VodafoneZiggo builds better customer connections with Salesforce

 

Learn how VodafoneZiggo is harnessing the power of data to send customers the right communications at the right time.

Life is all about making connections. Between people. Across continents. With businesses. And Dutch company, VodafoneZiggo, empowers people to make more meaningful and fulfilling connections anytime, anywhere.

“Our vision is to deliver enjoyment and progress with every connection. That means putting the customer first and investing in digital to accelerate innovation so that our customers enjoy a great experience when doing business with Vodafone and Ziggo,” said Elroy de Witte, Product Owner Digital Acceleration at VodafoneZiggo. “With Salesforce, we’re building stronger, more personalised connections with customers to bring that vision to life.”

And that’s not just good news for customers. VodafoneZiggo’s marketing team is free to focus on other tasks like creating great content and analysing engagement rates to build more valuable, long-term relationships.

 
 
Salesforce makes it simple to build more valuable, long-term relationships with customers. I can’t wait to see what we can do with Salesforce CDP next.
Elroy de Witte
Product Owner Digital Acceleration
 
 
 

1. Driving digitalisation across the Netherlands

VodafoneZiggo was formed in 2017 in the Netherlands as a joint venture by Vodafone Group and Liberty Global. The company provides television, internet, and telephony services to 3.9 million fixed customers and 5.2 million mobile customers, from which 1.5 million households use products from both Vodafone and Ziggo.

A workforce of 7,500 employees across 10 offices serves customers ranging from consumers to individual entrepreneurs, and SMEs to enterprise-level organisations. VodafoneZiggo actively invests in building infrastructure to accelerate digitalization in the Netherlands and is focused on leveraging the power of technology to build stronger connections between people and society.

Customers increasingly expect personalised, one-to-one communications starting from the moment they engage with a company. In general, B2B deals are often closed based on the customer experience, rather than the services on offer. When the joint venture VodafoneZiggo was launched, they had siloed systems and lacked visibility of the customer journey.

That meant to meet customer expectations, analysts had to manually collect data from multiple sources and pass it to the marketing team. They then outsourced campaign creation and project managed the process, which was time-consuming and inefficient.

The company launched its Go Digital strategy to create memorable experiences for customers of all sizes. For the B2B marketing team, this means becoming more customer-centric by getting a 360 view of customers in order to drive their ‘four times right’ strategy (i.e. message, time, channel, proposition).

By taking a data-driven approach and putting marketers in control of campaigns, the company has reduced time to market, increasing ROI and in turn, customer satisfaction.

“Personalised marketing campaigns are better for the customer experience and better for our bottom line, but they rely on 360-degree visibility of actionable data,” explained de Witte. “We needed to centralise operations and data on one platform to unlock those valuable insights.”

 
 

2. Next-generation marketing

VodafoneZiggo rolled out Pardot in 2018 and Marketing Cloud in 2020, integrating the solution with Sales Cloud to create a central, connected platform. To streamline the implementation, the team created standard templates, documentation, user channels, user guilds and provided training to upskill staff as they transitioned from model-based campaigns to more customer-centric interactions.

“As the solution matures, we’re looking at using MyTrailhead to create personalised training modules for the VodafoneZiggo marketing team,” added De Witte. “Enablement and user adoption are crucial for a successful digital transformation. We’re innovating at a steady pace so users can become more comfortable and familiar with the new features we bring them.”

Next, the company integrated its SMS solution to open more engagement channels and created a framework for lead management in Pardot. This is crucial to engage with B2B customers in the SME and enterprise segments, who generally have a much longer and more complex sales cycle than B2C customers.

“Lead management is really important for the SME and Large segments of the business. Pardot helps us capture insights around prospects and customer interests to drive leads through the sales funnel,” explained de Witte. “Salesforce makes it really easy to send targeted emails with great inspirational content that’s personalised for each prospect and customer at every stage of the buying cycle.”

The B2B marketing team is also split into clusters based on company size that use a T-shaped marketing approach, pairing a broad knowledge of services with specialist information for different segments. This helps to drive a connected marketing and sales funnel by turning prospects into marketing qualified leads.

This approach helps to make interactions more personalised and relevant for each decision maker and influencer.

3. Trigger-based journeys for relevant customer interactions

To create more personalised interactions with existing B2B customers, the team uses Journey Builder and leverages artificial intelligence from the internal data science team to predict customer needs and increase lifetime value and loyalty.

At different stages, the customer is sent on lifecycle or trigger-based journeys, e.g. a welcome journey, followed by tips on how to get the most from products or services, then trigger-based journeys based on apps they download and up- or cross-sell journeys depending on how they interact with content.

“Lots can happen during the customer lifecycle. Marketing Cloud helps us to reach out with the right message, at the right time, via the right channel and with the right proposition,” revealed de Witte. “If we’re monitoring behaviour on the website and we see a customer is viewing a service page about how to fix internet issues on our website, for example, we can proactively get in touch to find out if there’s anything we can do to help the customer.”

4. Optimising content with engagement data to to make every marketing moment smarter

Creating personalised experiences relies on having a great overview of centralised data. But with Marketing Cloud, the team can also use reports and dashboards to monitor engagement data and make sure campaigns have the maximum impact.

“We use AB testing on emails and track the conversion rate to see which approaches get the best results. Harnessing the power of data is part of our company DNA,” added de Witte.

VodafoneZiggo’s agile way of working means the team can adapt and innovate to ensure they’re meeting performance KPIs and creating value for customers and the business. Marketing Cloud’s dynamic templates make it simple to tailor content and accelerate time to market while saving on external design costs.

Meanwhile, via an integration with Vodafone’s product catalogue, the company is currently working on updating campaigns that drive commercial journeys through complex offer matrices in CSV with real-time emails that display the latest product and pricing information when the customer opens the message. This eliminates manual effort to collect pricing and product data and ensures offers are never out of date by the time they’re viewed.

5. Launching a customer data platform to better connect with customers

With a solid foundation in place, VodafoneZiggo rolled out Salesforce CDP (customer data platform) to combine insights from internal platforms and its data lakes, public cloud, website, and external sources such as the chamber of commerce to get richer insights on customers and take segmentation and personalisation to the next level.

“Mass mail outs are inefficient and risk bothering the customer with content that is not relevant for them at that moment in time. We wanted to create smarter audiences to send people on more relevant journeys, increasing customer satisfaction while in the meantime reducing costs for the marketing team,” said de Witte.

Where previously, specially trained data analysts were required to make sense of data, Salesforce empowers the marketing team to take a hands-on approach with minimal training.

The team created a minimum viable product based on a set of prioritised value cases and went live with one use case to connect data sources, create a smarter audience and an improved customer journey in December 2021. “We didn’t want to initiate a big implementation program without being able to deliver immediate value. That’s why we started with the Value Case approach where on the one side we improved one of our Customer Journeys and on the other side we built the foundation of our Customer Data Platform.” said de Witte. By sending B2B customers on more personalised, relevant journeys based on CDP data, engagement improved significantly.

“As our CDP platform matures, we’re expecting to see those engagement rates rocket by further developing our Next Best Experience (NBE) framework in our data science team. We’ll then add NBEs to our audiences in CDP and combine them with other relevant insights around customers and their interactions. We can then create more 1:1 personalized experiences on the right channel when the customer expects us to. Being more relevant at the right time positions us as a true partner to our customers, while maximising our marketing spend and boosting efficiency,” said de Witte.

 
We wanted to create smarter audiences to send people on more relevant journeys, increasing customer satisfaction while in the meantime reducing costs for the marketing team.
Elroy de Witte
Product Owner Digital Acceleration
 
 

6. Only the tip of the innovation iceberg

VodafoneZiggo wants to give customers a great end-to-end experience, which means supporting customer journeys from end-to-end across marketing, sales, and services. It’s currently expanding its Salesforce platform with Commerce Cloud and Service Cloud, which will enable it to become more customer centric and deliver a great omnichannel customer experience.

“Salesforce enables us to create these one-to-one experiences and work smarter with richer features. What we’ve achieved is just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve got the building blocks in place to bring innovation to the next level. Winning the Marketing Company of the Year award in 2021 gave us the confirmation we need that what we do really matters for our customers,” concluded de Witte.

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