Accenture’s Derek Melvin and Velissarios Lataris share how the leading consultancy supports UK telco giant Virgin Media O2’s success
Accenture is one of the world’s leading IT and professional service organisations providing solutions and services across strategy consulting, digital technology and operations. It is widely regarded for its focus on technology and innovation and building lasting partnerships to deliver real business value.
Among the organisations Accenture works with are the world’s leading telecommunications and network providers, including a longstanding partnership with Virgin Media O2 (VMO2).
Accenture and VMO2: 20 years of collaboration
“As the pace of change increases and the need to be competitive is ever greater, we are helping our clients by working with the new and evolving technologies, including of course generative AI, and helping them to drive efficiencies, improve customer experience and drive and unlock new revenue,” says Derek Melvin, Managing Director in Accenture’s Communications, Media and Technology practice.
Accenture has a well-established and successful ongoing relationship with VM and O2 spanning more than 20 years, a relationship Derek and his Accenture colleagues are proud of. This includes playing pivotal roles in some of VMO2’s most critical business initiatives and programmes in that period, including the merging of Virgin Media and O2 three years ago.
Derek continues: “We’re currently working with VMO2 on a range of programmes spanning technology modernisation, commercial acceleration, optimisation of operations and, of course, their networks. What we’re trying to do is help them positively impact a number of areas such as improving customer experience and leveraging data and AI to better effect to drive results across VMO2.
“And it’s via this approach that we engage with Julian, VMO2’s Director of Technology and Service Operations, and his team. We’re helping them modernise their network, enable faster fault-to-fix resolutions and improve the experience for every single customer who is using the VMO2 network.”
This sentiment is echoed by Velissarios Lataris, Managing Director, leading Accenture’s networks business in the UK and Ireland.
“We’ve helped Julian and the wider network operations team to redefine and optimise their operating model in business operations and customer monitoring. We assessed these against our business best practices from a process technology, automation and people point of view.
“On the back of that activity, we defined a comprehensive set of transformation initiatives to enable data-driven automation, using tools like predictive analytics, AI, and Gen AI, while in parallel making sure that we don’t impact, in a negative way their customer experience, but in fact continuously improve it.”
In short, Accenture is working very closely with VMO2 to create a modern proactive and data-driven networks capability. And that, Velissarios adds, is what drives Accenture forward in its partnership with VMO2.
“We will continue building on the work that we have already delivered with Julian and his team to bring further innovation and automation to network operations,” he shares. “Our ultimate aim is always helping VMO2 to provide a better experience to its consumer and business customers.”
This will be rolled out with the aid of AI- and Gen AI- use cases to further increase efficiency, productivity and improve the operational response times to any customer facing issues and effectively drive towards a more unified operation to serve all of VMO2’s customers.
Derek, Velissarios and their wider teams at Accenture are also working across other areas at VMO2, including with its engineering teams, to improve the performance of VMO2’s mobile network and the overall customer experience. As well as this, Accenture and VMO2 have recently announced a partnership to deliver mobile private network solutions to enterprises across the UK.
Velissarios concludes: “As the UK mobile private networks market continues to grow, we will bring our expertise along with VMO2 to help UK businesses unlock the full potential of 5G.”
