O2 finds a winning formula to keep customers happy

In a competitive market with few differentiators, O2 realises that in order to win business, it is imperative that it delivers reliable, high-quality services and demonstrates its understanding of customers’ needs. O2 understands that through close communication and excellent service, trust can be built between the organisation and its customers. Indeed, over time and with regular dialogue this can fast become a healthy, long term relationship.

The O2 Marketing Team have been working with WIN for a number of years utilizing short codes as the primary method for customers to manage their Pay & Go accounts by opting into Bolt Ons & Tariffs, ensuring customers are offered unrivalled packages which deliver excellent value. WIN also works with O2 on innovative campaigns, such as ‘Random Acts of Kindness’, part of O2’s commitment to providing the best possible experience to its customers.

WIN’s next generation messaging platform delivers O2 a flexible, reliable, stable platform that helps enable O2’s Pay & Go and O2 Pay Monthly teams to quickly react to changing market conditions and consumer needs, delivering tactical solutions quickly to ensure O2 stays at the forefront of the Mobile Market Place. Using WIN’s messaging platform O2 not only can increase its efficiency with customer account management, but it also has access to retention and acquisition tools that can help O2 deliver even more innovative campaigns to its clients.

One of WIN’s primary responsibilities in campaign delivery is actively managing short codes. O2 first builds customer profiles through subscriber registration and then employs WIN to use this information in an intelligent, timely and relevant way.

WIN has integrated creativity into its technology platform to enable innovative uses for short codes and help O2 to interact with its customers on projects such as:

1. Bolt Ons - O2 subscribers use a short code anytime to redeem various promotional offers like £5 for a certain number of additional voice minutes, web time or SMS messages, providing greater value for O2 customers. The Favourite Place tariff even offers subscribers personalised cheap local calls after WIN has validated and stored their post code.
2. Campaigns

• Random Acts of Kindness – here WIN manages the process of randomly selecting O2 customers for a chance to win tickets to The O2 Arena. WIN promotes the competition via SMS messages to subscribers then confirms their entry has been made by either validating their eligibility or if not eligible, WIN notifies the customer of exciting opportunities to enter. Ultimately, WIN selects a random lucky customer.
• Time sensitive – by partnering with WIN, O2 can surprise its customers with Birthday, Valentines, or Christmas wishes with a special message plus a certain free amount of SMS messages once a keyword is sent from the mobile user to a WIN managed shortcode. O2’s RAOK campaigns have seen response rates upward of 30% where customers can receive a free gift or have the possibility of winning tickets or prizes.

WIN has helped O2 strengthen existing customer relationships and garner new ones by delivering unique, responsive and real-time SMS messaging. WIN has helped O2 achieve its aim in not only acquiring more customers, but building loyalty by ensuring dynamic user experiences and fruitful customer-relationship management.

O2's Head of Pay&Go Retention, Sharon Pickford commented, “ We have proven that we can work with our partners to deliver innovative campaigns and we have worked hard to provide our customers with a ‘wow factor,’ while earning their loyalty allowing us to respond to the ever changing market conditions quickly and effectively using WIN’s technology with effective CRM capabilities.”

“In partnership with WIN, we can offer quirky campaigns like ‘Random Acts of Kindness’ or time-sensitive message campaigns for Birthdays, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and so forth to reward our customers. All of these specialised efforts allow us to build integrity amongst vertical partners and most importantly, loyalty and trust amongst our customers,” said Sharon.

About 02

One of the leading communications companies in the UK, O2 offers mobile voice and data services in addition to fixed broadband services to consumer and business customers. O2 is part of Telefónica Europe plc, which is a business division of Telefónica S.A., one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies. In the UK, O2 has 21 million mobile customers and 527,126 broadband customers as at 30 September 2009.