From abandoned basket to satisfied purchase.

Growth through customer experiences

With over 45 million mobile lines and 2.3 million broadband lines, Telefónica Germany is one of Germany's leading integrated telecommunications providers. The company achieves strong growth by putting customer experiences at the centre of its business.

With its comprehensive range of mobile and fixed-network services for private and business customers as well as innovative digital solutions, Telefónica is well-positioned to help customers shape their digital lives.

Finding the value of customer data

Telefónica consumers have many ways to communicate with the brand about products and services. The company wanted to leverage data to improve customer experiences across all touchpoints, but first it needed a central platform to provide the same data for all channels.

Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Adobe Journey Optimizer serve as the core of Telefónica’s customer experience ecosystem by collecting, managing and disseminating customer data between interaction points. This enables customers to receive personalised messages at all touchpoints and seamlessly transition between stages of the customer journey.

With a data structure in place, the company can start building upon those insights. The company created a three-year plan to use the customer data more strategically, delivering data-driven experiences and personalisation at scale. To achieve its goals, the company decided to integrate its Adobe platform with Adobe Experience Manager Sites as a Cloud Service for content management and Adobe Target for A/B testing. Insights from testing help to optimise the website and provide customers with an even more intuitive search and user experience.

"Now that we have a seamless integrated Adobe platform to turn customer data into personalised content and experiences, we can finally concentrate on delivering true omnichannel marketing," says Dr Verena Grundke, Director Customer Marketing at Telefónica Germany.

Working with Adobe apps, Telefónica has a scalable data platform that can distribute the same customer information to all channels for consistent personalised messaging. The customer experience remains consistent across channels, resulting in a seamless journey that picks up across every contact point and channel.

From abandoned basket to purchase

Telefónica first used the platform to address the problem of shopping basket abandonment. Shopping journeys aren’t straightforward. Customers don’t always purchase offers that they place in their basket straightaway. While researching a new mobile phone contract, they might remember that they need a new phone case. They start shopping for phone cases while the phone contract is left forgotten in another browser tab. Telefónica adopted an omnichannel strategy with nine digital and analogue touchpoints to help all customers find their way to the checkout.

Customers receive co-ordinated messages through web banners and emails that remind them about the abandoned shopping basket. The customer can click the email to re-enter the shopping journey and finish purchasing the contract through the website. Telefónica has sent more than 100,000 personalised emails in the first year since launch. The company has also recently integrated SMS as a push channel and offers customers the option of concluding their contract via the recently completely rebuilt and relaunched app. In addition, the digital assistant AURA is able to provide customers with advice during their purchase.

The strategy does not limit itself to the digital channels. The centralised customer data also feeds into off-line customer service channels for a true omnichannel shopping journey. If the customer calls customer service, the call centre agent receives information about the contents of the shopping basket in real time through the call centre platform. The agent can advise the customer on next steps for a shopping journey started on the website.

The same thing happens with a customer visiting a retail location. Retail employees can see what products visitors placed in their online shopping basket. They can show customers products that they have in their baskets, such as encouraging them to see a new iPhone in person or answer questions about services. If customers leave the retail store without making a final purchase, the employee can record information about the intent to purchase that feeds back centrally to the AEP.

"This fusion of online and off-line shopping journeys, along with the ability to interact with customers as individuals, is what makes the Adobe solution so beneficial," says Dr Grundke. The success of the omnichannel strategy speaks for itself: 21% of all customers who abandoned their shopping basket came back within the first 30 days to place an order.

Defining a data-based strategy for the future

The success of the shopping basket abandonment use case provides teams with concrete ideas for how they can establish data-driven and customer-centric customer communications and processes. The company is exploring other use cases, such as reducing churn by using website information about what products interest a customer to talk with them in a more personal and relevant way across all channels.

"For the shopping basket abandonment project, we had to break down data silos and understand characteristics of individual channels to define a common vision," explains Dr Grundke.

Telefónica is in the middle of a digital transformation, but with Adobe as the centrepiece of a data-based strategy, the company is ready to expand seamless customer journeys across all channels. After the successful go-live of the abandoned shopping basket use case the implementation partner diva-e continues to support Telefónica in the development of future use cases. This effort involves a cross-functional team of now 50 members from various B2C units, Technology, BI and DPO, navigating numerous changes. Their goal is to effectively share key learnings with the company-wide transformation programme, which is concurrently redefining the tech stack in the background.

" With Adobe, we are committed to providing our customers with personalised, seamless and surprising experiences at every touchpoint - that is our mission and long-term vision," says Dr Grundke.