rates as high as 20%.) Over time, even small errors compound into major discrepancies, increasing the risk for incorrect billing and impacting the client experience. 

Fragmented data also creates challenges for telecom business users, who can’t keep up to date with contract commitments such as expiry dates and renewals. When a payment or renewal date goes unnoticed, the result can be unexpected bills – and unhappy customers. 

Increasing contract accuracy with automated data capture and verification

Fortunately, Vodafone knew how to sidestep these telecom industry issues: investing in a centralised contract repository with structured, accessible data. To begin this digitisation journey, Vodafone turned to MRI Contract Intelligence to help unify and verify its data and enable more visibility into contracts.  

MRI Contract Intelligence is an Artificial Intelligence-driven abstraction solution that extracts key data from documents quickly and efficiently. Manually auditing contracts clause-by-clause is very time-consuming and costly – and still runs the risk of human error. Based on MRI Software’s experience with supporting telecoms, Vodafone knew MRI Contract Intelligence would create smoother processes for reviewing contracts by validating and organising the contract data.  

The process began by capturing and validating contract data. MRI Contract Intelligence digitised over 30,000 Vodafone contracts using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and proprietary AI technology to scan and upload vast quantities of B2B contract data. From there, the solution could manage new contract intake, ensuring clean, trustworthy data across Vodafone’s contracts. The solution puts structured, accurate information at Vodafone’s fingertips – without the extra time, risk and workforce required by manual data abstraction. 

Vodafone then used MRI Contract Intelligence to automate the contract audit process. The AI-powered automation uses natural language processing, pattern recognition and layout detection to find relevant contract data out of context. The functionality is paired with two-step human validation, ensuring high-quality data. 

MRI Contract Intelligence makes it easy for Vodafone to centralise its contract data. Users can track and manage all contracts in one place, creating a single source of truth. What’s more, getting relevant contract data no longer takes hours of searching – everything is accessible at the click of a button. As MRI’s other telecom clients have seen, the capture and verification of data helps teams across the organisation create more accurate reports and uncover insights into contract data. Vodafone continues to strengthen customer relationships and make better data-driven business decisions. 

Levelling up with automated contract intelligence

Vodafone has realized several business benefits since implementing MRI Contract Intelligence, including: 

• Superior customer experience: Vodafone can reach its customers more easily, proactively notifying them about upcoming renewals and expiry dates as well as service usage. Having all the contract data in one place also makes it simple for customers to find, review and understand their contract commitments.  
• Lower costs: MRI Contract Intelligence helped Vodafone reduce its contract management costs. For example, internal teams spend less time searching for and managing contracts, focussing instead on other value-creating tasks. The automated contract intelligence process also increases contract data accuracy and reliability. 
• Better decision making: Vodafone uses MRI Contract Intelligence to make smarter business decisions. Using the insights gained from the solution’s analytics, product managers have evolved offerings and pricing to perfectly match their customers’ needs, boosting sales and revenue. 

By digitising and managing its contract management process through MRI Contract Intelligence, Vodafone has increased the momentum of its digitisation journey while becoming more agile as an organisation – and that means stronger customer relationships and more value for stakeholders. 

Now our contracts are a digital asset that produces actionable, data-driven insights instead of hidden, inaccessible information.

Sebastian Milczanowski, Head of Group Business Assurance, Vodafone