In the crowded telecommunications market where customer loyalty is critical, today’s businesses must excel at using the full power of digital channels to connect with customers and remain relevant. Industry giant Vodafone understands that customers expect highly personalized experiences that appeal directly to them, and that help the Vodafone brand stand out among the competition.

For Will Harmer, Global Product Owner, Digital Marketing at Vodafone, this translates to a need for the company to have a deep understanding of what its customers want. By measuring customer behavioral data, marketers, product teams, web teams, and other groups can gain insights into customers’ needs so they can address them and create a more positive impression of the brand.

“As the world goes digital, teams across Vodafone need to be aware of how their roles are changing and becoming more data-centered,” says Harmer. “Everyone involved in customer experience should know how to look at data, form insights, and use those insights to optimize the experiences of our customers across digital channels.”

Adobe Experience Cloud solutions are the underlying technology that support the measurement, comprehension, and personalization of digital experiences at Vodafone. Adobe Analytics is central to understanding data and measuring all customer interactions and behaviors across the Vodafone mobile app and website. Adobe Audience Manager uses this data to segment Vodafone’s customers into audiences, which are used by Adobe Target to add customized web offers, timely push messages, and banners delivering relevant messages based on current phone, plan, and usage. Together, the Adobe Experience Cloud solutions provide insights to deliver personalized content and optimized messaging to customers — and to help Vodafone stay ahead in a highly competitive telecom industry.

Promoting understanding of customer data across teams

Harmer also believes that training is key to helping employees understand the intricacies of data and use Adobe solutions more effectively and productively. However, trying to scale training is no easy task. The company has nearly 100,000 employees worldwide. Harmer and his team of five support thousands of marketing users in regions around the world.

“Sometimes we would fly people to one of our training centers for a formal training session,” says Harmer. “Other times we would fly to an office to hold training sessions for a handful of employees. Traveling and training took up a lot of time, and people also spent a lot of time between sessions waiting for a chance to learn a new skill.”

When Harmer asked Adobe for advice on how to scale training, he was introduced to Adobe Experience League. With Adobe Experience League, Vodafone can deliver high-quality, self-service training to anyone at any time.

“With thousands of users of Adobe solutions, ensuring that everyone understands and is getting the most out of tools is a challenge,” says Harmer. “That’s why we turned to Adobe Experience League to accelerate our digital transformation and give everyone access to key skills around analytics, audience management, and personalization.”

Reaching more learners with Adobe Experience League

Vodafone has a strong learning culture. Through its enterprise learning management system (LMS), the Learning & Development team provides thoughtful lesson plans that help people at all levels to become more skilled and engaged employees.

“Our learning team needs to continuously evolve in terms of how we approach training in order to keep up with the agile, digital world that our employees are working in,” says Prachi Prasad, Learning & Development Lead – Commercial at Vodafone. “Adobe Experience League fits perfectly with our shift away from structured training bootcamps to more customizable, self-paced learning.”

With Adobe Experience League, learners can view learning content at any time and from any device and they get access to the most up to date content. More importantly, those learning modules are organized into learning paths. Employees know which learning path is the most relevant to their role and experience level, so they can take control of their learning and are motivated to engage on a deeper level with content curated just for them.

Prasad and the Learning & Development team created an even more individualized experience by curating Adobe Experience League courses into custom Vodafone learning paths and incorporating them into the company’s existing LMS. Vodafone created three categories of learning paths: analytics, personalization, and data management. Each of these paths has three skill levels — learner, practitioner, and expert.

When an employee logs into the Vodafone LMS, they can select the relevant curated learning path and the link will direct them to the Adobe Experience League modules. A digital marketer responsible for creating personalized experiences on the My Vodafone app, for example, might select the expert personalization learning path.

“By creating our own curated learning paths and tying them to our LMS, we gain visibility into how learners are adopting Adobe Experience League and continuing their learning journeys,” says Prasad. “So far, we’ve had excellent feedback and good completion rates from early adopters. People love how they can access quality education on demand and keep learning on their own time.”

Vodafone also adds assessments and gamification to the learning paths to encourage greater adoption. Working with Adobe consultants, Vodafone created assessments to track how employees are absorbing each lesson. After learners pass the assessments for all modules in a path, they are rewarded with a digital badge that they can share to social media platforms such as LinkedIn. This reward provides learners with a goal to strive for, while adding friendly competition that prompts colleagues to push themselves along their learning paths as well.

Upskilling more employees in less time

Kostas Chrysovitsiotis and his MarTech team were some of the first to work with Adobe Experience League at Vodafone. Many members of the MarTech team have strong marketing and data experience but are developing digital technology knowledge. Through Experience League, the team learned how Adobe technology contributes to customer experiences.

“Working with Adobe Experience League, our team gained the knowledge and skills to understand specific digital marketing needs in a third less time than waiting for in-person training,” says Chrysovitsiotis, MarTech Lead, Digital Channels at Vodafone. “This knowledge allowed us to give more valuable support to marketers by working faster and taking on more advanced use cases. It also reduced onboarding time, as I can point a trainee to Experience League instead of taking the time to walk them through basics.”

Chrysovitsiotis praises Experience League for the high quality of its courseware. According to him, videos are well-produced, and content is presented in a way that is easy to understand. Videos are also just long enough to convey all necessary information while still being short enough that learners can quickly take in a lesson whenever they have some extra time.

What’s more, Experience League offers value to more than just daily users of Adobe Experience Cloud. Vodafone also encourages leadership to take lessons and gain a basic understanding of how the solutions work. This promotes more agile marketing and advanced use cases as leaders better understand why marketers are choosing certain strategies and what is possible with Adobe Experience Cloud.

“Working with the team at Adobe, we’ve managed to upskill in weeks the same number of people that previously would have taken us months, and at no cost,” says Harmer. “This gives more employees the confidence and skills to analyze how customers are using our website and app and deliver rich experiences that drive business value.”

Driving ongoing digital learning

Vodafone plans to continue engaging more employees across the company with Adobe Experience League. While Vodafone has started with curated learning plans from Experience League, Harmer hopes that his team can begin adding in-house content as well, such as videos highlighting common Vodafone use cases on Adobe Experience Cloud solutions.

While Vodafone encourages employees to experiment with Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, it limits some functionality to prevent beginners from accidentally changing important reports or updating the website. Harmer is thinking of introducing the Adobe Experience League assessments as a requirement before permitting more advanced usage. For instance, an analyst might need to complete expert-level data management training before being allowed to purchase third-party data.

“In today’s world, everything is digital,” says Harmer. “I think it’s fantastic to have these free resources from Adobe to promote ongoing learning and drive greater usage of our Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. By better understanding data, we can make a huge impact on digital experiences for our customers.”

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