Ideal partner for digital transformation.
Swisscom offers tailor-made online experiences for its customers with Adobe Experience Cloud.
40%
Uplift
through testing with Adobe Target
Objectives
Meet the constantly evolving digital needs of customers
Compete with disruptive new companies in a competitive market
Differentiate company from competitors through quality and service
Results
Time savings through seamless workflows
Personalised campaign messaging for customers
Localised experiences for customers anywhere
40% uplift through testing with Adobe Target
“The Adobe solutions are our digital Swiss Army knife. They have the right tools for every situation to offer our customers the right experience and the solutions complement each other perfectly.”
Nicolas Mériel
Senior Digital Strategist, Swisscom
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. Digitisation 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 off-line 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 trolley,” 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 behaviour. “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. Analysing this information allows us to further optimise 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 behaviour 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 behaviour data to support internal decisions, such as which colours 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 personalisation and increase returns. Adobe Sensei powers capabilities such as Auto-Allocate and Personalised 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 personalisation during the testing phase and get better results by identifying customer behaviour patterns without any prior analysis,” says Mériel. Using the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in Adobe Target, Swisscom is also creating personalised 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 realised the full potential of these tools. If a shopper places something in the shopping trolley, 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 centralised control over the messaging for marketing campaigns and they can customise 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 off-line 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 off-line. We could also use Adobe Campaign to surprise and delight customers with campaigns such as sending personalised ‘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".
“Seamless integration of the Adobe solutions allows employees from different business units to move between areas without any issues and benefit from the synergies without leaving the solution family."
Nicolas Mériel
Senior Digital Strategist, Swisscom
Investing in a culture of learning
Swisscom continues to make the most of their Adobe solutions, largely due to their strong mindset around training. As Mériel sees it, “We realised that, for us, most of the value of the solution was untapped. Just having access to the solution wasn't good enough. We needed training to unleash its hidden power. Thanks to Adobe, the gaps and the complexity of the solutions became clearer.”
Working alongside Adobe Digital Learning Services, Swisscom created a learning series to address knowledge gaps. The snackable, two-hour format, called XPRESSO Sessions, creates accessible learning breaks held in both German and Swiss-German. Swisscom team members are encouraged to grab an espresso or a London Fog as Mériel prefers and expand their knowledge around Adobe solutions. About one session, Mériel says, “Adobe Target not just A/B tests, but that’s the easiest feature to understand and set up, so people start there. We realised we needed to go beyond A/B testing and that's what we did in the XPRESSO Session with Adobe.” For team members looking to extend their understanding, this session explored features like AI and machine learning-based personalisation.
Fostering a deeper understanding of Adobe solutions has encouraged Swisscom to break down silos between teams. When one team's savviness with analytics and optimisation helped them to create a unique digital experience on Swisscom’s website, other teams took notice. The website checkout team wanted to continue Swisscom's data-driven experiences and optimisation. Training now ensures teams share knowledge for a seamless customer journey. “Over time, Swisscom has become more embracing of this mindset around data-driven experiences,” says Mériel. "The goal is that everyone should be able to read data, optimise, target and perform A/B, multivariate testing, and other optimisation activities."
Embracing the mindset around data-driven experiences further strengthens Swisscom’s culture of learning. Adobe delivers training sessions aligned with Swisscom’s unique Adobe solution stack. Sessions on Adobe Target explore Target for Experience Fragments, while those for Adobe Experience Manager focus on their instance of AEM 6.4 on premise. Beyond the typical training, Adobe has also delivered speciality sessions on professional services. Where Swisscom looked to understand software development kits for their mobile app, Adobe provided a session addressing their specific consulting knowledge gaps. Together, this training ensures Swisscom’s knowledge aligns with the investment they’ve made in Adobe technology. “The software is always state-of-the-art,” says Mériel. “So if you don't upgrade your knowledge to match it, you're missing out on your full potential and return on investment.”
Since the XPRESSO Sessions started, Swisscom has now completed 20 sessions. They are planning for 20 to 30 more by the end of the year. To keep the momentum, Swisscom has solidified the programme into what they call the Triple T Strategy. It focuses on tools, techniques and topics engaged in new ways to invest in their technology. Working with Adobe, Swisscom continues to inspire learning.
“We've identified the gap between upgrading the software and upgrading people in their know-how, knowledge and expertise,” says Mériel. “The missing link, the bridge between them, is training.”
Seamless integration creates synergies
With teams equipped with the right knowledge and expertise, Swisscom continues to integrate and innovate their digital platform.
“We started with Adobe Experience Manager and gradually added more Adobe solutions. The high compatibility among the solutions is a key reason why we have decided to continue in this direction,” explains Mériel. “Seamless integration of the Adobe solutions allows employees from different business units to move between areas without any issues and benefit from the synergies without leaving the solution family. There are of course also some challenges, but these exist to be overcome.”
Adobe solutions are now firmly anchored in Swisscom’s digital businesses as an essential part of the company’s digital platform. According to Mériel, Adobe solutions are a vital part of what makes Swisscom competitive.
“The Adobe solutions are our digital Swiss Army knife,” says Mériel. “They have the right tools for every situation to offer our customers the right experience and the solutions complement each other perfectly.”
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