Vodafone dials up its content operations with Contentful

Introduction

Candidly, we can all admit to getting a fizz of excitement from our phones now and again. Maybe it’s an off-key Happy Birthday phone call sung by a far-flung relative. Maybe it’s a social media notification from your best friend. Or maybe, it’s a phone call with a job offer from your future employer. 

These devices connect us with those who matter most and telecommunication companies like Vodafone, which boasts the largest network in the world, are to thank for this. The multinational company has been at the forefront of industry-wide advancements — from making the first mobile call in 1985 to sending the first text message in 1992, and now offering a reliable 5G network to support the latest phone models. Vodafone’s mission, “Connect for a better future,” and dedication to leveraging new technology are two forces driving these milestones and the service experienced by its 300 million customers.

In 2020, these forces came into play internally at Vodafone UK, one of the group’s 17 market-specific teams. Fed up with disjointed tools and manual processes that lead to inefficiencies and errors in content publication and management, the Engineering team decided to leverage new technologies to address such challenges.

More than streamlining processes within its operating group, the new solution, built largely with the Contentful Composable Content Platform, boasts a reusable architecture, enabling operating markets outside of the UK to borrow content and iterate on it, encouraging new company-wide connections and greater brand consistency.

Hanging up tired technology and disjointed systems

Like most companies, Covid-19 became a catalyst for the warranted technology change. As foot traffic in physical stores dwindled and web app use jumped 40%, it became clear: Digital was the primary route to attract and retain Vodafone UK customers, and enhancing these experiences would be key to remaining a leader in the space. 

While Vodafone’s omnichannel digital experiences were already expansive, the content served to each was stored in six different systems. All of these disconnected systems led to long hours of redundant content copying and pasting and cache-clearing for content editors and developers.

“We needed something to make our jobs easier and to unify both content and tone of voice across touchpoints — whether a customer is seeking support from Tobi, our chatbot, surfing our website for a new phone, updating account info on the mobile app, or discovering new phone models via in-store digital signage,” Robert Greville, Head of Web Engineering at Vodafone, shared.

Patching through a new, composable platform

The solution was twofold: Pare down those six systems and adopt a more user-friendly tool with automations to enhance speed and agility across marketing and ecommerce initiatives. The company’s main content management system wasn’t capable of addressing these, presenting the perfect opportunity to re-platform.

Vodafone UK developers were initially divided between a longstanding, well-known monolith, and Contentful, a more modern, composable solution. The benefits of Contentful, namely its decoupled architecture; reusable, structured content, and reliable customer support, made it the front-runner and encouraged Vodafone to pursue a proof of concept of the platform. 

“With support from Contentful, it took us about eight months to get the first 500 marketing pages live. We spent most of that time making sure our content types and content models were correct and ensuring the tool in place would offer real flexibility going forward,” Clare Jolly, a Senior Software Engineer who heavily supported Vodafone UK’s Contentful implementation, explained. 

Signaling new ways of working with fewer errors

Contentful has effectively replaced five of Vodafone UK’s six content tools, shrinking the company’s technical debt extensively and enhancing the speed with which teams can publish new content and update existing content across channels. 

A prime example of the extreme, but positive, change Contentful brought to Vodafone UK was its rollout of the iPhone 15 launch in September 2023. In years previous, Vodafone engineers and marketers spent weekends and evenings prepping for the launch, and despite all of this after-hours prep work, outages and errors still occurred.

In 2023, everything went smoothly. Contentful enabled teams to build content and schedule it for publication well in advance. Scheduled publishing worked so well that the new iPhone was available on Vodafone UK’s site before it made it to any other competitor’s site. 

Contentful’s automated caching was on full display for this event as well. Engineers didn’t have to manually clear caches as they once did for variation (e.g., color and model) of the new iPhone — which would take hours. With Contentful, it happened automatically.

Inviting more people to join the call to create content

Perhaps more important than enhancing speed to market and consolidating technical debt, Contentful is democratizing content creation and management. Creating, publishing, and editing content can be done without any code and little onboarding to learn how to use the platform. 

Non-technical team members with a heavy hand in content — marketers and merchandisers — can now own the projects they’re working on throughout the entire lifecycle from ideation to publication. The teams can be more responsive to customer feedback, changes in the market, and stay in lockstep, if not ahead, of competitors because they aren’t waiting for engineers to get content over the finish line. 

Feedback from these team members has been minimal but, according to Greville, this speaks volumes. Engineers are no longer tied up with content changes or seen as blockers for new marketing and ecommerce initiatives. They’ve been able to reconstitute their work hours to more skill-based tasks to develop applications that streamline content production and management further. For example, Jolly used the Contentful App Framework to build an app that allows non-technical team members to upload an image of a new product (e.g., a new phone model), and have it automatically create a new content entry with the information that needs to be populated, saving time and resources.

“We’ve actually had developers move to our team from other areas of the company because they want to work with Contentful,” Ana Pasparan, Software Engineering Manager, shared. “There is just a lot of flexibility in languages and frameworks, which lends itself to creativity.”

Going long-distance

Outside of enhancing internal content operations, Vodafone UK has developed a content library that other operating groups within the larger company can reuse and build off of to decrease redundancy and increase both brand consistency and trust with customers.

“With how our old CMS was set up, it was impossible to build and launch content for our own region, so having the bandwidth and tools to stabilize ourselves and then create things that can be used by other markets is sort of shocking — in the best way, of course,” Jolly quipped.

Vodafone Ireland is the first region to adopt the UK’s content model. As much as 80% of its content has been reused, making for a more cohesive brand experience and decreasing the number of resources used to update Vodafone Ireland’s digital experiences. 

Vodafone UK hopes that countries outside of Ireland will join the call to create content within Contentful, using their work as a launchpad and recalling the company’s mission to “Connect for a better future.”