Success Story
ROI-Focused Consulting For A UK Telco
Our technical knowledge and industry experience enabled a leading telco to clarify and consolidate the requirements for an in-house real-time decisioning platform, with a view to maximising ROI.
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
Faced with CXM issues from siloed inbound and outbound systems, our client decided to build a bespoke decisioning platform. Developed in-house, the platform is an ambitious next-best-action (NBA) marketing ecosystem. It’ll deliver personalised experiences at every opportunity. Our role was bridging business, user, and technical requirements to create a practical and prioritised development roadmap.
The company’s aim for the NBA platform is to bring together customer data, offer decisioning, and UX across a range of products, price categories, and locations. To achieve something like that, you need marketing, developers, and commercial teams all working together. The tech needs to be built for everyone from the start or it’s unlikely to help anyone.
Mark Clydesdale, Head of Strategic Consulting
The Challenge
Aside from the significant technical task of building an industry-first decisioning platform, our client faced internal challenges that were threatening to delay delivery:
- Misaligned priorities: Operational, technical, and business teams had different ideas for what the platform should do.
- Overlap and competition: 8 team leads were raising requirements.
- No clear roadmap: Developers faced a growing backlog with little prioritisation.
- Use case clarity: The system needed to know which offers would most benefit the customer, which meant all stakeholders needed to align on commercial goals.
- Operating model changes: Moving from inbound and outbound campaigns to real-time experiences would require new ways of thinking and working.
Led by Head of Strategic Consulting Mark Clydesdale, Tap CXM consolidated and translated all stakeholder needs (marketing/operational, commercial, technical) into functional requirements for the new platform. These requirements would guide the development roadmap and define configuration specs.
Mark’s extensive telco experience, having worked with other industry leaders on similar projects, meant he could:
- 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.
Ultimately, our strategic consulting brought the different teams together and delivered a framework to achieve their desired outcomes.
The Results
139 requirements
The consolidated list – detailed, resourced, and prioritised – essentially became the implementation playbook.
Balancing 8 viewpoints
Mark’s ability to understand the required outcomes, both from a marketing and technical perspective, aligned the client’s teams.
More users = more experiences
Mark established a pathway to migrate CXM responsibility from a small (and overloaded) team of 6 to the ‘journey squads’ who would scale up activity.
Clear commercial outcomes
Bridging what the business wants (everything), what the technical team can realistically build, and what benefits customers, enabled technical programmes to gain momentum.
