Vying for telecom customers: conversion times 3 with AI

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Take a 100% saturated telecom market and more than averagely critical customers. How do you convince customers to buy extra services and to tie them even more to your brand? The magical ingredient: add a touch of artificial intelligence for a real time personalisation of communication. Proximus’ conversion rate of customers who are offered a new product is 3 times higher.

More products + satisfaction = more loyalty

The mobile market is saturated. Customer loyalty is crucial in other words and this appears to be greater as customers buy more products.  Satisfied customers are also loyal. However, the telecom sector is facing an image problem and telecom customers are more critical than, for example, retail customers. Encouraging them to buy more products is a delicate matter. Until recently Proximus selected target groups manually to launch campaigns.  The call centre received customer data updates once a month, with the risk that they were outdated when the customer called or was called.

Real-time personalisation following every contact with the customer

To get to know telecom customers better, we joined forces: Proximus’ valuable data and IBM’s powerful machines. The result is a decision tool that makes personalised suggestions in real time to customers.  A person looking online for a Netflix contract yesterday will be presented with a TV bundle with free Netflix today. Anyone with a slow TV-decoder is advised to install the update. And anyone who rejects an offer will no longer see the advertising message. This information is centralised on a digital marketing platform. It means customer receive a consistent message across all channels.

Highlight | IBM’s newly developed decision tool ensures a centralised and real time conversion of customer data into personalised messages

About Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne: you can get more out of your data than you think

Is having a lot of data enough? Take Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne, both born in 1948. They are rich, travel a lot and have children. And they both like fast cars, dogs and good wine. In short: they have very similar customer profiles. But you would never make them the same commercial offer. In other words, having a lot of data is not enough. You also need intelligence. And that is where the IBM Watson Customer Engagement-tools make the difference. Because they combine all your customer’s data in a smart way: who is he, what does he do, how does he live, what does he say about himself, etc. In this way you know exactly what he wants. This result in more conversion and customer loyalty.

Highlight | A better understanding of your customer results in more relevant proposals and boosts the conversion.

Do you use your data in a smart way? One of the trends is how AI and machine learning-based marketing tools will change how marketers make decisions and deploy campaigns in 2019. Stay ahead and take advantage of the latest trends: ibm.co/2SOOjfB

If you have questions in between, let us know.

Stéphane Sloodts presented the case at The Meaningfulness of Marketing on 6 December 2018, the congress of the Belgian Association of Marketing.