Conversational service: how it can help build efficiency and drive revenue, by Ana Simic, Head of (Digital) Service & Social Media A1 Telekom Austria

1. Ana Simic • ana.simic@a1telekom.at • @AnaSimic
Conversational service
#inSpiredEvent2017
How it can help build efficiency and drive revenue

2. Conversational service: How it can help
build efficiency and drive revenue
Ana Simic, Head of Digital Service & Social Media, A1 Telekom

3. Customer relationships are (becoming) conversations.
“Markets are conversations.”

4. A1 Market Leader in Austria
• 7 European countries
• 24M customers
• Part of América Móvil, the 3rd largest global telco
Part of the A1 Telekom Austria Group
4 strong brands
• Strong brands (A1, Red Bull Mobile, Yesss!, Bob)
• 6M mobile customers
• 2.2M fixed customers
Customer contact
Service through digital channels
• 3,200 employees in customer service
• 70,000 customer contacts daily
• Mein A1 App
• A1 Chat
• A1 Guru
• A1 Blog
• A1 Facebook
• A1 Community
• And many more ..
„Einfach A1: Internet, Telefonie, TV und IT-Lösungen aus einer Hand“

5. “We are working hard to continuously improve A1 digital self-care & interaction
capabilities to satisfy and exceed customer needs and generate measurable value for
the business by reducing service costs and increasing customer satisfaction.”
Head of Digital Service & Social Media @
Business Unit Consumer
Social media
Community, bots & more
“Mein A1” self-care applications (app & web)
Our Why?

6. Our current view on the strategic shift of f2f calls to
digital self-service
• Hotline
• Operator shops
• Indirect sales
• Field service
• Live chat
• Social media
• A1 Community App
• Self service app (Mein A1)
• Wifi optimizer
Web
• Self service (Mein A1)
• Online bill
• Device assistance
• FAQs
Personal service Messaging Digital self care
Customer-2-
customer service
Other
• IVR
• PC clients (service
center)
Deflect manual Service RequestsIncrease efficiency Deflect manual service requests

7. What base of channels are we building on?

8. Messaging | Chat & social media
Live chat
• Live since 3 years
• Available on Web (incl. resp. mobile)
• Our challenges: availability on weekends; session-
based; customers prefer asynchronous channels
Social media
• Active since 8 years on 9 channels
• Weekly organic reach ~450k
• Our challenges: growth in service requests by 170%
in 2017 vs. 2016; customers expect fast response
times <1 hour

9. Self care | A1 Community
Why we are proud of it?
• 187,000 registered users
• 1.5M unique visits / year & growing!
• Becoming an important sales accelerator
Our challenges
• How to integrate community content better into the
customer journey?
• How to find & keep super users for the content hubs
we want to focus on?

10. Self care | Mein A1 app & Web
Why we are proud of it?
• Penetration >65%
• Growth YOY +30%
• Helps reduce calls, driving digitalization & online
push
Our challenges
• Backend needing to follow the speed of frontend
development
• How will the messenging growth impact the position
of the app?

11. Self care | Wifi Manager app
Why we are proud of it?
• Over 20k happy customers
• In-house development
• Promoting our positining as enabler
Our challenges
• Integration in the „A1 App-Universe“
• Communication

12. Self care | Help & Contact area
Why we are proud of it?
• Introduction of Guided Contact concept
• Reduction of calls as 30% use self-care
• In-house development
Our challenges
• Internal channeling vs. customer-view
• How to integrate more intelligence and more
interactivity?

13. New! | Proactive service information
Why we are proud of it?
• Relief in the call center immediately visible
• Fast & agile development and deployment
Our challenges
• Not personalised yet
• Manual inputs

14. What is changing when relationships turn into
conversations?

15. 1. Conversations are an “endless” stream
Today
Straightforward Q then A
Requests from various channels are
routed to agents or systems and are
fulfilled
A lifetime journey
Asynchronous conversation takes
place using various channels (mainly
messaging)
Future

16. 2. Messaging is learned and well-adopted by customers
 Preferred channel for younger customers  With automation: 24/7 service & instant help  Improved customer experience

17. 3. Businesses can profit, but need to invest & transform
• Asynchronous & parallel handling of service cases
• Higher agent satisfaction & higher TNPS
Messaging throughout the customer journey
Marketing, Sales and Customer Service – all in one conversation
Awareness Consideration Acquisition Service Loyalty
Routing
Lead generation Transactions, payment
Guided problem
identification
Feedback
moderation
Lead nurturing FAQs as dialogue
• Potential for automation via AI & bots
• Big data integration

18. Where do we see the biggest potential?
App Messaging & Automation Community & Social

19. Showcase: A1 Chatbot
For us it is still a playground

20. A1 chatbot in Facebook Messenger: smartphone advisor
User onboarding Feature selection Search results

21. A1 chatbot in Facebook Messenger: additional features
Smalltalk elementsShop finder Service inquiries

22. What we learned so far
Some of the learnings so far
• 10% of customers use or try the chatbot
• Customer needs a „solution or next step“
• Bots can sell! 
• Development is an SW-development
Where we can improve?
• Wider range of use cases & platforms
necessary
• Improved „intelligence“ & reliable platform

23. Conversational commerce in the
A1 Community with Google Optimize
Best practice

24. How can we convert huge community traffic into sales?
URL
Topic
URL
Topic
BUY
Trial: relevant integrations of sales teasers
throughout the community platform
• Framing a conversational situation and
offering the right conversational message
to discover product and service content in
the A1 online shop
• Steps: set goals, implement, evaluate user
acceptance & results

25. What did we implement?
on the A1 Community start page
on thread pages
on category pages

26. Referrals to
product pages
1.4 %
0.4 % vs. 1.8 %
Number of
conversions
6.7 %
451 vs. 420
Assisted conversions
compared to social media
60 %
1082 vs. 682
• Clicking on URLs to product pages can be increased
• No effect on the number of conversions
• Only selected and mild feedback from users regarding
new ads
Outcomes
Objective setting
Can we drive conversions with conversational
advertising in the community?
Measuring performance
Change in referrals, conversions and
assisted conversions
User acceptance
How did users perceive the
conversational ads?
• Strengthening effect on A1 Community as top
player in the customer pre-buying phase in
comparison to Facebook or A1 Blog

27. After-trial: Next steps
Teaser with UGC support (old concept of using testimonials)

28. So how will we know that we are successful on
this “conversational journey”?

29. So how will we know that we are successful on
this “conversational journey”?
Customers will be more
satisfied. It will save them
time & money.
We will be rewarded with a
higher NPS.
“Hard KPIs” are still the
main currency: higher
sales (or leads), lower
service costs.
It will take big(ger than
expected) transformation
and process optimizations.

30. …but it would be too boring
otherwise, wouldn’t it?

31. Thank you for your attention!
••

32. Ana Simic
#inSpiredEvent2017
Email: ana.simic@a1telekom.at