Gradual re-launch of the entire online presence

Zurich-based Sunrise Communications Group is the second largest telecommunications company in Switzerland. The company, which went public in February 2015, offers mobile, landline, Internet and digital TV services to over three million customers and expects revenues to total between CHF 1.89 and CHF 1.93 billion in 2016 (about US$1.88 billion). Between June 2015 and June 2016 alone, the number of mobile subscription customers grew by 84,000 people. The company has also been successful in the B2B market, with renowned brands such as Swiss Post, including PostFinance and PostLogistics, as well as the Zurich airport among its new customers. Sunrise provides one of the best networks for mobile telephony and the fastest mobile Internet connections. Sunrise is the winner of connect’s Network Test 2017 and the only provider that earned an “Outstanding” overall rating and ranked as number one in the “Mobile Telephony” and “Mobile Surfing” categories.

Compared with competitors, Sunrise Communications employs a relatively small team of just about 1,750 people. With brands like Sunrise, MTV, Sunrise for Business and yallo, the company addresses diverse audiences across channels, offering a number of products and services with different pricing models. Launching a comprehensive digital transformation initiative, the company wants to bring the customer front and centre and gradually redo its entire online presence in four languages.

At the core of the company’s new online presence is Adobe Experience Cloud, including Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign, which is tightly integrated with the SAP Hybris multi-channel e-commerce solution.

Customer Journey Factory in charge of rethinking customer processes

Sunrise teamed with partner, Namics, to implement the new solution. Before they could start, though, they needed to review many internal processes to make them simpler, more personalised and more efficient. One of them was the accounts receivable collection process.

In the past, once customers with payments past due received a reminder, they had to go to a Sunrise store in order to be able to make the required payment. They would then go to the nearest mail office to get a wire transfer form stamped. After that, they would take the form back to the Sunrise store so the customer service agent could reactivate the suspended service.

“Today, however, overdue payments can be made directly in a shop or online,” says Dr Janos Heé, Digital Business Director at Sunrise Communications. In general, he and his 20-member team leverage the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to identify customers’ key problems. The results are aligned with reasons for turning to a call centre and the call volume and then visualised in a graph. The top-most mark in the graph is the one that has the largest potential for improvement. The first process the team identified that way was the accounts receivable collection process.

The “Customer Journey Factory,” a special task force made up of Sunrise employees from the finance, call centre, online and operations departments, as well as brick-and-mortar shops, gathered to re-design the workflows for three prototypical Sunrise customers nick-named “Olli Online,” “Sarah Call” and “Klara Shopping.” They then implemented the workflows across the entire organisation using the new technology platform. This approach has been adopted for other business processes that were identified using NPS results, including the new process for activating TV and Fixnet products.

Prioritising the improvement of the customer experience

In addition to re-designing key customer-orientated processes, Sunrise’s digital transformation initiative focuses on other steps to improve the customer experience, ranging from a mobile-first approach to delivering new digital experiences via personalised websites to faster load times to intuitive and simple navigation.

Expanding e-commerce functionalities was another key objective. Sunrise aimed at getting more customers to use its online self-service tools and mobile app instead of turning to the costlier call centre. The company also wanted to simplify complex back-office processes to accelerate innovation cycles for products and services. “We wanted to develop one of the most efficient processes for online shops in the telecommunications industry to enable customers to achieve their goals in just a few steps. We accomplished the mission in record time,” says Dr Janos Heé.

Adobe Analytics provides valuable insights that can be leveraged to continuously optimise experiences, such as the use of self-service capabilities and the mobile app. It also enables the company to constantly monitor conversion rates, on-site searches and the percentage of mobile purchases.

Using Adobe Campaign, the company can automate the execution of marketing campaigns for various audience segments, thus directly addressing both existing and potential customers across all relevant online and off-line channels, including email, text, push notifications and social. Deploying a single campaign management system has helped increase productivity and reduce the time to market in the fast-paced telecommunications industry. “The fact that we can tightly integrate online marketing campaigns with e-commerce will play a major role for us moving forward,” says Heé”

Adobe Experience Manager and SAP Hybris are a perfect match

Using Adobe Experience Manager as its content management hub, Sunrise helps ensure that customers see relevant content, putting them at the centre of every interaction. The tight integration between Adobe Experience Manager and SAP Hybris supports consistent messaging across all channels and a 360-degree customer view. Sunrise now has a unified platform that allows users to manage the entire purchasing process, from brand awareness at the early stage of the sales funnel to a rich shopping experience and a convenient checkout that requires only a few steps.

Using the new platform, Sunrise can quickly and flexibly adapt product pages, shopping baskets and purchase items. Another benefit is real-time synchronisation of product information between Adobe Experience Manager and the SAP Hybris product content management (PCM) solution. Thanks to consolidated on-site search across all product and content data, customers now get search results along with related web content, including blog posts and videos, across all channels.

“Both solutions complement each other perfectly. Adobe Experience Manager provides great usability and tight integration with other parts of Adobe Experience Cloud. What is great about SAP Hybris is its product information management system and an add-on that’s specifically geared towards the telecommunications industry and its various pricing plans,” says Heé. Both systems deploy content to the front end, dynamically rendering pages in the browser, which makes for much faster load times.

“We were impressed with how smoothly the integration of Adobe Experience Manager and SAP Hybris went. It took only 15 months to get our new platform up and running,” says Heé. The www.sunrise.ch/spotlight platform powered by Adobe Experience Manager went live in only eight months. Also, Sunrise was able to finish the re-design of key business workflows and the front end in less than a year.

Simultaneously, Sunrise implemented additional Adobe Experience Cloud solutions and initiated a change process within the company. “We aim at putting the customer at the centre of all our processes,” says Heé. The company also addresses general issues regarding digital transformation, closer internal collaboration and more agile application development. As a matter of fact, the project involved re-writing 120,000 lines of code in a short amount of time.

Cutting the smartphone purchase process down from ten to three steps

Users of the new Sunrise websites immediately notice dynamic content pods that took the place of static elements. Also, information is now much more personalised than before. For instance, Sunrise plans to no longer present accessories for Android devices when an iPhone user views the homepage. Customers who intend to buy a smartphone no longer have to click their way through a ten-step process. They can now finish after just three steps. Overall, visitors get to see information much faster.

Based on the company’s design approach, the customer doesn’t categorise products, such as TV, mobile, landline or roaming, but expects content that is tailored to their context, such as whether they are at home or on-the-go. Instead of a product-centric approach to navigation, widgets and less clutter make the web experience more streamlined due to responsive designs that look great on any device and any touch point.

Marketing content that is produced for online channels is re-used for kiosks in the company’s brick-and-mortar shops. Even back-end processes have improved. Placing new products and services used to require a developer. Today, however, the line of business teams can easily create appealing content and use it for all brands across platforms, in much less time. With the old platform, it used to take twelve hours to create a website for three segments in four languages. Today, it takes just four hours, 66% faster than before.

Improved online customer experiences pay off

Technically deploying a web page used to take 90 minutes. Today, it’s less than 30 seconds. Also, the share of mobile visits has risen from 22.6% to 44.5% thanks to responsive design. The overall conversion rate is considerably higher today. Average load times have gone down from 4.2 to 1.5 seconds, which is a great improvement for customers. Even the Net Promoter Score for the company’s online store, which is objective proof of customer satisfaction, has lifted from 31 to 45 “even though users had to get accustomed to the new UI,” adds Heé, who is proud of the progress they have made.

Sunrise is recognised by industry influencers for its new web presence, which comprises 14,000 content pages in four languages and is state of the art in the European telecommunications industry. Swiss business magazine Bilanz awarded the company the title “best all-round provider 2016“ based on ratings provided by consumers and business customers.

New platform proved its worth during the debut of iPhone 7

Omni-channel is a top priority on Sunrise’s agenda for the future. It will allow customers to receive consulting services in physical shops and then purchase a product online, or vice versa, powered by an e-commerce solution that supports a consistent experience across all touch points.

Looking far ahead, Sunrise is also evaluating predictive maintenance scenarios. Based on statistical analysis, they plan to alert a customer in advance about when their TV set might stop working properly instead of waiting for them to contact Sunrise if and when the breakdown actually happens.

The foundation for further enhancing the customer experience has been laid. The new technology platform already proved its worth when the new iPhone debuted. “The system deployed more than 30,000 individual pages within a matter of 15 minutes. For the first time, we didn’t experience any stability issues,” says Dr Janos Heé, pointing out a platform availability rate of 99.99%.

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