How VodafoneZiggo Reduces Customer Churn and Increases Engagement Using Real-Time Data

About the Company

VodafoneZiggo is a Dutch Telco company that provides fixed, mobile and integrated communication and entertainment services to consumers and businesses. VodafoneZiggo is a joint venture of Liberty Global (the largest international TV and broadband internet company) and Vodafone Group (one of the world's largest telecommunications companies). In 2021, VodafoneZiggo was Marketing Company of the year. And last year, VodafoneZiggo won two DDMA Dutch CRO Awards for their dedication to more data-driven decision making and experimentation.

Challenges

VodafoneZiggo is an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and telecommunications company that is focused on bringing joy and progress with every connection. To achieve this goal, they needed to unify their customer data from across various external systems, like CRM, and from offline sources. Without a single source of customer data, VodafoneZiggo knew whether someone was a customer but couldn’t act in real-time if a customer was currently looking for a new phone, was unhappy with their current service, or take advantage of an opportunity to promote specific offers.

Solutions

Customer Acquisition and Targeting

Product Recommendations

Using BlueConic, VodafoneZiggo’s conversion rate optimization (CRO) team created an end-to-end product recommendation experience, boosting phone sales and Priority ticket/reward sales (football matches, events, etc.) – all without requiring additional help from technical or marketing teams, who used to manually update recommendations periodically.

To increase phone sales, they used BlueConic’s out-of-the-box feature to identify the operating system (OS) a customer was using to access their website. To start, they uploaded their products to BlueConic’s product store to enable product recommendations. Knowing customers were likely to purchase the same type (iPhone, Android) of phone again, they personalized customers’ shopping experience by only showing them phones with the same OS.

However, if a customer used a different OS to browse the website, product recommendations dynamically updated to show recently browsed devices. Using the JavaScript front end API from BlueConic, VodafoneZiggo showed phones to customers based on what was in stock and their interests. VodafoneZiggo could easily expand the product recommendations to their “hollandsnieuwe” mobile brands, a no frills brand for mobile phones and subscriptions in the Netherlands, and the Priority Platform, an exclusive platform for customers to buy tickets to football matches and events.

Within three to six months of launching product recommendations, VodafoneZiggo saw a 3.5% increase in clickthrough on the product carrousel for returning mobile visitors. For the B2B side of the business, they also saw a 2.26% increase on product detail page (PDP) visits and an 2.95% increase in add-to-carts. For B2C, there was a 17.6% increase in interactions for both returning and new visitors.

Within the Priority platform, VodafoneZiggo saw a 1.71% increase in clickthrough, 1.18% increase in PDP visits and a 1.41% increase in customers adding to cart. Not to mention, the IT team no longer had to update product recommendations manually, saving the team time and driving more relevancy for customers at their moment of need.

Targeting and Personalization across channels

With the wealth of customer data at their fingertips, VodafoneZiggo leverages BlueConic to optimize their targeting efforts. For example, using BlueConic profiles, segmentation, and connections, the company sends relevant segments to Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, Pega, Salesforce and other important systems and activate the data on the different platforms.

Additionally, with a goal of being more prescriptive on Facebook and increasing their ROAS, VodafoneZiggo leverages the Facebook Connection to send segments into custom audiences in Facebook. Because segments update in real-time, VodafoneZiggo suppresses ads for customers who have already purchased a new phone or renewed a subscription. While they used to manually load data from the CRM systems at a dedicated cadence, segments are now flowing to Facebook automatically meaning the customer data is more accurate, up-to-date, and based on actual first-party behavior on their websites. VodafoneZiggo optimized their ad spend by using real-time, first-party data.

The flexibility of BlueConic further allowed VodafoneZiggo to power smarter customer interactions with a stackable promotion experience. Designing a multi-channel experience using a Dialogue plugin, they could trigger a smart content block that sent customer profile data to the front end to provide specific offers for specific prospects. This is the same approach they are using to build a smart customer support chat to prevent churn.

Customer Retention

Churn Prevention

VodafoneZiggo used churn probability scores brought in from the Advanced Analytics department for their internet business (Ziggo), which they use as their real-time Digital Churn Trigger model. Connecting the churn score to BlueConic profiles, they could automatically route at-risk customers to chat with customer support specialists online. Using this method, they saw a 4.53% reduction in churn in relation to the control group, 7.14% increase in chats, decreased web-to-call by 7.14%. By reaching the right customers and resolving their issues, customer satisfaction increased which led to saved revenue. VodafoneZiggo won a DDMA award with this use case.

Results

VodafoneZiggo relied on BlueConic unified profiles to understand customer preferences, capabilities to easily segment their audiences, and connections to target customers and households across channels with real-time data. Using product recommendations onsite, they saw an increase in CTR, PDP visits, and add-to carts for all use cases. By sending segments via BlueConic to Facebook, they improved their ROAS. To redirect customers who were likely to churn to their customer support specialists via chat, they reduced customer churn by 4.53% and call volume, leading to significant revenue savings.