Telefonica | Vivo nets a 30 percent increase in marketing revenue with IBM Unica

Telefonica | Vivo, the largest mobile telecommunications provider in Brazil, has enjoyed remarkable success over the past decade. As demand for mobile services surged, Telefonica | Vivo tripled its customer base to roughly 60 million in just seven years, growing its annual revenue to more than USD15 billion in 2010. With success came more customers, more services and more products. That meant more data and more complexity—and a challenge for Telefonica | Vivo marketers.

As the business grew, Telefonica | Vivo’s decentralized and manual marketing processes couldn’t keep up. The São Paulo-based company had 30 contractors running manual database queries to generate campaign lists, a slow, costly and error-prone process that resulted in large campaign backlogs. Campaigns lacked relevance and timeliness, while duplicate and uncoordinated campaigns resulted in “contact stress” for customers and the risk of alienation. Performance measurability was limited, meaning that Telefonica | Vivo marketers had difficulty determining which campaigns and channels were most effective, and which fell short.

Recognizing the need to improve, Telefonica | Vivo marketing leadership undertook an in-depth search for an integrated marketing platform. The company selected IBM® Unica® based on its strength of enterprise customer references, ability to meet Telefonica | Vivo’s IT and marketing requirements, support for the Portuguese language and best-of-breed functionality.

“We needed a tool that could improve our marketing processes, increase our response rates, reduce the time of developing and implementing campaigns and optimize our customer interactions,” said Leandro Andrade, Telefonica | Vivo Director of Business Intelligence. “Unica is helping us reach those goals and drive revenue growth through personalized marketing campaigns.”

ROI realized in less than a year
Telefonica | Vivo implemented IBM Campaign, IBM Contact Optimization and IBM Marketing Operations and integrated the solutions with its 120 TB customer data warehouse and business intelligence tools used for deep customer segmentation analysis and statistical modeling.

The company now executes 200 campaigns per month, coordinating and optimizing its outreach based on customer response. IBM Unica solutions have provided greater scalability and precision in delivering millions of marketing SMS messages a day, and millions of emails and telemarketing calls a month to opt-in customers, up substantially from previous statistics. It also uses direct mail and interactive voice response initiatives, while other targeted interactions offer customers incentives to opt in to marketing communications, helping increase the opt-in rate to 70 percent.

The results have been remarkable. Telefonica | Vivo has increased the revenue it generates from direct marketing by 30 percent, with five times more sales on campaign days than in the past. Telefonica | Vivo achieved positive return on investment (ROI) from the IBM Unica solution in less than a year.

Moreover, Telefonica | Vivo has reduced its operational costs by 80 percent by eliminating the previous manual efforts required to develop and run campaigns. Campaign cycle times have been reduced from 30 days to four. Telefonica | Vivo has gained breakthrough insights into customers and campaign effectiveness that it uses to continually evolve customer profiles, devise creative campaigns and optimize personalized marketing.

To improve its marketing results, Telefonica | Vivo uses predictive modeling to support a next-best offer (NBO) concept, based on customer purchases, segmentation, behavior, and external and geographic data, with business rules around profitability, company values and regulation. With this approach, it achieved a 35 percent increase in the number of customers buying services, up to 550,000 in just three months.

“In addition to amazing results, we’ve also achieved a new level of efficiency, and can deliver our campaigns to market much quicker. We’ve created a virtuous circle—relevant contacts with our clients, quicker response and results, better analysis and, again, new and more relevant contacts,” noted Kendji Wolf, Telefonica | Vivo’s Business Intelligence Senior Manager.

Transformation into a centralized marketing infrastructure
The centralized IBM Unica solution has also boosted morale in the marketing department, with an internal survey finding a 40 percent increase in employee satisfaction. Said Wolf, “Employee satisfaction is very important to Telefonica | Vivo. With Unica, employees are much more satisfied with the result of their work and its importance. They could stop doing manual activities and focus on delivering real value.”

One key to success was the ability to integrate Unica with Telefonica | Vivo’s existing infrastructure, in particular its data warehouse and business intelligence tools that analyze data from 15 transactional systems, (processing more than 2 billion call detail records (CDRs) per day), providing a closed-loop system that’s both scalable and flexible. “We rely on a consistent process of collecting and generating customer information, extracting knowledge from it and using it to boost business,” said Daniela Calaes, Telefonica | Vivo Senior Manager of IT.

Strong support from C-level executives and the IBM Unica Latin America team were also essential, Calaes said. Through the transformation, Telefonica | Vivo has tightened collaboration between marketing and IT and formed a panel of marketing, CRM and business intelligence leaders to monitor and guide the program.

Building on its success, Telefonica | Vivo’s next step is to implement IBM Unica Interact for inbound marketing through its website, call centers and physical offices, and IBM Opportunity Detection for event-based marketing. This initiative will introduce real-time marketing capabilities into the inbound channel, building on Telefonica | Vivo’s success using IBM Campaign to push pre-calculated messages to the website, call center and physical offices.

For more information
To learn more about IBM Unica, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner or visit the following website: ibm.com/software/marketing-solutions