PegaWorld 2025: Telenet Boosts Brand Loyalty with AI-powered Ethical Marketing

PegaWorld 2025: Telenet Boosts Brand Loyalty with AI-powered Ethical Marketing

So welcome everyone to our breakout session of Telenet, a Telenet group. Today we're talking about an exciting use case that we built in the last year and a half or so called Check and Smile. And the idea was to use Pega CDH to boost customer satisfaction, but especially focusing on brand perception and not just on pure revenue. And what the cat has to do with it. Then yours will tell you in a minute.

So maybe a quick introduction to Telenet and to us. So let me maybe start with Telenet Telenet group for the people who don't live in the Labb Benelux will probably never heard of us before. Telenet group is one of the leading telcos in Belgium. So you see a very pretty picture of Belgium. Here we have multiple brands. Telenet is one of them. HBase is another. And as you can see, Telenet is mostly active in the northern part of Belgium. So the Flemish part in total we're talking about 2.8 million customers. That's a lot in Belgium. I swear it might not be a lot compared to some of the numbers we saw today, but in Belgium it's a big deal.

So who are we? My name is Tine Van Calster. I'm the product owner of the segment of one team. I'll tell you a bit more about what segment of one is exactly in a minute, but it's basically I lead the team, the multidisciplinary team that's responsible to build and configure all of the campaigns or use cases in Pega CDH. It's multidisciplinary. So what does that mean? We have everything from Pega development to data science, data engineering, Nearing CRM analysts and also business consultants, and I brought one of them today, Iris. So Iris is responsible for making the bridge between the data team, where we are part of with marketing and with our technology teams to make sure that actually works end to end in all of our channels.

All right. So I promised to tell you all about segment of one. So segment of one is our program name for hyper personalization. I'm sure that in each of your companies you have something very similar going on at the moment. Um, so the idea of segment of one is to go from a cannoneer, one size fits all approach to very targeted marketing, both inbound and outbound. And we want to do that by recommending the right action in the right channel at the right time, with the right message.

Now, we've been doing this for a while, so it's not a new Pega CDH implementation. Um, we've been doing this for about, I'm going to say six years, especially in the last three years, we've really had a ramp up in the number of Next Best Action that we have live. So at the moment we have 1800 actions live through eight different channels. So both inbound and outbound, which generated in the last half year. 9 million communications with a very impressive, if I do say so myself conversion rate of 9%. So 9% of our customers actually accept the action, whatever it is that we propose. So that's a bit setting the scene up. The segment of one program is running for quite a long time. We use Pega CDH as a tool to build everything. And of course, everything is based on the data and AI that we have available on our customers.

So what is check and smile? Check and smile is a new use case that, as I said, went live about one year ago. Um, and it actually came from a bit of a difficult place, let's say. And so we had a very big IT transformation. And when I say big, I really mean we changed everything. So just entirely new it stack. Um, luckily, the migration between the systems went pretty smoothly for 99% of our customers, but not for 1% of the customers. And of course, that 1% gets the most attention. We're very clearly heard by everyone in the company, and also puts a little bit of a dent in our brands perception, um, which is why we wanted to bring a new proposition, a new customer value proposition live. Um, really starting from our customers and what they want, and make sure that we bring an extra service to them that they will enjoy. Um, and starting from the most customer centric place possible.

So if you want to do that, the first thing you do do is, of course, talk to your customers. So we started an elaborate research where we asked them, okay, but what do you actually expect from your telco provider? Um, and we identified a lot of opportunity areas. So as you can see, our customers have very high demands. They want us to basically manage their life effortlessly, empathize with their needs and dreams, and really care about the world that they are part of. So everything about this, of course, screams hyper personalization. And that's also where, of course they were looking towards Pega CDH to help them out.

So when we started thinking about the CVP, we formulated a couple of requirements. Um, because this is really a new type of proposition. We were still in or still in full transformation of the very one size fits all to targeted campaigning mode. So what we wanted to do for this CVP is really only focus on our existing customers. Start from customer intimacy, customer centricity. Be very bold and big about it. So don't do something quietly in a corner and then hope for the best. But really, just shout it as loud as possible and make sure everyone knows about it. Um, it needed to be an ownable milestone. So again, something that you really work towards a deadline, something that you could live with long term potential. And starting from within. And so really starting from our Telenet values and bringing them to the customer as best as possible.

So what did we end up with? We ended up with check and smile. So check and smile is really all for our existing customers. Um, it's an application that we put live in our app. So it's only available in inbound, only digital. It's available for all of our customers. And what we basically do is for four facets of their life, basically, or their life, at least as a customer with Telenet, we do a proactive check, completely personalized based on their data on AI, of course, and we do them this check for their network. So their network quality, security and products and a cherry on top is kind of a customer loyalty program.

So I will go a bit more deeply into the four different checks in a minute. But basically this means we have four different next best actions live towards our customers at all time in the app with an added bonus. I don't know if how many banks and how many telcos are in the room, but I'm always jealous when I see all of these banking stories with billions of interactions because everyone uses their banking app every day. Everyone doesn't use their telco app every day, so usually they only come when something is wrong or their bill is too high or something like that. So we wanted to give our customers an extra reason to come to the app. So a nice side effect. I'm not going to spoil what yours is going to tell you, but a nice side effect is that more people also came to the app because we have this service life.

So I said we wanted to be big and bold. That meant we launched it with the national campaign. So it was really a shout out on TV, radio, the whole shebang to make sure that everyone knew about this new proposition that we were launching. We went live in less than six months, which was quite a big feat. There were a lot of different teams involved from Telenet, I think more or less 50 teams, something like that, that needed to come together to deliver this end to end. And we did it. And so very reachable or set in stone. Milestone was met on time. And the entire thing is powered by Pega CDH. And yours will tell you all about it.

But an interesting thing about it as well is because we were focusing on long term potential. I don't know how it works in your company, but most business cases are made on a pretty short term. And here we said, because it's really about building that relationship with our customers, we are actually willing to accept a negative business case to start, because we believe in building that long term relationship with our customer, and we will get the return on investment just on a longer period of time.

So what is it now exactly that we are proposing to our customers? As I said before, we are checking for dimensions, and they all have to do with the customer experience in some way or form. So the GIF is running. So that's what the check and smile actually looks like in the app.

So the first check that we do is all about your connection. And so of course people want their product with us internet mobile to just work. What we do is we proactively check their connection, whether or not it has a good quality, but also investigate the root cause. If the quality is not up to par, how we can then fix it and then immediately give them complete access to a digital flow to then solve this problem. So that's the first one.

Secondly, the right product. So the product check might speak for itself, but we use our data and AI not just to give like a very simple best fit story where we basically say to our customers, based on your usage, this would be the best product for you. We really focus on for each customer getting the maximum value for money out of their products. So we stimulate certain, um, feature usage. If they don't use a certain feature that they actually already have available in their product, we want to stimulate it. Um, it might be something like you have a free data sim and you're not using it yet, so why don't you here? Is it an extra product for free? But it might also be your under using or not using a certain service, but you are paying for it. Then we are willing to offer you actually a downgrade and offer you a very easy way to turn off this service because we believe in the longer term.

The second two checks are a bit smaller, but not less important. So the safe surfing we get a lot of customers. A lot of our customers ask us questions about how can we securely manage the digital world, especially my my kids. They have access to social media and all the crazy stuff out there. So how do I manage this? And we have certain products that are also freely available to our customers that can help out. And then finally, customer advantages is more the typical rewards or promotions, loyalty checks that we can do so that people are aware, given that they are already a customer, what exactly they can expect from Telenet as a company.

So let me quickly deep dive into the first two, because that's really where data and AI plays the most impressive role. Let's say the network check. And so it kind of speaks for itself. We want to provide a quality check for our connectivity products to our customers. Um, where we not only in the first round had an inbound, um, so only available in the app flow. So more of a reactive flow. If you say we have a problem here with my internet, I want to have a fix but also proactively target our unhappy customers. And we use AI. This is predictive AI. So not generative predictive AI in two different ways.

So first of all, we've been building models, root cause models about technical issues for years. So we don't only look into the technical data at this. This customer doesn't have nice quality of service. No. We really want to know why they are having a bad connection. Is it because of their modem? Is it because the network in the ground isn't up to par? Is it a drop cable issue, etc. etc.. And we built a lot of these models and they're mentioned now eight but we have a lot more than that. Basically it just says this customer has a good experience because of this or a bad experience because of this.

But of course that's only the technical sides. And when you proactively target customers with technical issues, you also have some limitations in terms of one of the solutions might be sending a technician towards the customer. And we have to take into account that we don't have endless amounts of technicians running around. So um, we also put a model in place that predicts the quality of experience of a customer. So it's not because technically the modem says, I'm not really getting the highest speeds possible, that that customer actually sees it as a problem. That has to do with customer profiling, with how much devices are on the modem, etc., etc.. So in order to do the right thing proactively, so really reaching out to the right customers, we also have a quality of experience model that predicts basically the happiness of the customer because of their quality of connection. So that's behind the network.

Check the product check. Then here we look at your products. Um, and segment of one uses all the data and AI that we have available to make certain. Um, yeah, kind of um, assessment, let's call it that way. Um, and if you're using your product to its full potential. So it's all about value for money. Um, really increasing the value for money for the customer, but also the perception of value for money of the customer. So we check their current product and usage. We assess how far they're willing to go to mitigate potential value issues. So for example, do they just need to use their product more? Are there features that they are not using yet, or do we really need to say, okay, they're really not using this service. Let's just turn it off. And then we trigger the most relevant offer, um, to a customer. And in total it's about 70 different messages. It's actually more at the second run. So second run is currently going on. Um, and that is then presented in the app with the right flow behind it. Um, of course.

And then finally there are some customers where everything is actually fine. And so you have four different checks going, but if they have good quality network, they're on the right products. They already have all of the potential, uh, Safe surfing options available. The rewards are just the standard ones that are available on the website and nothing more. You still need to provide a nice experience for these customers as well. So we have like a full storyboard, a story rap, uh, thanking them to, uh, for being a good customer to Telenet. And then of course, if something would then pop up, they can do the check. Um, again.

So now you know what Check and Smile is all about. Um, as I said before, we launched it with a national campaign. So we have a short movie that we want to show, which is the commercial that's actually now running again on TV since yesterday. Um, it's in Dutch, so I'm not going to apologize. Maybe it's just a nice Duolingo moment for everyone. Um, it's only 10s. It's not a full commercial. Um, and then afterwards, I will hand the word to yours. So here we go. Continue reading. Abonnement and sit in your chair and smile. Start in the mid Telenet app.

So Tina didn't lie. We went big and bold with our commercial. It is indeed in Dutch. I do apologize, but I think you all get the underlying message. It is all about making sure to offer this service to our customers so that they can check their products and the telco products, in our case, their connection, their safety settings at any given time. And the customer would then be informed whether he needs to perform an action, whether there's a better offer available for him given his usage or that everything was good. I also saw in the previous messages that we also say, yeah, you're actually doing everything right. You have the latest products, you, uh, your usage is fine. So we're also reconfirming that.

So you might wonder, how did we build this? And this might not come as a surprise. We used Pega CDH to help us with that for a quite simple reason. Pega CDH has been in our architectural landscape marketing landscape even for over five years, and it has a really central role. It's already connected to a lot of channels, including Pega Customer Service. I'll come back to that later on. And Dina already stated, yeah, that was also for us, the reason why we could fastly implement this in less than six months. Now, the past few days we have learned about Blueprint, so we didn't have that at that point in time, but we could even go faster in future.

We also made sure that that we made a setup for us that allowed us the maximum flexibility, and you should really look at it as individual toggles per message that you could switch on and off in case an offer was not really resonating with the customer, and so on. And it's also the very first use case for which we enabled ADM adaptive modeling, um, which is a brand new proposition. So there was not a lot of intelligence already available. But on the other hand and I'll talk you uh, I'll talk a little bit more about that later on for every single customer. We had multiple offers available, and we actually wanted to use the power of ADM to help us decide which offer to show at that point in time. Um, last but not least, we also made a conscious choice at launch to only launch it in inbound channels. We chose for a digital channel being our mobile app and Pega Customer Service on the other side, uh, a really human channel to serve as many customers as possible. Because we do know that not all of the customers are already engaging with us through the app.

So you see that actually there were already a lot of conditions available in our current landscape just waiting for us to be, uh, to be enabled. Does that mean that we didn't need to change anything to our current setup? No. One of the major changes I think we did is to provide for Next Best Action per single response. Previously, we only stated one. Right now we do send back an offer for all the different checks and network check, product check, security check and reward check. That's that's something that we didn't do before. We also made sure that we had something to tell to every single customer. So we actually created Next Best Action for every customer. And last but not least, and I also told that earlier on with Adam. Yeah, it also made us think about different ways or and additional ways for a customer to engage with our messages. So we also incorporated additional feedback buttons like thumbs up and thumbs down to make sure that we could gather their feedback correctly. And of course, that provided an excellent starting point and a learning opportunity for for Adam.

Now this is how we have built it. But of course, I think the million dollar question is where are we at this point in time? So I'll share a little bit of the results. And I'm also always quite excited if we can share the results. I'm kind of like a number guy. But I think one of the key objectives was to make sure that the customers felt valued after showing the offer, and actually, half of them actually told to us that they felt more valued. Of course, the big star in the in the in the movie was the cat and it was almost all customers just loved the cat. It's called Vermeer, by the way. So it's now back all over on national television.

But also importantly that non Telenet customers also saw our commercial. And they also told to us that they would consider Telenet as, as a provider because they had this service. So I think we the mission is accomplished, that it was really set up as a brand loyalty campaign. Does that mean that we are there yet? No. At this point in time, we reached 20% of the customers. I'll tell you a little bit more about that later on. And we have an 8% proposal accept rate. So conversion. And one of the key items was also check and smile should and should. And it also did it did give a boost to our to our app. And you see that we actually had more app visitors and more app downloads, Uh, especially in the first weeks after the launch. So that was kind of like a temporary effect.

But you also see that there were still some customers that seem not to be interested. And the main reason that they told to us is that they don't fully trust it. They thought that this is just a little bit of a marketing campaign with a commercial offer in disguise. So we still have work to be done, uh, in the upcoming, uh, in the upcoming waves. Dina already told you, uh, actually, yesterday said the second big wave actually went live. Even with the two of us being here in Vegas with all of you.

Um, what's different about this, this wave is that, of course, we expanded the scope. We expanded the scope in two ways. On one side, we added new offers in it. And a key example is, uh, the Wi-Fi check that enabled the customers to check on their Wi- Fi coverage in their mobile homes, uh, All the time. We did include numerous other offers as well, but this is one of the key, the key features. And of course, we also expanded the scope and we added outbound to the mix. And that totally makes sense because previously we saw that we did not reach the full potential, yet at 20% of our customers that we reached so far, that has mainly to do that with the fact that not all of the customers are currently already using our app. And of course, not all all of the customers are calling in. So that's one of the key reasons why we actually wanted to expand that for for outbound channels as well.

We did already do a proof of concept back in March with email, and I also showed the first results there. We we had an open rate of 49% of the email, which is quite good in, in our case 6% click through rate and a 2.2% uplift when comparing target and control. So customers was actually taking the offer that we, uh, that we proposed. That also meant, of course, that we needed to change or actually revisit a little bit of the setup. Uh, yeah. One of the key challenges or we don't like to call it challenges, but rather opportunities was for us to make sure that it is consistent. Right. We wanted to make sure that the customer that receives an email with a specific offer, that you would see the same if we would open the the app. So the consistency was a was a big deal for us.

That also meant that in background, we needed to prioritize these offers in exactly the same way, both in and outbound. Secondly, of course, previously the scope was rather inbound. Right now we're adding outbound. So we also needed to expand the scope of Admiral. Think about Uh, integrating the new feedback for email uh, on on one hand, but also making sure that we could leverage the results of what we already had, uh, had passed. So we actually came up with, uh, with a setup of Adam that was actually on action level to ensure also the the consistency overall and also something that we didn't quite think, uh, when we launched this one year ago, Jeff Akin smile was kind of like a separate ecosystem. It was only available in a limited number of, um, of channels. But right now, if we put it into the mix in outbound. Yeah. We also needed to think about how do we position these check and smile offers, because it comes into the broad action catalog of other commercial messaging service messages. And it could be that we have for the same customer. We have a commercial offer, but also a more cheaper offer, which again, smile. So it put us also from a marketing point of view with some with some challenges.

Does that mean that we're there? No. We still have a lot of plans. Had we from a customer point of view, we will keep on adding new and more offers because we want to stay relevant for the customers. But we also and that's something that we also learned from the customers themselves. We also need to do a better job in explaining why we select this offer. They want to do that in a hyper personalized, hyper personalized way. So we're also making some progress over there. And overall, we want to make sure that the entire process for the customer is very free and that they can just go ahead. No hassles from, from from an end to end point of view that we have a better journey fulfillment that's on the personal or on the customer side if you want, but also Pega itself.

And we've been inspired, or at least I was inspired in the last few days itself is also moving and we need to keep track. So we're also preparing our move to the cloud. So in the upcoming few months, even we will have our bigger stack also available in the cloud and it will unlock new opportunities for us as well. And we're also thinking about implementing the operations manager, uh, as well. So you see that everything is evolving and we need to we need to keep up with that. And I'll give the word back to Tina for some additional words.

Exciting. Um. All right. Yeah. I just wanted to finish on, um, we are now doing the second wave of chicken smile. Um, we built it as an always on proposition. So customer value proposition a year ago, and I don't know how it works in your company, but usually we jump from one big idea to the next, and it's always a new thing that gets precedence over the thing that we did last year. Um, but this time we really mean it. So we keep on going. Um, customer loyalty is one of our key objectives as a company that we want to keep, um, targeting. So we really want to be recognized by our customers as the best in markets, um, by having the right CVS, but also the effortlessness, as you just said of our digital journeys, is key. And of course, check and smile is the main proof point, let's say, of this objective. Um, and it's a multi-year objective. So it's not only 20, 25. Um, it will continue and continue.

Um, and it also shows that we've been working on segment one and on Pega CDH for years. It's quite a journey of transformation, let's say. So change management wasn't always easy, but in the end we got there. And so now segment of one and CDH and its capabilities are really front and center in our company strategy. And check and Smile is an extremely nice proof point of the road that we have taken. So that was our story. Thank you for listening. We put our email addresses on the slide, but of course we're still running around here today. If you have any questions. And I see that we actually still have quite some time for questions. So we are ready for answering them. Thank you for listening. If there are any questions, just come over to the to the mic up front.

So. I want to walk up. Yeah. Um, yeah I love the story. What was the was there any impact to the contact center. Like as in more calls with driving this out to out to market. What was that impact? Um, well, a very good question, because it was actually one of the main three blocks of KPIs. Let's say that we were tracking from the start. So brand loyalty was the most important one, of course, but also impact on call centers, retail and technicians. Um, luckily we had foreseen to staff up beforehand because if you go live on a national campaign and of course you expect some impacts. It was actually pretty okay, especially in our call centers, because the app journeys were built in a correct way that customers could really do the full fulfillment themselves. Um, and in the end, we then used that extra capacity as both the technicians and the call centers to really increase our proactiveness even in the first wave. So contacting the customers where we felt the need was the highest to actually see what was available for them in the check in smile. Um, so we had prepared upfront.

Great presentation. I have got a couple of questions about the right product. That part that you mentioned in there when the offers are getting generated and if the product bundling or new product needs to be added, how actually you managed it with it within Pega or outside Pega, that is the first question. And secondly, if someone is getting the offers and they wanted to just select that, the fulfillment, how did you manage that? Was that also within the Pega side or did you manage it outside?

Okay, I can I can take both questions. So first of all, how do we come up with the best product. We use a lot of offline models to with propensities. And how likely are they to to buy it. But we also of course in that model there's a lot of usage parameters as well being used. So it's really the best product that we can have at that point in time. The big game changer here, or at least something that we did not do from a marketing point of view before we allowed also for products that were cheaper for the customer. And so we really took the customer angle in this case to see, based upon his usage, what would be the best product that we could propose, even if it was cheaper. And that's that we never have done before. From a marketing point of view, that's also what Tina was referring to. We were allowed in a negative use case because we also wanted to rebuild the trust with our with our customers. So it was really based upon the combination of intelligence that was already available and business logic. And we allowed also for, uh, for cheaper products for the, for the customer in terms of the fulfillment, uh, the main fulfillment that we have built on top of this was through the app. So in the app you would get the message whether you could have an opportunity, a better, cheaper product. Let's take that as an example. We made sure that the fulfillment that they could perform it in the app itself. So it was really 2 or 3 clicks clicks away that the customer could buy the product or at least change their product. And in the same screen. So we made sure that the fulfillment from a customer point of view, that the experience was actually dealt within the channel, that it was proposed for customer service on the other side. Of course, the advisor could make sure that the the customer landed up with, with, with the product that he is. So they were able to do their, their own fulfillment. I don't know whether that answers your questions.

Thanks everyone for joining us.