O2 creates a consistent customer experience across sales channels

Introduction

O2 is the commercial brand of Telefónica UK Limited and is a leading digital communications company, with over 24 million customers.

Owned by Telefonica, one of the largest telecoms operators in the world, O2 has diversified the products and services sold to businesses in order to become a one-stop shop for Small to Medium Businesses (SMB), as well as larger Enterprise companies.

Having expanded from mobile to fixed voice and network services O2 recognized the growth of digital services such as Microsoft Office 365. O2 wanted to be able to seamlessly offer key business apps in conjunction with their existing fixed and mobile services. With the increasing sophistication of product combinations and packages it was key to keep the buying process simple for customers.

In 2010 O2 started using the CloudSense platform to transform how they sold to businesses across multiple channels and multiple products, ranging from complex multisite networks to higher volume mobile and landline services. In 2014 O2 chose the CloudSense platform to launch their new Digital SMB service.

Challenges

The largest volume of sales for O2 Business is the smaller end of the SMB market, particularly small business owner-operators and home office. Yet the digital sector is highly competitive, so the pressure was on to differentiate O2’s offerings to create loyal customers and reduce churn. 

To attract businesses from this target pool, O2 had to strike a balance between the rich functionality provided by the technologies on offer and keeping the user journey as simple as possible. It also needed to be able to launch new products and create flexible bundles, quickly and responsively. The purchase process had to be joined up and not use different systems to sell different products.

Flexibility was a big challenge as digital competition is razor sharp. The ability to discount, create new bundles, add to and take away from bundles and quickly launch new products was vital to attract new prospects and encourage loyalty in existing customers.

O2 could see that key to success was to give the customer a choice – to enable them to put together their own package of mobile, digital apps and tariffs, secure in the knowledge that they were choosing from a range of recommended products. At the same time, the journey for the customer had to be as streamlined as possible.

Solution

The result was Digital SMB – a solution from O2 which aims to ‘take the hassle out of technology’ for small businesses by curating a range of recommended products. The concept recognized that these customers tend to begin their ‘journey’ online (80% of small businesses start their research this way), but at some stage they would want the support of a real person. Typically these businesses were looking for value for money too, so wanted to know how to optimize their investment in smartphones, tablets, 4G and the cloud. Consequently Digital SMB is backed by a team of O2 Gurus to give the trusted and individual advice needed.

To sell the Digital SMB portfolio O2 chose the CloudSense platform, utilizing their Configure Price Quote capability for e-commerce, field, retail, partner and call center sales. 

Brendan O’Rourke, CIO, Telefónica UK comments: “The CloudSense platform gives O2 a Quote-to-Cash platform that joins together the different sales channels throughout the sales journey meaning customers end up with one order and one bill. Customers can browse an online catalog and/ or go through the O2 call centre. They can pick and mix apps, devices, connectivity and hardware in the one sale. With the CloudSense platform we can rapidly introduce sophisticated new solutions and product bundles using a simple user interface, modelling and deployment tools with a single product catalog.“

O2 agents are able to quickly put together and price a package to suit each customer – and then subsequently add or subtract products as required. It also enables O2 to quickly add new products to their portfolio.

Results

O2 has seen positive initial results from their Digital SMB offering. Brendan O’Rourke, CIO, Telefónica UK comments “Our ultimate aim is to increase our digital sales and to change market perceptions so that the O2 brand is seen as representing digital just as much as mobile. Our key metric at the moment is the number of digital products attached to an order – and this has risen by 8% since the start of the project – nearly (20,000) digital products. This is before any advertising around Digital SMB.”

“Products on offer include storage services from cloudco Box, Microsoft Office 365 and McAfee Multi-Access, which provides protection for up to five devices simultaneously.” Brendan O’Rourke, Telefónica UK continued, “Businesses have already seen that we are taking the hassle out of the technology, so they can work smarter and faster in an ever increasingly digital world.”

“To bring a vision to life, you have to have confidence in the technology you are working with; that it has the capability and flexibility to deliver our digital vision. CloudSense has been an important partner in the success of the Digital SMB project,” says Brendan O’Rourke, Telefónica UK. “They understood how we operate and the complexity of what was needed to fulfil our vision. When you talk to most e-commerce providers it’s a case of ‘one size fits all’ but CloudSense were able to provide the different elements that our sales teams and partners needed implemented.”

“O2 has the agility to serve its SMB customers in the straightforward and responsive way that they demand.” Brendan O’Rourke, Telefónica UK continued, “The CloudSense platform gives agents a clearer and more comprehensive view of customers and they can use this to adjust or discount bundles as they need to. The customers themselves can more easily look for and access specific products and tariffs themselves too. The same product catalog can now be accessed by our 2,000 plus agents."

However the consensus is that this is just the start of the journey – O2 is now looking to expand the Digital services roll-out over time, with a host of new services, particularly around instant server and cloud-based solutions.

“The CloudSense platform gives O2 a platform that joins together the different sales channels throughout the sales journey meaning customers end up with one order and one bill.”

Brendan O'Rourke, CIO at O2