2014 Gold Best Data Strategy

Client Telefonica UK

How did the campaign make a difference? Having invested significantly in shifting the focus of business from acquisition to the retention and growth of existing customers, it was key for O2 to demonstrate the financial impact of this strategy change. Research showed that customers didn’t understand the need for other products and were frustrated by having to repeat themselves when staff had no record of conversations they’d had with other O2 representatives.

By joining up the data collected at each touchpoint to optimise simplicity, timeliness and relevance, O2 turned an upsell message into a personally tailored and highly beneficial recommendation – leading to a 69% take-up rate and an additional £187 million of revenue.

Strategy Data was critical to improving the relevance and effectiveness of the customer experience. O2 is an incredibly data rich organisation, but the volume of data and speed at which it is collected make analysis and real time channel integration particularly challenging. But the brand needed to make offers more tailored and empower staff with the knowledge to talk to customers more productively.

O2 started with inbound channels, able to use their Vision tool to deliver offers and piggy-back on systems and processes that were already in place without incurring any additional contact costs. It created a modelling datamart, crunching over 1000 pieces of information into a set of 150 core variables to power propensity models and activity triggers. This identified products of most benefit to the customer (whilst being profitable to O2). The models had the flexibility to upweight any business-critical products and included dynamic behavioural triggers, such as a customer calling a competitor’s number, to ensure timeliness.

Creativity Cynical consumers are wise to cross and up-sell attempts. The beauty of this approach was to present an upsell message from O2 as a personally tailored and highly beneficial recommendation by ensuring the simplicity, timeliness and relevance of the offer was always right. Straightforward in theory, but challenging in a sector that generates more transactional data in one minute than most brands generate in a month.

Offer were made easy for timepoor customers (and staff) to understand via direct messaging and clear interactions with retail and call centre staff. Touchpoints were joined up to improve timeliness – with systems updated in real-time so that IVR messages and call centre conversations agreed with the messaging a customer was currently seeing online. And offers were adapted to reflect customer behaviour and needs – the type of person they were, the devices they owned, their tariff, their length of custom, call behaviour, texts and data, usage triggers and response to previous campaigns and offers.

Results As relevance was crucial, offers were only served to customers when a clear and pertinent need was identified. In 2013, these strict parameters resulted in 31% of all contacts being served with an offer. And the take-up was astonishing – an incredible 69% of all offers were accepted. The value generated in one year from the products and services promoted (for a famously cutthroat, low loyalty sector) was a staggering £187 million.

The analytics that underpin Vision have been so successful that a similar approach is in development for outbound communications.