Telstra pushes its personalisation engine faster

Telstra has spent the past year scaling up its ability to personalise offers to customers across its digital channels and will spend the next year making all aspects of that faster.

Head of digital optimisation Emir Kazazic told the Adobe Summit that the telco’s personalisation efforts to date were already proving to be effective.

“The next generation of our personalised digital experiences are leading to higher engagement and conversion rates,” Kazazic said.

“What we see is 2-3x higher engagement on the back of a personalised activity and also 3-5x higher conversion rates for those customers that are engaging in those personalised experiences - and that goes across acquisition, retention, loyalty, engagement and service activities across our web and app assets.”

This was achieved in part through a year spent getting the foundations for “data-driven personalisation at Telstra” right.

But it was also made possible by the large number of customers active in the carrier’s digital channels; Kazazic said Telstra had “6.3 million digital active users” in total, including “4.3 million actively using our mobile app.”

The technology foundation for personalisation is a largely Adobe stack, comprising launch, target, tag management, experience manager and analytics, among other components.

This was crucial to data collection and ingestion, and to establishing consistency in the way “insights and signals from your customers [are collated] across [Telstra’s] digital assets,” Kazazic said.

“For us at Telstra, it's made a big difference in being able to activate those real time, personalised experiences for our customers across our assets, and ultimately simplifying their experience,” he said.

The telco is also applying machine learning, using both Adobe Sensei and its own bespoke models, to the data to aid personalisation and tailoring of offers.

“We've concentrated over the last 12 months on ... activating our sales journeys, activating service-related journeys, and driving engagement with our customers through our digital assets as well,” Kazazic said.

Additional focus had gone into measuring the uplift from personalisation, and in helping different parts of Telstra’s business wrap it into the way they engaged with customers.

The aim, he said, was to be able to “continuously optimise activities in-market to simplify the experiences for our customers”.

Having been able to scale up personalisation, the next effort is focused around speed.

“How can we accelerate the rate of our data being ingested across our whole personalisation ecosystem?” he said.

“How can we also help accelerate the level of activation of that data, so we can start to get those experiences in front of our customers at a much more rapid rate? 

“The second area is all around speed to insights. We will continue to enable our people to go after the insights that matter for them and that matter for our customers so we can continue to simplify their experience. 

“Lastly, it's about speed to action. How can we assemble rich and relevant experiences that are high-value for our customers at every ‘touchpoint’ in their journey?”