Saicom Voice Services
Brief from client
Due to covid’s impact on Work From Home (WFH) policies, Saicom’s mobility business has been growing exponentially.
Saicom needed a way for clients to manage their remote workforce’s bandwidth effectively, so that clients could keep their costs optimised and avoid bill-shock surprises at the end of the month.
How we solved it
Zero One handled this challenge by tackling the problem from multiple perspectives:
- How does Saicom onboard large tranches of new network users effectively?
- How do customers stay on top of usage and take appropriate action quickly?
- How do customers inspect and understand usage placed on the network?
- How do customers manage their users in bulk once they’re all live?
What we built
- To handle customers staying on top of their usage, we built a multi-channel notification system that can take any form of notification, i.e. when a user’s network cap is breached, and deliver it over one or more mediums. Technologies supported are listed below, with more to follow soon:
- SMS
- Push notifications to a mobile device
- In order for customers to understand their usage, we overhauled their current data collection system that collected data at the granularity of a month. Data collected now has one hour granularity, and the ability to drill down into an hour and inspect the applications used during that hour.
- For Saicom to manage large swathes of incoming new users, we built a suite of bulk management tools that allow internal Saicom administrators to fill out spreadsheets which are then pushed through Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) pipelines which bootstrap data into their systems in a clean and efficient manner.
- When customers need to manage their own users in bulk, we leverage similar ETL pipelines that offer secure and constrained client-facing functionality which perform tasks such as locking or unlocking users, renaming users, and applying bandwidth topups.
Some interesting statistics
- On an average month, the stats collection system processes over 115 Terabytes of data from nearly 1 million user sessions.
- Over 40 thousand alerts have been sent via the notification system.
- Data is collected, normalised, and aggregated from all major South Africa cellular companies, Vodacom, MTN, Telkom Mobile, and Cell C.
