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Vodafone Italia - Supporting credit management process through challenging times

Vodafone Italia has more than a third of the Italian market and is part of the worldwide Vodafone Group, the world's leading telecommunications company for mobile telephony. In Italy it delivers mobile and fixed line telephone and broadband services to more than 30 million customers.

Vodafone Italia has been a highly successful operation for nearly 20 years since it was launched in 1990. With more than 7,000 stores and coverage rates for Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) and General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) of 99.4% of the population of Italy, Vodafone is a highly established provider and market leader in Italy.

Vodafone and Experian have a strong history of working together having established an effective relation over ten years ago. During this period, Vodafone has developed its capabilities to enable credit and risk management to be central to the business' success. This meant that when the challenging financial conditions starting to alter the competitive landscape, Vodafone Italia already had the sophisticated credit management systems and processes in place to effectively respond to the challenges in the market.

Through the combination of Experian tools, Vodafone are able to constantly monitor the environment and quickly apply robust strategy improvements to manage the whole client lifecycle. Vodafone recognised the impact the changes in the economic environment would have on its business, including on bad debt rates and mandatory churn and responded appropriately, implementing Champion / Challenger strategies to evaluate and evolve new strategies for maximum performance.

In addition to change in global economic conditions, the mobile telephone and internet market has changed beyond recognition. Increasingly sophisticated handsets, services and third party content increasing the average bill, as well as higher operating costs has meant that there is now a higher risk associated with the more valuable products and services.

This gave the organisation a challenging context to operate in. It needed to ensure it could continue to maximise acceptance rates and keep mandatory deactivation rates to a minimum while reducing the cost of bad debt and credit losses.

Vodafone Italia has comprehensive processes in place to meet these complex challenges. The organisation has a common platform for risk management as Experian's application processing system, Transact SM and the customer management system, Probe SM, use Strategy Management technology, giving Vodafone Italia the power to govern credit risk management across the organisation.

Maximising acceptance rates with a robust and rapid registration process and minimising mandatory deactivation rates with effective limit management and collections strategies have been key objectives in Vodafone Italia's drive to maintain market share and increase its competitiveness in the quickly evolving market of telecommunications.

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