Optus is experimenting with generative AI to personalise “on-the-fly” what it puts in front of customers when they visit its web properties, the latest in a series of initiatives aimed at increasing the size of transactions and the customer’s so-called “lifetime value”.
Optus’ Sanjay Sharma, right, speaking at Dreamforce 2024.
Digital transformation executive Sanjay Sharma told Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2024 conference that the telco wants the ability to “decide dynamically what to present at the right time… for pretty much every click on the website.”
“We are starting to experiment with things like dynamic generation of content during inbound interactions with the customer, so we can present content that people can relate to,” Sharma said.
“So, for example, if you like extreme sports, we could have in your journey a content graphic so you can build a rapport.
“We think that will help us with the conversion [to a sale].”
Sharma said that a traditional challenge with presenting personalised recommendations to customers “in the moments that matter” is that “a lot of the time, by the time we get the data, the moment has passed.”
“We’re working very hard now to process a large amount of data ‘on-the-fly’ so that we can actually present a very personalised customer experience during an inbound interaction,” Sharma said.
“Because of the regulatory environment we are operating in, we can’t reach out to the customers as often as we’d like because of the consent requirements, so we need to be ready whenever the customer engages with us.”
It’s the latest initiative in an ongoing package of works that aim to increase the value of a single interaction, as well as the customer’s lifetime value – how long they stay and how much they spend with Optus, before moving on.
Sharma traced the efforts back as far as 2013, when he said the telco began a program of work to set up a unified storefront through which fixed, mobile and entertainment products and services could be purchased.
That work was completed in 2019, but the platform was used by contact centre agents and retail store staff, as this was still the predominant way of selling telecommunications and related services.
It has had to revamp the platform as telco services are now mostly purchased via self-service channels.
“We had a very simple idea to deliver an ecommerce-style experience for telco products,” Sharma said.
“We wanted to offer an intuitive, guided, personalised customer experience to our customers so they could buy all our products one by one or a combination of that in any quantity.
“It sounds very simple, but it’s incredibly hard, because unlike ecommerce, in a telco world it does matter what you have purchased previously, what your history is, whether you are paying your bills on time, and can you afford those products, [check] your identity because we’re operating in a very regulated industry, and we need to do service qualification for your specific address.”
“To [do all] that in a seamless ecommerce-type flow was a lot of work.”
The structure was achieved, however, and is known as the “universal cart”.
Sharma said it forms “the basis for the new digital foundation” at Optus, starting with “a unified storefront experience where customers can mix-and-match and purchase what they want, but once an order is taken, we break that order into multiple parts for fulfilment in different .. platforms.”
Much of that order breakup and processing is automated.
The storefront runs on a Salesforce stack, including Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud, with the latter enabling some of the telco’s personalisation efforts.
“We wanted to overlay personalisation on [the storefront] so we could cross-sell and upsell and give [customers] personalised nudges and assurances that they’re making the right decision, which increased the average order value for us in a single transaction,” Sharma said.
He said there had been a 62 percent increase in cart-to-checkout conversion rates.
The telco also targeted an increase in customer lifetime value.
“A customer usually stays for about six years on average once they actually purchase the first service,” Sharma said.
That initial personalisation drove a “marked uplift in our checkout and conversion rates,” Sharma said.
“We are accelerating further with personalisation to abandoned cart, transactional emails, [and] attachment options, so that we can actually accelerate and deliver more value to the customer and increase the lifetime value.”
Sharma said the telco had seen a 19.5 percent uplift in prospect conversion “due to abandoned cart support”.
It is also tackling cart abandonment for existing customers by sending them a “fast follow-up” to encourage the purchase.
Ry Crozier attended Dreamforce 2024 in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.