Data Engineer
Data Engineer
Data & Insights Tribe
Works in Utrecht and from home
Lives in Volendam
Worked for VodafoneZiggo since 2015
VodafoneZiggo colleagues knock on Gerrie Veerman's door in droves. For a cup of coffee and a chat, but for data in particular. Gerrie collates the millions of incoming bits and bytes from customers into straightforward datasets that provide an insight into how they use our products and services. “Combining data and establishing links in such a vast ocean, organising it into something that can be easily understood - it's a real challenge and great fun."
"Many companies source data only from their websites and CRM systems. VodafoneZiggo is in the fortunate position of having several more sources of information: think shops and apps, but also media boxes and underground cables. My team brings all those different, often large data streams - anonymised, of course - together in a single, central location, so that we can distil from them smaller datasets that we supply to other business units and departments. People in all parts of the company are becoming increasingly aware of the power of data, and that awareness breeds creativity and they ask, 'Would this or that be technically feasible?' Invariably it is - only it does often require coming up with a novel architecture to extract the specific information desired. Precisely that is what makes my job as Data Engineer so varied and versatile."
"Our team has grown tremendously in the past four years. I was one of its founding members and rolled naturally into a coordinating role. I evaluate and appraise setup designs, and offer advice where appropriate on how things can be done better. Our whole team has a shared and very motivating can-do attitude and we all like to get our hands dirty and don't like to keep people waiting. We start each morning with a stand-up - what you did yesterday; what are your plans today? - which is really conducive to maintaining the team spirit and staying connected to each other, especially in times like these. It energises us, too, and it's become a bit of a tradition to ring off with a 'Go-go-go!'"
"Our business unit has several feature teams that are more business driven. One such team is concerned with network-monitoring data, for instance, another with wifi issues and another with something else again. The wonderful thing about our work is that we can combine the data from all those different sources and as a result, draw better conclusions about developments of direct concern to the company. Poor wifi signals, for instance, might well be directly correlated to customers cancelling their accounts. That's the kind of information that leads to decisions, policy and action that truly is data driven."
"In the cloud, applications are managed differently. All the infrastructure is driven by code, meaning that you can copy your services and switch them on and off with a couple of mouse clicks. And that's ideal! The demands and requirements placed on our software are ever increasing and everything needs to be more readily and accurately accessible. Since we migrated our platform to the cloud, our whole operation has become much more versatile and resilient. We can now easily scale up or down in response to peaks and troughs in demand, for instance, just like the Spotifys and Netflixes of this world."
"Another cool development: we're using more and more real-time information. We recently piloted a link to the Ziggo website to analyse visitor behaviour in real time and it was a great success. You might see that a customer appears lost, for instance, and can then activate a pop-up chatbot to help them find what they're looking for. And if customers are logged in, it's possible to offer even better, targeted assistance based on their personal details. Has someone phoned us a number of times? Then we can offer quicker support through the chat.
"I'm a back-end employee, obviously, and I have no direct contact with customers, but it's really nice to be able to tell from data that a customer has been given what they came for and is satisfied."
