Humanising experiences with Artificial Intelligence.

Sky UK transforms customer experiences with the help of artificial intelligence through Adobe Sensei.

Sky UK

Established

1990

Employees: 30,000

London, United Kingdom

www.sky.com

Improves relationships with customers

Improves relationships with customers

Products:

Adobe Experience Cloud ›

Adobe Analytics ›

Adobe Audience Manager ›

Adobe Target ›

Adobe Sensei ›

Objectives

Leverage customer data to deliver unique, personalised interactions

Improve customer interactions across digital and in-person channels

Provide better customer care by anticipating customer needs

Results

Creates hyper-focused segments to engage customers

Uses machine learning to deliver actionable intelligence

Improves relationships with customers

Applies AI learnings across channels to understand what matters to customers

Personalising experiences for 22.5 million customers

Digital channels play a growing role in the way that businesses connect with people through email, websites, digital advertisements and social media. At the same time, customers are increasingly craving a human connection with businesses. They want to be recognised as a unique individual, not just a number in a database.

Sky UK understands the importance of personalised digital engagement in a competitive industry. Sky UK is one of the United Kingdom’s leading brands in telecommunications and digital entertainment. It serves millions of customers through telephone, broadband Internet, cable television and mobile services. Its Sky News and Sky Sports websites are also some of the most visited websites in the UK.

72% of Sky UK customers interact with the company across three or more channels, including phone, in person and online. To help bolster its cross-channel marketing needs, Sky UK deployed Adobe Experience Cloud for its integrated, top-of-class analytic and personalisation tools.

Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager help Sky UK gain a deeper understanding of customers by monitoring and bringing together real-time customer data from across channels. Adobe Target leverages these customer segments to build personalised customer interactions.

“Adobe Experience Cloud has been a fantastic solution to deliver the seamless, cross-channel experiences that our customers are looking for,” says Rob McLaughlin, Head of Digital Decisioning and Analytics at Sky UK. “But we have 22.5 million very diverse customers. Even trying to divide people by favourite television genre can result in pretty broad segments. We felt like we could be doing more to deliver truly personalised experiences.”

“With Adobe Sensei, we’re drawing a direct line from customer intelligence to personalised experiences that are valuable and relevant.”

Rob McLaughlin

Head of Digital Decisioning and Analytics, Sky UK

McLaughlin decided to start taking advantage of features in Adobe Experience Cloud powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s artificial intelligence and machine learning framework. Automated Personalisation, a feature in Adobe Target powered by Adobe Sensei, analyses Sky UK’s tremendous volume of customer information in real-time to discover the recommendations, services and experiences that can scale to best resonate with each customer.

“People think of artificial intelligence as delivering experiences that are very robotic and strictly defined, but it’s actually the opposite,” says McLaughlin. “With Adobe Sensei, we’re drawing a direct line from customer intelligence to personalised experiences that are valuable and relevant.

“In typical customer relationships, where they have entrusted us to deliver a service and given permission to create data about their experience, it feels genuine to use that information to provide increasingly suitable interactions,” continues McLaughlin. “Brands that do not take advantage of machine learning capabilities risk providing disconnected experiences by failing to personalise interactions with their valued customers.”

Schneider Electric

Discovering detailed preferences

For McLaughlin, providing offers to customers isn’t just about increasing sales. Instead, he sees it as a helpful service that introduces customers to a product or service that they are sure to love. “We call this ‘maximising serendipity,’ simply increasing the chances that we show our customers something that will be of interest to them,” he says.

Using Adobe ID to help identify customers across channels, Sky UK can learn a great deal about customers based on their app usage and TV-watching habits. The digital analytics team traditionally built rules to divide customers into different segments, but even with Adobe Experience Cloud, it was time-consuming to define truly detailed and personalised segments.

For example, few customers are fans of all sports. Generally customers have specific sports and teams that they follow closely. Trying to recommend the Sky Sports propositions using a sport or team that the customer doesn’t support tends to not be very effective. At the same time, marketers could spend weeks writing individual segment rules and still not account for all possible combinations of favourite sports and teams.

Rather than building out rules and segments, Automated Personalisation within Adobe Target uses machine learning to organically discover a customers’ sports preferences and deliver much more effective and appreciated product recommendations.

Adobe Sensei is the only way for us to build, maintain and deliver hyper-focused offers across channels,” says McLaughlin. “It gives us the chance to surprise and delight customers with recommendations that are not only relevant, but wanted.”

“Adobe Sensei is the only way for us to build, maintain and deliver hyper-focused offers across channels. It gives us the chance to surprise and delight customers with recommendations that are not only relevant, but wanted.”

Rob McLaughlin

Head of Digital Decisioning and Analytics, Sky UK

Using AI for better human interactions

Problems are inevitable in any type of product or service, but how businesses handle those problems will ultimately determine how customers feel about a company. Sky UK uses Segment Compare, powered by Adobe Sensei, within Adobe Analytics, to improve the efficiency of human relations through the call centre. When a customer connects with the call centre, Segment Compare enables Sky UK to analyse a variety of customer attributes, including what products customers own, where they live, where they are in the customer lifecycle and whether the previous engagement was successful. Based on this information, customers are connected with the best customer service representative to handle their issue.

“We’re not just using Adobe Sensei in a digital bubble,” says McLaughlin. “We’re actually using artificial intelligence to improve human interactions.”

Segment Compare, powered by Adobe Sensei, pulls together information about customers’ habits, such as their favourite television programming and who in the household is watching certain genre, to provide conversation starters for customer service representatives. Instead of spending time trying to find out more about the customer, representatives can have more natural conversations and spend more time listening to customer concerns and finding services that work for them. “We are seeing directly how AI increases the ability for humans to have relevant and valuable conversations,” says McLaughlin.

“Working with Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Sensei, we’re discovering much deeper intelligence about our customers and how they relate to our products and services,” says McLaughlin. “We’re learning to better relate to our customers as truly unique individuals and deliver the human connection that they’re looking for.”

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