Delivering an exceptional customer experience is challenging for companies with a broad product portfolio, multi-market presence, and globally distributed teams. Business leaders in technical roles must balance the seamless delivery of digital products and services while fostering a culture of empowerment that allows teams to focus on innovation.

Vodafone, a Global 500 telecommunications company in Europe and Africa, serves over 320 million mobile customers across 21 markets¹. By investing heavily in software engineers and adopting leading engineering practices, Vodafone has turned its geographical scale into a competitive advantage, launching products 50% faster across multiple countries².

I sat down with Ahmed Elsayed, UK CIO & Digital Engineering Director at Vodafone, to discuss his experience unifying a global engineering team to streamline the development and deployment of digital products and services to ensure an exceptional customer experience.

Ahmed, you lead over 1,000 software engineers across 12 countries in Europe. Can you share how your engineering strategy has evolved over the past few years and the journey you’re on today to deliver digital products and services at Vodafone?

At Vodafone, we work every day to provide the best experience to our customers. A few years ago, we recognized the need to refresh our online channels to better align with our customers’ daily lives. We were buying all of our technology, and it was difficult to co-create and get the right velocity of delivery. We decided to take control of our future and build more in-house.

Initially, we developed software country by country. The Vodafone app, for example, looked similar across locations but was actually built 12 times in Europe. We realized there was a better way to maximize engineering productivity and scale our projects globally.

We came together as one global technology team and moved to a ‘build once, deploy many’ philosophy. And we focused on doing this in a seamless, zero-touch way to enable a high delivery velocity while ensuring customer availability across all of our services.

How has your engineering strategy impacted the customer experience?

Incidents will happen, but we owe it to our customers to recover quickly. We also focus on simplifying the customer journey. We know that their time is super important, and we don’t want them to struggle to find information on our website or go through multiple steps to buy a product. By prioritizing availability and the user journey, our customers directly experience the benefits.

What has been the benefit of Vodafone focusing on the customer experience?

Offering seamless digital journeys and high availability to our customers directly results in a lower churn rate. Customers stay with us, helping to protect and grow revenue.

For example, some of our biggest trading days are when there is a new iPhone launch. Peak traffic causes many company websites to go down. For the last launch, we were 100% available across the whole pre-order period and even the latency was almost nil—we’re super proud of that. Customers really felt the same experience they would get on a normal day. And the outcome for Vodafone was more than our fair share of the market for iPhone purchases and new contracts activated.

We’ve discussed the importance of cultivating an exceptional engineering culture. How does this help your teams remain focused on innovation and customer experience?

We want our engineers to be customer advocates. For that to happen, they need to be close to our customers. And to enable that, we need to offload tasks that can be automated so they can spend more time understanding our customers, innovating, and building.

We’ve adopted this pipeline-driven organization approach to automate and standardize the tools on the software cycle. This frees our software developers to focus on building more features for our customers, ultimately delivering a better experience.

And your ‘build once, deploy many’ model helps scale this even further, correct?

Exactly. The beauty of operating in multiple markets is that you can get innovation from all across. For example, our colleagues in Italy have successfully integrated observability into many of our products. They call it Pizza Connection. And, our colleagues in Portugal have built great reusable components that are now benefitting multiple markets.

By sharing our knowledge globally, we enable engineers to reuse and build upon existing code. We call this technology as a service, which brings all of this automation—especially on the infrastructure level—into one end-to-end platform. Developers can start coding and go live on day one because the platform creates the end-to-end setup for them.

By leveraging automation, we’re significantly enhancing efficiency across our company, accelerating the delivery of new products, and improving our operations—all leading to better stability.

What role has PagerDuty played in supporting your teams on this journey?

At the core of an outstanding customer experience is our operational stability. To achieve operational stability, you need to have the right partners. PagerDuty was one of the partners we chose that aligns well with our strategy and culture.

As a pipeline-driven organization, we need technologies that can be automated as code. I can have a great incident management solution, but it’s not efficient if my teams have to configure it manually each time. This has been one big success working with PagerDuty.

If we really want to bring everyone closer to the customers, then it’s important that we act as one. The beauty of PagerDuty is that it provides visibility—whether the dev, the ops, or the security team—into our entire ecosystem. It democratizes the knowledge around the incident, and ensures everyone is up to date at the right time. Generally we detect and resolve problems quickly.

Later, our developers can learn from previous incidents and ensure resilience and stability by design when building code on any future products. Thanks to the benefits we got from PagerDuty, we’re able to advance the collaboration across the team with the customer lens on top.

Can you share an example of a time PagerDuty played a critical role at Vodafone?

PagerDuty is integrated with our logistics system, Cavendish, which is fully built in-house. We deployed before one of our big trading days, and detected a problem at 5:00am. We sorted it before 8:00am, and that’s thanks to PagerDuty. If that didn’t happen, we estimate we would have lost 6 million pounds during that very high trading day.

What impact can AI have as part of your digital operations?

With incident management, people usually focus on how to recover. But what’s also interesting is after an incident—using AI technologies—can I correlate previous incidents and develop auto recovery for future incidents? Can I reach a state where I proactively detect a problem before it impacts our customers? That’s the beauty with AIOps—the ability to understand the future, prepare the team better, and avoid as many incidents as possible.

With AIOps, I imagine that we reach a state where our ops teams are actually automation engineers. Rather than managing the fire, they would build the right automation so it never happens at all. Maybe a few quarters from now, we won’t be discussing how many incidents we had or the mean time to recover, but how many incidents were avoided. We’ll become more predictive.

What advice do you have for companies that are going through a similar journey?

Maybe I’m biased as a software developer, but sometimes it’s better to build rather than to buy. Many companies have bought technologies over the years, making it difficult to co-create and understand the needs of their customers. If something is related to your core value stream, I recommend building so you can deliver the right value to your customers.

But with that, choose the right partners. There’s a cultural shift when you move from managing technology to actually building it. You need partners whose technology you use, and with whom you share a common cultural understanding, and who challenge you to improve your engineering strategy and culture.

^{1 https://www.vodafone.com/about-vodafone/who-we-are
2 https://www.vodafone.com/news/technology-news/7000-new-software-engineers}