Online Customer Self-Service

Maximizing the Customer

Experience

Liferay European Symposium 2010

Offenbach am Main October, 2010

Radoslav Volny

Senior Manager for Online

Dusan Bystriansky

Director – Business Development

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High Level Summary

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The objective of this presentation is to:

Summarise why it is increasingly more important to maximise the quality of the

customer experience over online web channels

Outline what challenges does this pose for Telecom IT solutions

Offer suggestions how these challenges should be addressed

Illustrate these points on case study of implementation of Telefónica

O2 Slovakia (O2) integrated ePortal built on Liferay framework

The first section covers a short introduction of O2 Slovakia and current market

conditions and drivers demanding online self-care channels.

The mid section deals with the online Portal and self-care implementation challenges

encountered on the way

The last part offers evaluation of realised benefits and provides a list of summary

messages and lessons learned

Trends and directions of Enterprise portals for the next 5 years:

Customer profiling

Site personalization

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Portals’ Role Within the Enterprise

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Over past 5 years, online sales channels have assumed an ever-

increasing role in determining an enterprise's financial success

As such, portal applications have emerged as one of the single most

critical IT assets within any enterprise (Telcos, Banks, airliners, etc..)

Gartner research shows 80% of enterprise executives think customer

experience is more important now than three years ago.

Both functional and technical differences between Enterprise portal

solutions and community portal solutions are vast.

Compared to Community portals, implementing an Enterprise portal

solution is no trivial matter. Enterprise portal solutions must:

Integrate heavily into pre-existing multi-system backend architectures (CRMs,

Order Management systems, Identity Providers (IdP), etc…)

Be scalable to 100,000’s users

Capable of processing high volumes of transactions

Be extremely resilient

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Enterprise Portals

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Motivation for Enterprises:

reduce cost to operate while maintaining quality of service

increase revenue through differentiation

Customers (end-users) demands:

higher purchasing flexibility (e.g. create their own bundles)

shopping convenience (anytime, anywhere),

highest standards of service delivery

Excellent Customer Experience means:

Increased loyalty

Increased Revenue

Prevented churn

Fertile ground for web-based self-care and web-based shopping

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….but

Before the arrival of internet, economy customers could only share their experience

with family members, friends and colleagues in a limited manner.

Now, one customer can share their bad experience story through blogs, podcasts,

social networks, video sharing, and rating sites with hundreds, thousands, and

millions of people. And that story lasts forever and continues to spread, thanks to

search engines.

While the internet has been empowering customers, companies have been

distancing themselves from their customers – less face-to-face interactions.

Web-based shopping and web based self-care is convenient for customers and cost

effective for companies, but can be disastrous when something goes wrong…

The probability that something goes wrong with web-based shopping and

self-care is very high.

Only reliable, resilient and fault-tolerant web-based solutions

enhance the customer experience

68% of Customer defections occur because customers perceive "An

Attitude of Indifference“ . Customer Experience Accounts for Everything.

Telefónica O2 Slovakia - Background

Pop. 38 mil

Pop. 10 milPop. 5.4 mil

Pop. 10 mil

Pop. 8.2 mil

Pop. 82 mil

ERASlovakia – population 5.4 million

Telefónica O2 Slovakia:

02.02.2007 - Launch of commercial

service (3rd mobile operator)

~400 employees

>10% market share (EOY 2009)

Telefónica O2 ePortal – Business Goals

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4. Stay lean in terms of internal call center and sales network

• focus on the most value added operations and let everything else on self-care

and

• move care traffic:

Call centre ShopsSelf-care

1. Competitive advantage via easy to use online self-service

2. Everything (product, service) is online enabled

3. Support multichannel organization (the same data on all touch points)

Telefónica O2 ePortal – IT Goals, back in 2008

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1. Consolidation of existing online applications under single framework

- website

- e-shop

- mobile content downloads

- online prepaid top-up

- email electronic invoice

- non existing self-care

5. Other requested features:

- SSO, authentication of O2 customers against CRM

- security: respect O2 security zones standard

- Allow for profiling and personalization of customers across all portals

4. Keep doors open for multiple vendors to develop future applications

2. Robust front-end for new CRM

3. Find reliable vendor who has both the UI and backend integration expertise

6. Limited budget and internal resources

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Customer self-care solution challenges

1. Simultaneous project - new Siebel CRM

challenge: launch ePortal prior to the rollout of a new CRM system but

still be prepared for its launch a couple of months later

- Integration considerations

- Maximal re-use, minimal wastage

2. Keep existing php/mysql applicationsBe able to integrate existing portal applications (using various

technologies) while still integrating them under the unified portal

umbrella.

3. Other Liferay “features”

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Addressing these challenges (1)

Simultaneous project - new Siebel CRM

-The so-called SafeWay initiative prepared ePortal for hot-swapping the

interface from the old CRM to the newer system.

-How this was accomplished?Services were designed to be identical in both solutions (legacy systems via BEA

and new via TIBCO). Both versions vary only in minor parameters.

-Was it successful? Yes. As the SafeWay name implies, ePortal was prepared for both contingencies

(launch either before or after rollout of new CRM). This was accomplished

within an acceptable cost of less than 10% of the project value.

Addressing these challenges (2)

Integration of existing applications with minimal changes

Existing, external PHP/MySQL E-shop and Forum only occupies the main part of

page, remainder is rendered by ePortal.

Solved by:

•URL scrapping (Customized Portlet Bridge – portlet proxying)

•Enhanced SSO of ePortal (more later)

Challenges:

•session handling, cookies handling, get/post parameters handling and it’s

configuration

•JS frameworks used (jQuery 1.2.6.)

•CSS clashes

•New URLs on page usable only within valid session

Addressing these challenges (3)

Multilanguagemissing possibility of different site structure in different languages

Solved by custom development:• set default language to never-used value (in our case Japanese)

• menus rendering checks if current language version exists

• page checks if proper language version exists, otherwise displays upper page

Increased control over user login names- example: MSISDN cannot be used as user login name. As a mobile provider,

this creates difficulties, many customers want to use their phone number as

their user name.

Developer Documentation- As for all technologies, the more comprehensive the technical documentation,

the higher quality output and faster times-to-market.

other Liferay “features”

What would be nice to see in upcoming Liferay versions…

Taking Liferay Features Further…Enhanced SSO & Federated Identities

Enhanced SSORequired: enhanced SSO functionality across Liferay and external portals

-SSO between portals within the Liferay container and external (php, .NET, etc.)

-Cross Domain SSO, portals on different domains (eg. sk.o2.com,

o2active.sk,…)

Solved by custom development:• A new SSO plug-in (sitting on top of Liferay’s authentication framework) was developed capable of

bridging authentication between LR accounts and external user stores

Federated IdentitiesAccount Profile attributes needed to be aggregated and sharable across all

portals (internal and external)

Example: user changes email address in external portal (o2active.sk), change is

propagated and viewable across all portals.

Solved by custom development:• Federated Identities management was implemented on top of the custom SSO plug-in.

Taking Liferay Features Further…

SSO & Federated Identities

….and some e-Portal statistics

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Over 15% of website visits touch self-care part (My O2)

15% monthly growth of number of registered users

Most visited content are pages related to customer cost control (actual expenditure, activation of Extra-packages)

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Where do we go from here?

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With the introduction of Web 2.0, the elevation of the

portal application’s role and importance within the

enterprise is now entering into a second phase.

Customer Profiling and Personalization is the

hottest rising trend in ecommerce

O2's portal-wide SSO & Federated Identities

Management has left the door open for very interesting

opportunities to be developed in this area:

Customer Profile data is stored and aggregated

Customer Online Channel Data is stored and aggregated

Business Intelligence rules are applied to this data to determine which

personalized content can be driven to them

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Customer Profiling and Personalization

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Customer Profile Data:

Date of birth, gender, name, locale, registration date, order history, product list, etc…

Customer Online Channel Data:

Search keywords - This is a clear indication of what the customer is looking for (they

explicitly told you) and navigational behavior

Product Browsing Attributes - What are the traits of the products the customer is looking

at? Are they looking at relatively expensive items, clearance items, core vs. accessory

products, etc.

Referring URL - This speaks to how they entered the site and can have a big influence on

how you personalize the experience for the customer.

Example - Concrete personalization:

Input: Visitor = Female, 18 yrs, today is her birthday, has recently searched “iPhone”, has

browsed “unlimited SMS tariff” in the past 5 visits and has been a registered user for more

than 2 years.

Output: Content = Display happy birthday offer, “Today only, get an iPhone 50% off when

you subscribe to an unlimited SMS tariff”.

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Personalization: pitfalls

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Perhaps more important than knowing what to present to the

customer, is knowing what NOT to present:

Example: Bob (a bachelor who likes to read Tom Clancy novels), visits his

favourite e-shop and buys a Where’s Waldo? children’s book as a gift for his

nephew…

Now whenever he visits his favourite e-shop, he is offered children’s books at

the top of the special offers list!

Eventually, the e-shop will be perceived as out-of-touch with Bob, and his

loyalty will erode…

Successful prediction models require both corrective &

reinforcement learning

Strongest indicator of a visitor's motivation for visiting a site is their actual

behavior during the current session

Weights must be applied to past session history

Current session behaviour must be analyzed and interpreted with

considerations to past behaviour (is current behaviour in-line with what we

already think we know about the user?)

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Best Practices

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Introduction – “Slowly, but surely” vs. Big-bang

Use as a base the simple data from customer profile data set

Introduce a small number of variables from online channel data set (keyword search data

is a very good candidate)

Define simple rules to drive popular/generic content (the more variables, the more

targeted and specific your content can become)

Measure success

Global improvements in portal performance (revenue, number of visits, number of

bounces, time on site…)

Evaluate business metrics based specific visitor behaviour in reaction to specific

personalization attempts (framework for info gathering already exists). For each instance

ask “Did the visitor respond positively or negatively? Was this „hint‟ useful?”

Notifications and reporting - React quickly to under-performing models

Simulate (Before releasing into the wild)

Internal simulations on actual customer data, can be automated

Regression testing can be performed continuously on real production data

Improve

Key success factor is to correct bad rules, reinforce good ones.

Lather, rinse, repeat

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Some other applications…

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Customer data and business intelligence rules can be

used in other ways than just driving cross-sale & up-

sale content:

Targeting specific marketing emails to specific customers

Offering specific discount promotions to specific customers

Determine different content based on user’s demographics.

Display different skins or themes based on the user’s

demographics

For a particular customer and product, and which NOT to

show.

Reports: which products are performing best within which

segments, which are under-performing?

The possibilities are endless…

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Summary messages

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Enterprises have fully emerged themselves into the online world,

portal dominance is now a reality

The heavy requirements imposed on Enterprise portals set them

well apart from standard community portal applications

Negative feedback is viral, one bad review has more negative and

wide-reaching impact than 100 good reviews

Only reliable, resilient and fault-tolerant web-based solutions

enhance the customer experience, and therefore succeed.

Web 2.0 has pushed forward the concept of the personalized

web. This trend will continue to gain momentum and carry

enterprise portals forward into the next 5 years. Key concepts:

SSO

Federated Identities

Customer profiling

Site personalization

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Thank you for your attention

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For questions about this case study please contact us

Telefónica O2, Slovakia, www.sk.o2.com

Radoslav Volny - radoslav.volny@o2.com

Emeldi Group

Dusan Bystriansky - dusan.bystriansky@emeldi.com

United Kingdom:

Emeldi Ltd, UK, http://www.emeldi.com

Czech Republic: Emeldi Software Services s.r.o., http://www.emeldi.com

Emeldi Technologies s.r.o. http://www.emeldi.cz

Slovakia Emeldi Software Service Slovakia s.r.o. http://www.emeldi.sk