C Spire Wireless Delivers on its Promise of Personalized Wireless with 1:1 Customer Dialogues

Neolane Drives Targeted, Relevant Interactions across Outbound and

Inbound Channels, Helping C Spire to Boost Marketing Efficiency and

Effectiveness

Customer name: C Spire Wireless

Industry: Telecommunications

Business Need: Support its corporate mission of delivering personalized wireless by moving from untargeted, blanket campaigns to personalized dialogues driven by customer needs, preferences, and behavior.

“Neolane is helping C Spire to fulfill its promise of delivering personalized wireless. We’re able to sustain more meaningful, relevant conversations with our customers across all touch points, which has not only improved the customer experience but business results.”

Justin Croft, Manager, Campaigns and Promotions,

C Spire Wireless

C Spire Wireless, based in Ridgeland, Mississippi, is the nation’s only wireless provider that offers consumers and businesses a suite of personalized services. The company provides wireless services and mobile devices in four states through its website, call center, and 80 retail locations. C Spire is the first wireless provider in the U.S. to personalize customers’ experience by offering apps that fit who they are, services that anticipate their needs, and rewards for using their phone in new ways.

Challenge: Competitive Market Prompts Need for Personalized Customer Dialogues

Formerly Cellular South, C Spire Wireless underwent a full rebranding in September 2011, changing its name and unveiling its “personalized wireless” experience. This personalized experience has become the heart of the company’s products and services—including its SCOUT personalized recommendation tool and PERCS rewards program—as well as customer interactions across all lines of business.

From a marketing perspective, C Spire needed to retool in order to support this corporate mission and drive deeper customer engagement. The company had been using a web-based email marketing tool, but there was minimal targeting or personalization of campaigns. In addition, the application couldn’t integrate with external systems

to pull in the required data.

Another by-product of the tool’s limitations was manual, time-consuming processes. Lists had to be generated externally and then uploaded, resulting in additional steps. Moreover, only able to send one-off deliveries, marketers couldn’t plan and execute coordinated campaigns across the customer lifecycle.

“We simply outgrew our email marketing tool and no longer had the feature set to support our growing marketing sophistication,” said Justin Croft, Manager, Campaigns and Promotions, C Spire Wireless. “To succeed in the competitive wireless market, we needed to take our marketing communications from untargeted, blanket campaigns to personalized dialogues driven by needs, preferences, and behaviors.”

Solution: Move beyond Email with Integrated Campaign and Decision Management

To create these personalized customer dialogues, C Spire didn’t just need a more robust email marketing platform. Instead, the company sought a cross-channel campaign management platform with a powerful personalization engine and native support for email, SMS, and other digital channels. To optimize inbound customer interactions via its call center and point of sale locations, C Spire was also looking for real-time decision management capabilities.

RESULTS

• Created a single, consolidated customer view that encompasses multiple data sources

• Increased open rates nearly 41 percent and click-through rates 25 percent as a result of sending more targeted, personalized emails

• Tripled the number of campaigns with no additional headcount thanks to greater automation and workflow reusability

• Mitigate churn risks by providing real-time recommendations via the call center and point of sale

• Optimize contact pressure and marketing effectiveness by consolidating messaging onto one platform

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“Thanks to greater automation and workflow reusability, we’ve nearly tripled the number of campaigns. In addition, we can spend more time on marketing, versus systems maintenance and other technical tasks.”

Based on these criteria, C Spire selected Neolane’s conversational marketing platform, including the Neolane Campaign and Neolane Interaction applications. According to Croft, Neolane was in the sweet spot: it was advanced enough to meet the company’s current and future marketing needs, but it wasn’t overkill that would hamper productivity, agility, and ROI.

“Neolane and C Spire had a shared vision for delivering personalized experiences and building interactive customer dialogues,” notes Croft. “It was quickly apparent that Neolane is a true one-to-one marketing platform that would allow us to increase engagement and results by delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time—across both outbound and inbound channels.”

Results: Greater Efficiency and Effectiveness, the Promise of Personalized Wireless Fulfilled

Within Neolane, C Spire has created a single, consolidated view of its customers that encompasses demographics; device, subscription, and billing information; campaign responses; and behavioral data from both Neolane (e.g. opens, clicks, web tracking, etc.) and external sources (e.g. app downloads, rewards program logins, sweepstakes entries, etc.). Daily workflows automatically load data from multiple sources, ensuring that the latest customer information is driving campaigns.

This data—plus Neolane’s segmentation and personalization capabilities—has allowed C Spire to target email communications at a much more granular level. Instead of reaching the entire database, promotional campaigns are segmented for specific groups, such as customers nearing the end of their

contract, or those with high-churn devices. In addition, customer lifecycle communications are now automated and personalized based on the whether the individual owns a smartphone or feature phone, is enrolled in the PERCS rewards program, etc.

Since moving from house list campaigns to highly targeted, personalized messages, C Spire has seen a significant boost in email engagement. Open rates have increased nearly 41 percent to 12.1 percent, while click-through rates are up 25 percent to 16.1 percent. In addition, email deliverability is approaching 97 percent.

In addition to greater campaign effectiveness, Neolane has increased marketing efficiency at C Spire. “Thanks to greater automation and workflow reusability, we’ve nearly tripled the number of campaigns,” said James Veillette, Marketing Database Analyst and one of C Spire’s power users. “In addition, we can spend more time on marketing, versus technical tasks.”

To optimize inbound interactions via its call center and point of sale locations, C Spire has integrated Neolane Interaction with its homegrown CRM system. Right within the CRM interface available to retail employees and call center agents, Neolane Interaction make real-time decisions based on the individual with which they’re speaking. For instance, to help mitigate customer churn, the call center agent is able to identify high-risk customers based on known churn variables and offer the most relevant message or promotion dynamically recommended by Neolane.

“Neolane is helping C Spire to fulfill its promise of delivering personalized wireless,” said Croft. “We’re able to

James Veillette, Marketing Database Analyst, C Spire Wireless

sustain more meaningful, relevant conversations across all touch points, which has not only improved the customer experience but business results.”

Looking Forward: Mobile Marketing with SMS and Push Notifications

Looking ahead, C Spire is eager to expand its mobile marketing efforts through the Neolane platform. The company recently added the SMS channel to send wireless service notifications and select, high-value promotional content. In addition, C Spire is piloting the Neolane Mobile App Channel, which will allow the company to deliver personalized push notifications and app content via its SCOUT app.

According to Croft, beyond leveraging each channel to engage customers, C Spire anticipates great value from consolidating all messaging on one platform. “We’ll be able to better manage contact pressure and gain insight into what’s truly working from a messaging perspective.”