Success Story
Unbound Next Best Action Marketing For BT
We’re enabling BT to mature from disjointed marketing to an industry-leading ‘unbound’ approach facilitated by a revolutionary decisioning ecosystem.
Industry
Telecommunications
Date delivered
October 2024
Length of project
6 months
Solution provided
Understanding Customers as Individuals, Deliver Personalised CX at Scale, Connect Customer Journeys Across Channels
The Project
Since BT acquired EE, they’ve been consolidating customer experience management (CXM) and establishing EE as the flagship consumer brand. Recently, those aims leapt forward. BT’s new NBA platform (a nod to “next best action marketing”) began rolling out. Developed in-house, NBA is an ambitious decisioning ecosystem that’ll manage both outbound and inbound activity. The ambition is to move to unbound customer interaction management, delivering the best experience at every opportunity to individual customers and connecting journeys seamlessly.
The Challenge
EE’s acquisition brought legacy CXM systems that worked in the past but don’t fit with future use cases. In particular, separate inbound and outbound systems were causing confusion, journey breakdowns, inconsistent messaging, and churn.
Rather than retrofitting a round hole to fit a square peg, the company opted to build its new NBA ecosystem. Data, decisioning, and UX across pricing and locations would come together to create a market-leading system. As with most industry-first innovations, that’s easier said than done.
- Inbound and outbound customers were handled in different systems with no sync.
- Ownership, governance and customer intelligence were patchy.
- There was too much distance between commercial and operational teams.
- NBA development teams had a massive backlog with little prioritisation.
Ultimately, rolling out NBA requires new ways of thinking and working.
Our role, spearheaded by Tap CXM head of strategic consulting Mark Clydesdale, was to bridge the gap between product owners, campaign managers, audience selection managers, operational managers, and deployment managers.
- Map end-user acceptance criteria so the NBA system has the right functionality.
- Define CXM use cases so NBA is built to benefit customers.
- Proactively prioritise system requirements based on what’s valuable and achievable.
- Facilitate the technical programmes.
Mark’s extensive telco experience–having worked with O2 and Vodafone on similar projects–built a framework for a best-in-class approach to next best action marketing.
Our part in this mammoth project was bridging technical, operational and commercial requirements – not just translating but elevating how things get done.
Mark Clydesdale, Head of Strategic Consulting, Tap CXM
The Results
User Acceptance
After translating and consolidating end-user requirements, Mark raised 139 requirements to make NBA a truly unbound platform. These detailed, resourced, and prioritised requirements essentially became the implementation playbook.
Broaden the Business User Base
A small (and overloaded) team of 6 handled inbound marketing under the old system. Mark established a pathway to migrate responsibility to product owners so BT can build more and better next best action marketing experiences.
Unbound System = Unlimited Potential
NBA currently reaches out to 25M+ retail customers (and counting). Crucially, the system allows technical, commercial, and operational teams to collaborate, creating a cycle of continuous improvement that benefits customers and brings in more value.
