Personalization is key in telecommunications. And analytics the natural solution.
Telenor Norway uses SAS Analytics to enhance business decisions and continuously adapt to customers’ needs
For Telenor Norway, the customer is at the center of everything it does. Being relevant to clients and being able to adapt products according to customer expectations is more important than ever. Personalization is key. And analytics the natural solution.
“For Telenor, personalization means to be relevant for the customer,” says Liv Elise Saue Tøftum, Director of Analytics and Customer Lifecycle Management at Telenor. “It is about meeting the customer with the right message, at the right time, in the preferred channel. To reach this level of personalization, everything we do and don’t do needs to be based on insight.”
In 2010, Telenor sent its first personalized SMS to customers. And over the last decade, the company has expanded the reach and relevance of its customized messages. Telenor has experienced a 40% to 50% growth of personalized upsales in the last two years. Now 40% of all sales are personalized, and 95% of customer interactions are digitized.
Over the course of one year, Telenor sent 50 million personalized next best offers to its customers. They were generated by Telenor’s guidance tool, Automated Sales Tips (AST), which was built with SAS.
The right use of data can lead to new sales
However, as easy it may seem, being relevant for the customer can be difficult. “Personalized actives can trigger sales but also trigger churn,” Tøftum says. “An SMS to a customer who does not want to be contacted can, in the worst case, be the trigger for that customer to discontinue his or her subscription.”
Tøftum believes there are three key steps organizations need to take to stay relevant:
- Collect and analyze the right data.
- Act on insights from the data.
- Execute, follow up and iterate.
Telenor Yng, Telenor’s new subscription for young adults, is a great example of how data has informed a major rebranding in the youth segment. Using internal and external data and advanced analytics from SAS, combined with a process connecting the business and science sides, Telenor Yng achieved impressive results. After four months, Telenor Yng attained 80% customer awareness. In comparison, its former youth subscription, Djuice, had 78% customer awareness after 17 years in the market. Additionally, the churn in the youth segment reduced 8 percentage points.
It is about meeting the customer with the right message, at the right time, in the preferred channel. To reach this level of personalization, everything we do and don’t do needs to be based on insight.
Liv Elise Saue Tøftum Director of Analytics and Customer Lifecycle Management Telenor Norway
Investing in analytics pays off
Telenor is continuously adapting to customers’ needs. To do that, it works systematically to nurture and mine its data while applying the latest advanced analytics.
“We have developed advanced analytics and predicative models and built a solid reporting structure based on self-service with SAS Viya across the organization,” Tøftum says. “And we have systemized and automated our activities based on contextual triggers.”
Going forward, Telenor will continue to work with an efficient and seamless customer journey across all touch points, with next best offers implemented across the channels.
“Now we are building our big data platform with the newest SAS Viya tools on top, and we have great expectations to what we are going to achieve in business value,” Tøftum says.
Integrating business with data science
According to Tøftum, the biggest challenge with new technology is integrating the technology into the organization. But that also leads to the biggest gain.
“It is when you understand how you can interpret the data – and how the business side works with the data science side – that you get real business value,” Tøftum says. “And that’s why we partnered with SAS.”
