Putting yourself in others' shoes

Catering to business needs | Revamping Vodafone's Enterprise Online Portal

The pace of technological adoption is accelerating like we’ve never experienced in human history.

For example, it took around 39 years for telephones to reach 40% penetration and another 15 before they became ubiquitous. Smartphones, on the other hand, accomplished a 40% penetration rate in just 10 years.

If now we think about the service adoption curve, then the pace is even significantly faster. The copycat effect is real and we’ve all heard about Snapchat complaining about how Facebook has taken “inspiration” from some of their most interesting innovations just months after being launched.

The only thing which no competitor can't replicate is the close relationship and engagement organisations can establish with their customers. Organisations striving in today’s market have successfully created customer empathy by understanding what they are experiencing, within their frame of reference.

Very few organisations fully understand the value of digitalisation and customer empathy like Vodafone Group Enterprise. Anchored on a strong commitment to their customers, the operator embraces digitalisation to recognise customers’ needs and behaviours, thus improving their experience and bringing innovative solutions to the market.

Aimed at attracting and engaging enterprise customers using thought leadership content, Vodafone Group Enterprise refined its objectives to improve the corporate website. Primarily, this initiative focused on content but also took advantage of advanced digital marketing best practices, especially those concerning SEO, personalisation, A/B testing, analytics and integration with the latest technologies in marketing automation.

Using personas to help create customer journeys, Vodafone Group Enterprise catered to their customers’ needs and laid the foundations for a truly omnichannel experience, allowing customers to interact using their preferred touch-points mix. This initiative was also driven by the need to incorporate the new Vodafone brand guidelines and establish a set of templates that could also be adopted by Vodafone Group operating companies to target their enterprise segments.

Working in partnership with Celfocus, Vodafone Group Enterprise sought to answer:

• How do we keep control of the portal and get the most value from an advanced digital marketing platform?
• How do we get insights on visitors’ behaviour?
• How do we reduce Time-to-Market for new offerings?

The new and improved portal is rapidly becoming a valuable resource for Vodafone Group Enterprise to showcase its global products, solutions and service propositions thus positioning the portfolio, creating awareness and generating new leads.

The holistic management of the content lifecycle has already proven to show a significant improvement, increasing the control of the message and ability to manage complex content into an easy and transparent way, for all stakeholders.

One of the key benefits provided by the platform is Personalisation and the possibility to provide customers with the correct amount of information based on their profiles and needs, which will prove pivotal in supporting the Customer Excellency Experience promise.

Using analytical information and data to gain insight into its customers’ behaviour, Vodafone Group Enterprise was able to gather valuable awareness of what customers are doing, and which content provides better traction.

Furthermore, the solution’s modularity and templates allow for authors to create and publish new content without requiring any IT changes. The architecture allows replication of both content and modular components supporting the ability to expand the solution to other Vodafone Group Operating Companies.

Finally, the Agile delivery framework and subsequent shorter delivery timescales allowed the project to address requirement reprioritisation, add new functionalities and react to any changes, leading to a quicker time to market for the project.

The Vodafone Enterprise Portal is the result of what enterprises customers were looking for in terms of content and, more importantly, experience. More than listening to customers, Vodafone put them at the centre of the experience, and built the platform from this pivotal assertion thus putting themselves in their customer’s shoes.

If you want to know more about this project, please download the case study here.

Workplace-as-a-Service from Sprint Business lets you focus on the important part of opening a new office and leaves the headache to Sprint.