Telia Company Leverages AI to Deliver Personalized Experiences in Every Customer Lifecycle Stage

About Telia Company

Telia Company is a multinational telecommunications operator that offers mobile, broadband, fixed voice, and TV services to both consumers and businesses across its family of brands in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

Challenges

Telia’s marketing, analytics, ecommerce, and other business teams had bold ambitions for the retention and growth of their customer base across a variety of brands and products. But with their data sitting in silos, they were left with an incomplete picture of their customers. Like most multi-brand telecommunication companies, Telia’s impressive organic growth and acquisition activity resulted in mountains of fragmented customer data sitting in disconnected legacy technologies used by various parts of the organization. This challenge was compounded by the fact that they offer multiple products in multiple countries.

To execute on their customer-centric vision for the future, Telia needed to change the way their data & analytics organization operated in terms of process and technology. Only then would they be able to operate with the agility necessary to utilize a single view of the customer and immediately move from insight to action to deliver personalized experiences in real time. Using the right technology and implementation strategy, Telia could execute on their vision of “personalization at scale” – a philosophy that would allow them to put the customer at the center of everything they do.

Solutions

Unifying Data to Personalize at Scale Across the Lifecycle

Telia’s guiding vision is “personalization at scale” – the ability to truly tailor interactions with customers at every point in the lifecycle and use data to drive smarter customer engagement. With customers across multiple products and brands, each with its own tech stack, Telia relies on BlueConic’s named and universal connections and listeners to build individual profiles that can be used in activation channels. With unified profiles, Telia can use up-to-date data across brands, products, and systems, to understand where a particular customer or prospect is in their lifecycle and create dynamic segments using customers’ recent behaviors, interactions, their subscription renewal date, consent, customer scores, and more. Recognizing customers across systems and sources allows the Customer Service team, for example, to put the most relevant upsell offer in front of a customer calling for a renewal. Within the first 11 months, they were able to create millions of individual profiles of their prospects and customers.

Increasing Revenue with Cross-Sell and Upsell Orchestration & AI

To grow their business, Telia looked to increase revenue in a couple ways – gain more revenue from existing customers and reduce churn. Using BlueConic’s Lifecycles, Telia designed cross-sell and upsell experiences that met each customer where they were in their unique journey across a diverse set of touchpoints. Instead of relying on a rigid campaign structure, they used BlueConic to serve as the “brain” behind Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) to deliver smarter customer engagements in response to each individual across all channels – including email, web, SMS, and in-app.

For example, they tested new strategies that focused on converting TV customers to a premium package, cross-selling broadband customers to mobile, mobile to broadband, and TV to broadband based on customer behaviors and current subscriptions to grow revenue from existing customers. They were even able to offer family plan deals by using BlueConic’s groups and business users utilized AI Workbench to refresh deepselling models that drove more personalized offers and recommendations for additional products.

To reduce churn, Telia used rich BlueConic profile data, native personalization capabilities, and Lifecycles, to deliver personalized and automated offerings across email and web channels. This included subscription extension offers, upgrades, and value-added services like Spotify.

Compared with the traditional campaign structure and legacy tools, Telia saw 3X the conversion rate.

Reducing Business Team Reliance on Technical Teams

Telia knew that keeping up with today’s customer meant having access to unified, actionable first-party data. But in addition to having access to the data, they also knew their teams and processes couldn’t be bogged down by tasks that caused bottlenecks due to a lack of operational agility. By implementing BlueConic, it became much less complex to integrate large sets of data to build a single customer view because teams weren’t relying on manual processes. Additionally, multi-dimensional segments could easily be applied across all activation systems and platforms to create multi-channel targeted campaigns.

Ideas that were previously dismissed because the cost in time and/or budget to execute on them couldn’t be justified suddenly become not just possible, but the new way of working.

For example, native AI modeling capabilities meant that their business and marketing teams could now run sophisticated models without having to rely on a data scientist or technical team. The ability to also upload their own models means Telia’s data, analytics, and marketing teams are now partners and collaborators in the initiative, and they are no longer wasting time with manual list pulls for segmentation.

Additionally, the lifecycle orchestration capabilities in BlueConic enable Telia’s business teams to automate coordinated messaging in every stage of the customer lifecycles for cross-sell, upsell, and retention while truly driving value for the customer. They no longer need to manually program dozens of campaigns or hundreds of onsite messages to make “personalization at scale” become a reality. Now they have the flexibility and freedom to experiment more often and at scale. And they can adapt instantly and confidently when needed.

Results

Telia’s cross-sell and upsell conversion rates improved 3X after implementing BlueConic to unify data and activate it in their cross-channel lifecycle marketing programs.

Equally important, Telia transformed their business by rolling out an entirely new “way of working” framework that eliminated previous customer data bottlenecks and supported cross-functional collaboration, leading to outsized gains in operational efficiency across their data & analytics centers of excellence and the business teams they support. These efficiencies are saving the company tens of thousands of dollars per year.