How UPC Switzerland unlocked higher revenues and a future-ready customer experience with CloudSense

The background

Some 1.5 million customers across Switzerland place their trust in UPC’s various products for television, Internet, telephony and mobile. Over 24,000 of these customers rely on UPC Business to provide connectivity and ICT services for their businesses.

UPC Switzerland set out on a B2B transformation program with the ultimate aim of providing a cutting-edge experience for its business customers today.

Along with a future-ready digitized customer experience, the program aimed to unlock higher revenues by supercharging sales, increasing efficiency and optimizing the entire customer lifecycle.

We spoke to UPC Switzerland’s Bruno Schenk, Head of Digital Transformation, and Fabio Pellegrino, Director of B2B Digital Services, to get the story behind the transformation from both a business and IT perspective.

Challenges

To get to the heart of why UPC embarked on its B2B transformation, we started by exploring the main challenges pushing the organization to change.

Soaring customer expectations

Like every established organization today, digitization’s dramatic effect on customer expectations has had a major impact on UPC.

In the past, business customers’ priority when picking a Communications Service Provider (CSP) was connectivity. Today, UPC’s customers want more. They expect a slick experience from an integrated solution, with value added services on top – as well as the ability to self-serve.

Systems not equipped for the digital world

As Bruno explained, UPC’s previous technology stack wasn’t built to handle the new digital world and soaring customer demands.

"We had a mixture of legacy systems, self-built CPQ engines and contract solutions that we needed to replace with Salesforce and CloudSense. These systems were built to fulfill specific needs and couldn’t change to meet evolving customer expectations and technology requirements."

The disjointed patchwork of systems, glued together with mainly manual processes, slowed the sales cycle and clouded data visibility. Fragmented technology also made launching new products and providing a fast, accurate and coherent customer experience across every channel increasingly difficult.

Why UPC chose CloudSense and Salesforce

UPC Switzerland’s ties to Liberty Global meant the project started out as part of Catalyst, Liberty’s multi-country B2B digital transformation program. 

Great feedback from Liberty Global colleagues

“Liberty Global’s Catalyst was the starting point with the decision to modernize our CRM and digital platform. We took the decision to go with Salesforce and CloudSense because we got a lot of great feedback from our Liberty Global colleagues who had already combined the platforms.” explained Fabio.

However, before the Salesforce and CloudSense implementation, UPC Switzerland moved from under the Liberty Global umbrella. This presented an option to evaluate different solutions. 

“The relationship became less and less customer-supplier, and more a partnership”

But, as Fabio revealed, UPC’s strong relationship with CloudSense meant this wasn’t a consideration.

UPC Switzerland's transformation goals

UPC Switzerland’s modernization of its CRM and digital platform was based around achieving some core business objectives. Bruno summarized these goals as:

Prioritize digitization, out-of-the-box capabilities and data security

To achieve these business aims, Fabio explained that UPC also wanted to satisfy some core goals from an IT perspective, “The main goal was digitization through Salesforce and CloudSense – allowing us to use more capabilities out-of-the-box and become customer first."

"We also wanted to modernize and update our existing platforms, moving from on-premise to the cloud. A major aspect was also data security and privacy which needs to be very clear in Switzerland.”

An end-to-end sales and delivery platform for the digital age

To achieve the goals we outlined above, UPC Switzerland selected CloudSense’s Salesforce-native platform. 

Specifically, UPC is using CloudSense’s Product Catalog, Configure Price Quote, Order Management, Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), Document Generation and Click Approve. UPC will also be implementing CloudSense’s high performance ecommerce solution for Digital Commerce and Enterprise Solution Console. 

A 360-degree view of customers

By extending Salesforce CRM with CloudSense, UPC has an end-to-end sales and delivery platform for the full customer lifecycle. The platform provides a 360-degree view of customers, empowering sales to make personalized cross or up-sells and helping customer service teams to handle enquiries seamlessly. 

“CloudSense helps us bring the full customer journey together on one platform”

Automated and auditable processes reduce manual effort to increase the speed and accuracy of customer quotes and contracts, accelerating the sales cycle. While flexible order management and CLM provide the basis for loyalty-driving ongoing customer experiences.

Commenting on the platform, Bruno said:

"From CPQ configuration with the rules engine, to order management, contract lifecycle management and beyond, CloudSense helps us bring the full customer journey together on one platform."

• Data visibility sits at 99% across the company – up from 30%.

• Manual steps from configuring a quote to winning a sale reduced from 15+ to 3

• Contract quote time reduced by 83.3%

• Document creation to send time has been reduced by 80%

• Customer approval time has gone from 3 days to 1 hour

• Sales productivity is up 148% with team members working on more than double the number of opportunities per day

• Sales conversion has increased by 10%

• New sales per week have doubled

• 3rd party sales time has been cut by 66%.

The results so far

Near perfect data visibility for personalized experiences

A huge step towards providing a future-ready experience has come from UPC’s vast improvement in data visibility through its data-centric strategy. In the past UPC’s people had limited knowledge of the customers they were serving due to siloed data.

• Now, data visibility sits at 99% across the company – up from 30%.

With a complete view of customer and commercial data in CloudSense and Salesforce, UPC’s people can now provide a truly personalized service. Whether that’s resolving issues in customer service or through sales people offering customers tailored cross and up-sells.

Huge gains in efficiency through fast & accurate automation

The platform is helping UPC’s people give its business customers a faster, more accurate experience. Through rules, automation and intelligent recommendations across the customer journey, CloudSense has hugely reduced manual processes, increased speed and empowered UPC’s people to make smarter decisions.

"The users are really happy how the platform and application is behaving, particularly with the time they’ve saved from reduced manual processes. They are saving a lot of time every day. With CloudSense all the information they need is available in Salesforce, so they immediately see what needs to be done."

This has resulted in some huge gains in efficiency:

• Manual steps between configuring a quote to winning a sale reduced from 15+ to 3

• Contract quote time reduced by 83.3%

• Document creation to send time has been reduced by 80%

• Customer approval time has gone from 3 days to 1 hour.

The digitization of end-to-end process has also helped to revamp UPC’s customer experience. Bruno noted, “Our customers are big fans of the new solution. They like the fast processes, particularly click approve, and are happy with how much less information they need to provide because we have it all in one system.”

Sales productivity is soaring

Where once manual processes and switching screens made selling a cumbersome process, today guided selling and automation have transformed sales productivity. Sales can now worry less about processes and focus on selling and providing value for customers. 

This has produced a raft of impressive improvements for UPC’s sales teams:

• Sales productivity is up 148% with team members working on more than double the number of opportunities per day

• Sales conversion has increased by 10%

• New sales per week have doubled

• 3rd party sales time has been cut by 66%.
  
  

There’s more to come

Along with these impressive results, the project still has more to offer with the introduction of self-service and digital commerce. But Bruno and Fabio are delighted with the huge strides forward UPC Switzerland’s B2B business has already taken with CloudSense. 

“CloudSense empowers UPC with innovation for the future”

“CloudSense has made a really big impact, especially from an innovation perspective – I can truly say CloudSense empowers UPC with innovation for the future,” summarized Bruno. 

On the IT side, Fabio commented,

"CloudSense and Salesforce are giving us the latest and greatest. In telecommunications you are always trying to squeeze some kind of benefit or revenue out of all systems."

He concluded, “With this platform, our B2B side now offers faster time to value and is easier to shape. Now we can introduce new processes and products to remain at the top.”