Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

This article was orginally published by the Dallas Business Journal and can be viewed in full here

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) has spent two years working on a concerted effort to leverage the big data it collects to improve both its internal processes and provide better external solutions.

The company founded its Big Data Center of Excellence, which comprises data scientists, experts and professionals that aim to create solutions that will improve products, offerings and processes.

“Most people know us as a service provider but not everyone knows us as an innovator,” AT&T spokesman Dan Feldstein said. “It doesn’t just help AT&T, it helps others, too.”

AT&T has a unique advantage, said Victor Nilson, senior vice president of AT&T’s big data division, as the company has a rich supply of data to leverage for analytics and development.

“It used to be a company that it was too big to go fast,” Nilson said. “Now, we can take massive data points and take learning points from it because we have so much data.”

So, the company leverages the data it collects to create opportunities within predictive analytics across its internal processes and for its customers.

It can use predictive analytics to take better care of customers’ equipment before a problem arises, improve customer care communications and save hundreds of thousands of dollars by identifying systems that could soon fail.

AT&T already monitors customer equipment in real time, so that its units can identify that, for example, a U-verse set top box is rebooting in the middle of the night or close to failing. With big data, it can use correlated data points to determine when a failure might occur and get in contact with that customer before service is impacted.

Similarly, when a customer calls in, AT&T aims to make the process painless. By using big data, it aims to cut out some of the unnecessary steps to solve the problem more efficiently, Nilson said.

But the company doesn’t only leverage big data for its customers. It uses it to improve its own operations.

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