Reducing Call Center Volume with Adobe Customer Journey Analytics feat. TELUS’s Mike Kellner

Billie [00:00:02] Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Room For Growth. We are just days away from Adobe Summit. I am super excited. My bags are packed. I'm headed to Las Vegas to join all of the other 100,000+ attendees at this massive conference that celebrates everything from Creative Suite of tools into, of course, my Love Language, which is the marketing set of tools that Adobe has in their suite, to AEM capabilities for web development. This conference is so much fun. We show up in a big way. It's an awesome chance for us to be in a ring just talking about some of the winning stories of our clients. In particular, Adobe is great at a few things. They are really good at helping brands with massive scale when we're talking about millions or maybe even billions of data points a month or a year, we're talking about the amount of data points that you could have on a single customer being so vast that it's hard to really track in your brain that kind of human scale of what's possible. Adobe is excellent at that. They're excellent at helping massive, massive brands tackle their most important business challenges. So this is everything from like major hotel brands who book their entire booking flow on Adobe technologies. So meaning at any given time, if you're looking up a hotel somewhere in the world, it doesn't matter what language you speak or which country you're looking from, you need to know what's available in the city that you're going to. And so the amount of demand on Adobe to have rich solutions that work is really incredible. And I love that.

Billie [00:01:38] Today we're going to talk about some win stories in particular for one part of the Adobe suite, which is Customer Journey Analytics. Customer Journey Analytics is a relatively new tool. It's a product analytics tool that helps combine offline and online data in ways that allow businesses to track the entire customer journey, both across devices and products. Again, offline/online, which is particularly relevant with the guest that we're going to talk to today. It's a really powerful tool. Adobe Analytics for a long time has been a leader in the insights and intelligence space, but particularly as we're getting ready for a Summit conference that's really happening in the shadow of a year that has been exclusively about AI, good data health and hygiene, and how to create scalable business intelligence is just so top of mind for so many people going to this conference. So we wanted to talk to a guest to can help bring down the barrier for what it means to adopt a new platform at scale. We know that that's a really intimidating challenge for businesses when they've got gaps in measurement and how they understand the customer experience. But the idea of bringing millions, billions of data points together to stitch profiles together across all these different platforms can be really intimidating, and it can be really intense, and it can be hard to know exactly where to start. So that's why I love this guest. Our guest today is a Director of Data, AI & Analytics at TELUS. TELUS is a major telecom. They are particularly relevant in Canada. For our U.S. listeners, you might think of them like a Verizon or a T-Mobile, but they're one of the largest mobility and home internet providers in the country. They're also in an extreme competitive state. So they are working to make sure that their customer experience is best in class and absolute best in the business, not just by Canadian customer standards, but really anywhere in the world. For folks who don't know, WillowTree was acquired by TELUS International last year, so we are really being held this year to put our money where your mouth is with these Adobe technologies, we are leveraging them to drive business results within our own parent company. And so I have been particularly steeped in telecom lately, and all of the challenges that that space brings. Again, it is huge. It's large. The customer pain points are many. You can think about how frustrating it is if your TV quality isn't perfect, or if your home internet goes down for even ten minutes, or if your phone plan, has something unexpected on the bill. There's just so many pain points that a tool like Customer Journey Analytics can really help with and transform a business. To make sure that you can both identify what are those customer pain points and then create the intervention for them. But also make sure that you can track what your customers are doing across in-store experiences, through call centers, through bots, through chatbots, and any sort of like, interactions that they might be having there. And then of course, across traditional channels, things like email, push, social media, paid media channels as well, it's really ripe for intervention right at this moment, both because of the advent of the AI, but also just because the savviness that's required of understanding customer experience and how a customer experiences your brand across these complex landscapes. It's just at an all time high. It's table stakes now, but that doesn't make it any easier. So super excited to hear from Mike and just talk about a few of the wins that he's had as he's worked to adopt this new Adobe platform.

Billie [00:05:10] But also keep in mind, we would love to see you at Adobe Summit. We are in Booth 1127. That's Booth 1127. It should be pretty easy to find us when you walk into the main hall, where all of the different sponsors are. Just look around for our dark teal and then our very welcoming space to come hang out. We'd love to have you there. But without further ado, I'm going to introduce our guest to you.

Meet Mike Kellner, Director of AI Data & Analytics at TELUS

Billie [00:05:35] So we are here to talk with Mike Kellner, who's the Director of AI Data & Analytics at TELUS. So we'll both explain a little bit about who TELUS for our non-Canadian friends, as well as the projects that he has been tackling. So hi, Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike [00:05:50] All right. Thank you very much, Billy. It's nice to be here.

Billie [00:05:53] So before we dive into many of the technical challenges that you're working on today and where you've had some wins as of recently, we're excited to tell some of those win stories. Tell us just a little bit about yourself. What is your role at TELUS and how did you get to that role? What has been a bit of the journey that got you here?

Mike [00:06:14] Oh excellent question. Yeah, I've, I've been at TELUS for a long time, 21 years now, actually, as of the beginning of this month. So quite some time. In my current role of supporting the AI and data and analytics team, it sort of evolved organically from one of my prior director roles. We kind of built it to solve a variety of problems. We were getting a lot of new capabilities. We work closely with Google, Adobe and others, and a lot of the capabilities they're introducing we wanted to leverage to improve our customer experience through data and analytic solutions, in particular AI. So we we formed a team to focus on a few use cases, focus on improving customer experience overall. So that's how we kind of got things started and, why we're venturing into the Adobe world as well.

Billie [00:06:59] Awesome. So before we get too deep for our non-Canadian friends, tell me about TELUS. What does TELUS do?

Mike [00:07:10] Yeah. TELUS is one of the major telecommunications companies in Canada. So think like a Verizon or AT&T in the U.S. Very similar. We have a suite of products that focus on mobile, home services as well, including internet, TV, etc. I think where TELUS is a little bit unique and different is that we also have arms in health. So we have TELUS Health organization as well, a TELUS Agriculture and Consumer Goods organization. So there's more breadth than a traditional telecommunications company. So we have a lot more products and services that we're able to provide and support our customers with.

Tell us about the challenges you’re tackling in consumer telecom

Billie [00:07:46] And then tell us again, so now that that listeners have wrapped their head around, "Okay, we're talking about telecom." And when I think about telecom, I generally think enormous customer-side, customer bases, huge amounts of potential data points that you can collect everything from: how are our customers interacting with us across internet, across phone — that's leaving out the big Ag and Health challenges that you're facing — within that, there are thousands of data points on any given day that you might want to track towards an individual customer. And then add in the fact around bundling and offering services, there's just so much that you could potentially be tracking against. And when your title is Data AI & Analytics, that can mean many things. Tell us a little bit more about some of the biggest challenges that you're tackling today.

Mike [00:08:38] Yeah. For sure. Where my team focuses, we operate in the consumer area. So all of our regular, consumer products: mobile, like I said, internet, TV, but not to businesses. So straight B2C, if you will. And, to your point, there are millions of interactions and touchpoints on a daily basis with our customers and even more data points that we're collecting. Right. And it's not just the number of customers as well. It's the touchpoints that we have across all of the channels that we offer. Right? There's stores, we have dealers, we have bots, we have our contact centers. So there's million, there's multiple channels as well, which adds to the complexity. Right. You mentioned the products alone and the product mix you can have. And what amplifies that is the multiple touchpoints you can have on top of it in different channels. So bringing all that together and understanding where there's inefficiencies and opportunities as it relates to customer experience. Right. We like to have a frictionless customer experience, if you will. And that's not always the case. So finding where those opportunities are to drive out that friction is really where we are focusing our efforts.

Talk about being an early adopter of Customer Journey Analytics

Billie [00:09:51] So, Mike, I know that TELUS is, of course, a major Adobe customer client, leveraging most of the Adobe suite to drive towards business outcomes, set compelling campaigns, do all of the functions that particularly the martech stack from Adobe offers. And you are one of the early adopters of their new Customer Journey Analytics platform. Talk to me a little bit about what capabilities you were hoping to bring in to TELUS, and what problems you're trying to solve by adopting that platform.

Mike [00:10:21] Yeah. So going back to the customer experience comment I made a little while ago, the, the capabilities were CJA are — there's many of them, obviously, but the ones that are very much interesting for us is: bringing all of our customer data together. So those multiple channels and touchpoints, being able to link and follow our customer across each of them is where CJA really excels. And we've, the way we've always sort of had challenges with understanding customer journey is everyone has their data, they understand it, but other groups don't necessarily understand it or even get a chance to see it. With CJA, we're working to bring it all together and ensure that we can match the customer data from one area — corporate stores as an example — to the customer data from our digital environments to our contact centers. And then, what it allows us to do is follow our customer through a specific journey. One of the cool ones we've been working on to remove pain points for our customer is onboarding. So when a customer activates or purchases a new product for us, from us, we can now track that from any channel that they've ordered that product right through to everything they've done, whether they've gone to our digital environment after, to another corporate store, or even contact the contact center. And what we're trying to do with that information is obviously streamline it. So we remove the unnecessary touchpoints that can drive customers crazy sometimes.

Billie [00:11:48] Mike, tell us a bit more about what the customer pain points are in telecom. I know many of them are pretty great. They often involve picking up a telephone. Tell us more about what you're trying to solve for and what pain points you're trying to identify.

Mike [00:12:02] We have a lot of products. You can, you can bundle lots of different things together in different ways. You can add them at certain points too, it doesn't all have to be at the same time. And that can pose challenges from a billing perspective and understanding your bill at certain points in time. So, making it easy for customers to subscribe to new products and services and not have to call us to ask questions about their bill is a big part of it. Right? So making that interaction and that part of their journey simpler and easier is a big focus for sure. The other is, is when your products are not working, right? If your TV signal or, earlier in the conversation we talked a little bit about Wi-Fi. If your Wi-Fi is not robust or dropping a lot, we get a lot of calls associated with that. So the two biggest pain points really are billing and can be billing just given the multiple products and the product mix that we have available for our customers. And then if something's not working, right? So you need to fix my service or things are dropping and then what have you. Right. So, avoiding those and working on those to support our customers is really the two big areas of focus for us right now.

How does Adobe CJA help you find and resolve customer pain points?

Billie [00:13:15] And Mike, talk to us a little bit more where in Customer Journey Analytics have you seen those customer pain points in an addressable state? What does that look like?

Mike [00:13:26] Yeah. So from a billing perspective, there's two that we're really focusing on right now. One of which is a missing credit. So if you add any product or service or you do have some sort of challenges and a credit is provided, in either one of those instances and it doesn't appear on your bill. Huge pain point for customers. And similar from a billing perspective is if you think something should be covered in your plan — data is a good example — and you see a separate charge for, say, roaming or a data overage that you weren't expecting. We see a lot of billing disputes in that regard. So with CJA we can see the relationship between the changes in your bill and the call drivers. So what we're doing is we're working to get ahead of those to to solve for them. And if it's a notification in advance or just addressing the system issues that we do have sometimes with missing credits, we're seeing where the opportunities are and where we're trying to address them proactively.

Billie [00:14:29] Yeah, talk to me a little bit about how you decided where to start. Where would you begin to bring data into CJA? Why did you decide, for example, that that first point of purchase would be a good one? And then what did you decide to bring in in terms of data? This is just such a common problem for executives who have to prioritize thousands of priorities, hundreds of priorities and business needs. And then there's always the debate around, let's capture everything. Let's capture only what we need. How do we know what we need? How did you solve that challenge?

Mike [00:15:03] That's a that's an excellent question. Yeah. Where we started was with contact center data. As much as we'd like to talk to our customers, they don't always want to talk to us, right? They don't want to call in the contact center, especially when they're having problems. So we wanted to find out really, that's our starting point. So we wanted to limit, or remove contacts that weren't necessarily right for the customer in particular. So that was the starting data that we brought in. And we focused on onboarding to start, because what we've known historically is, if you activate a product with us, you're calling us more than once over a couple of month period for a variety of different reasons: to understand your bill, or to rightsize because you didn't get something that you initially thought you needed. So a variety of different things. So we started there. And just we started there with contact center data. And then we started asking more questions, because that's the cool thing about CJA as well, you bring in some data, you connect it, and then you're asking: why did the customer do that? And then you're bringing in an additional data set. So we started with contact center data, then added digital. And we've now added bot, all of our bot data. And we're working on bringing more of our corporate store data in as well, so we can see what the customer is doing across each of those individual channels.

Let’s explore Adobe Analytics vs. Customer Journey Analytics

Billie [00:16:18] It's so interesting when I think about what the major differences are between Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics, the interfaces are basically the same. So if you are, an Adobe Analytics user or a power user, and there's many of those in the world because it's such an impressive platform, and then you're considering what is the transition to Customer Journey Analytics going to be? And what do I get in terms of a capability differential? Like I said, the interface is basically the same, but whereas Adobe Analytics could really only look at digital data. CJA crosses into being sort of part analytics, part business intelligence, where you're able to stitch together both offline and online data together and create that sense of a journey visualized so that you can then trigger off those touchpoints or off those events just as you would expect to do anywhere. But it's a really interesting capability gain, particularly when so much of the TELUS customer experience happens in disparate places. It's part, I mean, you can just think from the moment you buy a cell phone plan or a wireless plan, you're going to expect that part of your adoption and onboarding is going to be through an app or website. But if you run into a problem, do you go to the store, do you call somebody, and how do you create continuity in that customer journey? And CJA is really helping to solve for that. These new capabilities are really impressive, but it can be costly to bring on any new analytics platform. And then it's really important to do internal education to help folks inside of TELUS or any business that you might be bringing on a new business intelligence platform, to help them understand what does this platform do? What kind of data will be available, how do they engage with it? How did you think about internal adoption and making sure that the adoption of Customer Journey Analytics was successful from the perspective of just good communication?

Mike [00:18:14] Yeah, to tell you the truth, really, it was actually relatively easy. I mean, once you bring the data together and you can analyze it and show the journey in a way we've never been able to before, it really sells itself almost honestly, from a from a benefit perspective, being able to see things we've never been able to see before. A customer — we used to build customer journeys, and we would sort of build it in a way that was what we perceived to be "the happy path," versus, when we're doing it with CJA, it's really the customer who's showing us what their path is, and then we can find the happy path that we've defined. But there's actually more than one, because a customer could go and do a bunch of different things to solve their problem. And we've never been able to see that before. We've kind of only tracked single ones that we think is the right way to go. So it gives us a whole different perspective and lens, and that's pretty easy and impressive to sell, right? That's an intelligence on a customer we've never had before.

What about making Customer Journey Analytics part of your data operations?

Billie [00:19:12] But you lead a huge, a pretty large team. Sizable. When I think about just the number of people who you're managing in your sort of data operations team, that's a lot of folks to either get them using a new platform or have the capabilities. How did you think about bringing Customer Journey Analytics into your data operation itself, with your sort of like day to day practitioners?

Mike [00:19:37] That's a great question. We actually had a very thoughtful onboarding plan. It started with just a few of my senior leaders and we worked with our WillowTree partners to really understand the capabilities of the system and how it worked. And they helped us build an onboarding plan that was suitable for our needs, because we have some very technical folks. And this system is a little bit different than anything we've used before, and it's brand new, so you don't know what you don't know. We leveraged the WillowTree team to help build an onboarding plan suitable for data folks such as myself to really understand the capabilities, why it's beneficial, and how to use it. One of the earliest learnings we had was that, it takes a lot of upfront data work to make all of this happen. The connections just don't happen immediately. You really need to find the right unique identifiers to match and group the data together. And that's the other challenge we had across each of our business units and different data sets. So for example, the corporate stores data or digital data, they all had somewhat different unique identifiers. So we had to build reference tables to pull it all together as well. So upfront time and investment on making sure your data is robust and good quality is hugely important for this, for this capability to get the most out of it.

Any advice for other enterprises planning to onboard Customer Journey Analytics?

Billie [00:20:59] Talk to me a little bit more about lessons learned. What advice would you give to somebody else who's trying to onboard, an organization of your size on to a new Customer Journey Analytics platform?

Mike [00:21:11] What I would recommend, I'd spend a little bit more time designing your schemas and looking at your data. And I say that because one of the learnings, one of the other learnings we had on data, as we've traditionally aggregated data into single rows. So there's a lot of information in a single row of data on a customer. However, with CJA, each row of data represents an event, and you want to track customers at specific event levels. So did they do this versus did they do this right? And by aggregating your data, you're only going to capture one of those events. So you want to be mindful of how you're splitting your data out and how you're aggregating it so that you're getting the lowest level of detail that you want to understand for your customer.

Billie [00:21:54] Super interesting. I'm going to see if I can say this correctly back to you and understand it right. Just meaning you have so much data on any given customer that traditionally you wouldn't want it plotted out across individual events or behaviors or actions because it just simply be too much. So in a previous world, aggregating that data and rolling up single, rolling up multiple attributes into something more singular so that you can make sense of that data in a manual world doesn't actually make as much sense in Customer Journey Analytics, where you want that complexity and that granularity to, like, have all of its beautiful form, because that's when you can see trends and themes and journeys in their entirety. Is that true?

Mike [00:22:35] That's exactly it. Yeah. In fact, I'd say, start more granular and then aggregate within CJA. And in fact, we've done that. We've coined this new way of looking at our data. I called it creating an Event Hierarchy. Right. You have your macro events that you typically would look at at a higher level, but going down lower and lower, especially with digital data, where every page you click on is technically an event. So you want to aggregate those up to create your Event Hierarchy. And then you can be selective in which events you choose for your Journey Analytics. So that's exactly correct, Billie.

Billie [00:23:08] I'm putting you wildly on the spot right now, but can you talk a little bit about how you did that in an ecosystem where there's multiple, there's not just channel and product type, but there's also brand level. How did you think about that hierarchy, given the amount of complexity that you have to work through?

Mike [00:23:26] It's a great question. We're actually, that's one of the items that we're looking at next, Billie, but we've already given some thought to the separation. Because we do have brand interaction, certainly. And in fact, going from one brand to the other and the reasons why. Right. So we are certainly looking at for example, we have a couple mobility brands. Our main TELUS one and then we have a Koodo brand. And we do have TELUS-to-Koodo customers and vice versa. So looking at those journeys and connecting them is something we're working on doing right now. Our first and initial use cases were really focused just on the TELUS brand, as it is, which has plenty of complexity as it is with all of the products and touchpoints, as you've already mentioned. So optimizing those journeys is the initial use case for our focus.

What's next for TELUS in terms of CJA and other tools within the Adobe suite?

Billie [00:24:15] Yeah. Tell us more about what's next in TELUS's maturity curve in terms of leveraging Customer Journey Analytics and other tools within the Adobe suite?

Mike [00:24:23] Yeah, we've we're really just starting this journey. So we have a long list of journeys that we do want to build out in CJA already. And the appetite for usage is growing considerably just with the few use cases we've already developed. There's other groups within TELUS who have similar use cases, but with a slightly different spin on it from a customer lens perspective. Right. So onboarding is going to be another important factor. We've set it up right now where my team has access and is leveraging all of the data, but there's other groups that we'll need to bring in. And the thing about CJA, it actually makes it relatively easy because every group just needs to set up a separate project. But we just need to set that up so that it can be seamless, and bring people on, quickly and easily. And then finally, one of the last components of Adobe that we're really excited about leveraging more effectively is the CDP. So all of the things that we've been talking about, whether it's the events and the journeys that the customer is on to the communications they get, bringing that all together into a customer digital or a data profile, so that we we know what the customer is doing, what their preferences are, so we can personalize communications and events for them a little bit more effectively.

Billie [00:25:43] One of the best things about Adobe is that it scales really well. There's not really another solution in market that has the same level of scalability as the Adobe suite of products, but particularly those for customer data platform and the Customer Journey Analytics as well. How are you thinking about leveraging the scalability of this platform, both in terms of how people get it and start using it — systems, teams — and then just data points overall.

Mike [00:26:11] Yeah. So we've already had a lot of interest in CJA, not just for the journey analytics piece, but for other groups and within TELUS to start utilizing it for similar use cases. So we've been working with WillowTree on building a onboarding and governance model, and we're currently defining the users and the needs of those users. And each one is going to have a slightly different onboarding journey. So for example, we talked about Adobe Analytics a little while ago. And CJA being more in analytics and BI capability, bringing a lot more data together. There's a lot of interest in that. So we have some users who are going to look to migrate from Analytics into CJA, and there's a lot of familiarity there. So they won't need as robust or as as much support in the onboarding of it. So we have a group that we're focused on working with there. And then there's groups like myself who are really interested in seeing what the customer is doing in certain times of their lifecycle, and building out more journey flows and bringing more information together. And that requires a lot more data engineering work and really thoughtful approaches in how you're defining your events, like we talked about. So the onboarding for that is going to be quite a bit different. And then finally thinking about usage. CJA is different than AA in that it's not based on server calls or API hits. It's made based on rows of data and more of a consumption model. So we're building a little bit of, or at least we're thinking about how to provide a little bit of a chargeback model based on that same sort of usage approach across the different teams, because, again, it will be different depending on how you use it. So there's a lot going into that for sure.

WillowTree and TELUS working together

Billie [00:27:51] Mike, you've alluded to the fact that WillowTree and TELUS are now working very closely together under the same banner. TELUS recently acquired WillowTree. So this has been one of the first projects where our team has been working closely as well. Thank you so much for the partnership in that. I hope it's been as good of an experience for you as it has been for us.

Mike [00:28:10] It certainly has. Yeah. WillowTree has really helped us accelerate our learning curve. I've previously mentioned CJA is relatively net-new in the industry, and WillowTree has such a breadth of knowledge and a lot of experience with Adobe products in general. And leveraging and working with them to not only develop our use cases, but really set up the environment to allow us to onboard other groups quickly and relatively easily has been a huge win. And yeah, so big thanks to the WillowTree team for helping us with everything so far.

Billie [00:28:46] Yeah. Shout out to Tony Ferreira and Jon Yildiz does who I know have been really important in that mission. Anyone else who deserves a little name credit?

Mike [00:28:54] Yeah, Jon in particular. He's got great hair as well and, really, really great in helping us build a lot of the journey flows and really helping us understand the data structure and how to define events clearly. He's been a big help, and he's done a lot of our onboarding, training as well. So he's been a huge help.

Billie [00:29:15] Well, Tony is with us in the booth at Adobe Summit. So if you are wandering around the conference and you are in the section where all of the different partners of Adobe have booths set up, look for the WillowTree booth [1127], come and talk to us. Come talk to Tony, who helped on this project, and many others related to Customer Journey Analytics and the Adobe suite of tools. We would love to hear about similar challenges or similar moments of opportunity to bring data insights at scale. So thank you, Mike, so much for sharing the story about the journey you've been on very recently and some of the early wins that you're having. Look forward to hearing more as you keep expanding this platform and what it can do.

Mike [00:29:54] Yeah, thanks very much, Billie. I really appreciate it. And, I will be there and I'll come say hi for sure.

Billie [00:30:00] Awesome. See you at Summit.