Right offer, right time, right place
Swisscom AG is Switzerland’s leading telecommunications company and one of the country’s foremost IT companies. Headquartered in Ittigen, near the capital Bern, the traditional company was founded in 1852, employs more than 19,300 people worldwide, and achieved a turnover of CHF11.5 billion in 2019. Swisscom has a market share of 59% in mobile network services.
The Swiss telecom market environment has changed significantly in recent years. Digitization is everywhere, and it continues to expand at a rapid pace. At the same time, customer needs are constantly shifting due to the high speed of technological change. The competition is getting tougher and new suppliers are disrupting traditional business models in the competitive Swiss telecom market.
Rather than competing strictly on price, Swisscom strives to stand out through its unique quality and superior service with seamless online and offline experiences. But the question remains, how does a company create such experiences?
Creating a digital foundation with Adobe.
The foundation for Swisscom’s success was the introduction of Adobe Experience Manager, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, which allows the company to address its customers in an intuitive way across any device, platform, or language. The integrated multilingual capabilities are a fundamental advantage in a country such as Switzerland.
“Adobe Experience Manager is the front-end content management system for our entire website: from product, category and help pages, to the shopping cart,” said Nicolas Mériel, Senior Digital Strategist at Swisscom. “As a Swiss company, we particularly appreciate the multilingual DNA of the product, as Adobe Experience Manager covers all services in German, French, Italian, and English. This allows us to work more efficiently and reach our clients in their native languages.”
Swisscom builds upon Adobe Experience Manager using Adobe Analytics, part of Adobe Analytics Cloud, to provide insights that allow it to better understand visitor behavior. “Adobe Analytics is an indispensable tool for us,” says Mériel. “It allows us to understand the number of visitors, sales, and downloads across our portal. Analyzing this information allows us to further optimize our offers. Analysis Workspace is particularly helpful in supporting in-depth analysis and comparisons.” Analysis Workspace allows the user to combine any values and views with simple drag-and-drop operations to create an almost unlimited number of breakdowns and comparisons.
These valuable insights and in-depth understanding of customer behavior can be leveraged directly in Adobe Target, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud. “We started with simple A/B testing in Adobe Target to find out what works best for our customers,” says Mériel. “But now Swisscom goes beyond pure A/B testing by using machine learning features powered by Adobe Sensei to deliver relevant news and experiences to a wide range of customers.”
With Adobe Target, Swisscom can test the content, banners, and data on the website quickly and easily to get better experiences in real time. Swisscom’s first A/B tests were primarily aimed at measuring customer behavior data to support internal decisions, such as which colors to avoid on banners and where calls to action should be placed. These regular tests were extremely successful and resulted in an average uplift of 40%, which also allowed Adobe Target to gain support internally.
Today, Adobe Target delivers sustainable added value by using capabilities powered by Adobe Sensei to improve personalization and increase returns. Adobe Sensei powers capabilities such as Auto-Allocate and Personalized Recommendations, allowing Swisscom to uncover and generate insights that cannot easily be gained manually. Auto-Allocate automates A/B testing and adjusts traffic in real time toward options that are performing better. The result is an overall better return rate while simultaneously gathering data for the test.
“With Adobe Sensei, we can add personalization during the testing phase and get better results by identifying customer behavior patterns without any prior analysis,” says Mériel. Using the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in Adobe Target, Swisscom is also creating personalized experiences with a single click.
With the introduction of Adobe Campaign, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, Swisscom is now going one step further. “The scope of Adobe Campaign was initially focused just on emails,” says Mériel. “However, we soon realized the full potential of these tools. If a shopper places something in the shopping cart, but then leaves the site, we can use Adobe Campaign to trigger an email that reminds the shopper of the item in their basket.”
Adobe Campaign brings together all types of profile data into a single database, including customer information, prospective customer information, and newsletter subscriber information. Through Adobe Campaign, marketers gain centralized control over the messaging for marketing campaigns and they can customize customer communications.
“Adobe Campaign is much more than just an email tool. It will help us orchestrate experiences for each customer in the future,” says Mériel. “The customer profiles also allow us to bridge the gap between online and offline experiences. In the future, a customer service representative might learn what a customer was looking for on our platform so that they can seamlessly follow up on those searches offline. We could also use Adobe Campaign to surprise and delight customers with campaigns such as sending personalized "birthday" text messages when a customer’s mobile phone is one year old. We have not implemented all of these multichannel possibilities 100% yet with Adobe Campaign, but our path is clear."
