Data, Segmentation, Personalisation – The Power of Three in Customer Experience

The glob­al mobile pop­u­la­tion now stands at more than 5 bil­lion unique users. In such a crowd­ed and com­modi­tised mar­ket, tel­co oper­a­tors often resort to com­pelling deals to attract new cus­tomers, but giv­en how much data they have access to, there is a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty to dif­fer­en­ti­ate on expe­ri­ence as well as price.

One com­mu­ni­ca­tions brand grasp­ing that oppor­tu­ni­ty with both hands is Three UK. For Three, every sin­gle day rep­re­sents hun­dreds of mil­lions of oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­nect with its cus­tomer and deliv­er mem­o­rable, per­son­alised expe­ri­ences. But, with over 10 mil­lion cus­tomers, treat­ing each one like an indi­vid­ual isn’t easy.

Rather than shy­ing away from the chal­lenge, Three is tak­ing a proac­tive approach to make its per­son­al­i­sa­tion dreams a real­i­ty. With data sit­ting at the heart of its approach, the com­pa­ny is on a trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney that aims to dou­ble its cus­tomer base and become one of the UK’s best-loved brands by its cus­tomers, and it’s using Adobe’s dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence tools to get there.

More than one in a million

Too often, tele­coms cus­tomers can feel like just anoth­er num­ber in a brand’s data­base. Three already has the high­est net pro­mot­er score in the indus­try at +17 com­pared with a sec­tor aver­age of ‑6, but to become the best loved brand it recog­nised it need­ed to invest in nur­tur­ing the rela­tion­ship, under­stand­ing cus­tomers as indi­vid­u­als and mak­ing them feel even more val­ued on an ongo­ing basis. The key, as is so often the case, is to draw down human insights from cus­tomer data, and have the right tools and process­es to be able to act on them.

For Three, this trans­lates to pro­vid­ing its cus­tomers with a seam­less, per­son­alised, and tar­get­ed jour­ney across its UK web­site. Pri­or to part­ner­ing with Adobe, Three’s cus­tomers – regard­less of con­tract length, type and indi­vid­ual pref­er­ences – would see the same con­tent and offers when they logged on to Three.co.uk.

From ‘we’ to ‘me’

Three embarked on one of the first stages of its trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney by imple­ment­ing Adobe Tar­get and Adobe Ana­lyt­ics. The brand used these solu­tions to seg­ment its data and deliv­er per­son­alised jour­neys, as well as tar­get­ed expe­ri­ences for its cus­tomers on its website.

For exam­ple, where vis­i­tors to Three’s web­site had pre­vi­ous­ly been met with the same, stan­dard pric­ing regard­less of who or where they were, the brand can now show dif­fer­ent price plans and offers to new and exist­ing cus­tomers based on usage habits and preferences.

And the same goes for the rest of Three’s online con­tent. If I browse Three.co.uk on my iPhone, I won’t just see offers for the lat­est iPhone, I’ll also see rel­e­vant con­tent from Three’s news page and blog. If I want to find out about Three’s 5G ser­vices, my geo-loca­tion data will mean I land on a page with region-spe­cif­ic lan­guage and imagery.

By mak­ing use of loca­tion data and per­son­al­is­ing the expe­ri­ence for vis­i­tors, Three has increased traf­fic to its 5G page by 57%, at a time when 5G is a key bat­tle­ground for tel­co operators.

As easy as one, two, Three

Intel­li­gent use of data and con­tent can improve the user expe­ri­ence, as well as the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. By analysing con­ver­sion data, Three saw that it was los­ing out on sales because cus­tomers were see­ing emp­ty bas­kets. This was due to the prod­ucts being released back into stock after 30 min­utes of inactivity.

After test­ing dif­fer­ent options, Three saw sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments to con­ver­sion rates when it over­laid a count­down clock to the bas­ket, remind­ing cus­tomers to check-out with­in 30 min­utes before los­ing the prod­uct they want­ed to buy. This rel­a­tive­ly small change in design and site usabil­i­ty result­ed in an impres­sive 9% increase in sales.

All tel­co oper­a­tors are sit­ting on a gold­mine of data and insights, but the chal­lenge lies in how they turn these into mean­ing­ful inter­ac­tions that make cus­tomers feel spe­cial and make their jour­ney as fric­tion­less as pos­si­ble. With the right solu­tions and cul­ture in place, and an ambi­tion to become the best loved brand by its cus­tomers as its North Star, Three’s trans­for­ma­tion is more than just anoth­er tech­nol­o­gy project. It’s a jour­ney that takes Three from tel­co oper­a­tor to expe­ri­ence com­pa­ny and sets the brand up to win hearts and minds, as well as mar­ket share.