Telstra counters disruption with bold transformation

Telstra is Australia's largest telecommunications company and has been serving Australians for over a hundred years. It connects Australians to each other and the rest of the world, and helps businesses connect their operations.

The challenges of 2020 have underscored the importance of connectivity in our society, enabling changes to how we live, how we work, how we learn, and how we interact. For Telstra, these changes have made it all the more important to continue the transformation it set out as part of its T22 Strategy.

Salesforce is a key partner in this transformation which is aimed at simplifying Telstra’s products, eliminating customer pain points, and delivering all-digital experiences.

Telstra’s transformation extends to all areas of its business, with its Enterprise and Consumer and Small Business units each undertaking massive changes to best serve their customers.

Salesforce Professional Services has worked closely with Telstra to overcome this challenge and align the business and IT on a vision to improve the experience of customers, partners, and employees.

The Telstra Consumer and Small Business team is in the process of transforming the customer experience. The aim is to deliver a seamless customer experience powered by the Salesforce Customer 360 across sales and service. Telstra has now enabled more than 20,000 frontline agents with Salesforce and agents share a single view of the customer.

“Our vision is to build a connected future so everyone can thrive, and that means everyone which is a big aim. Salesforce Customer 360 is central to our strategy and brings together all of our customer interactions across sales, service and marketing,” said Michael Ackland, Group Executive - Consumer and Small Business. “We have a hundred years worth of customer data so one of our biggest challenges has been working through that legacy so we can always know exactly who we are talking to and connect all of the things they are doing with us.” 

The in-store experience provided by agents has been streamlined with Telstra working to reduce the time it takes for customers to order, upgrade, or make changes to their services.

"So many Australians can relate to the experience of going to a Telstra shop on a weekend and spending up to two hours filling out forms and waiting around,” said Karen Hughes, Executive, Networks & IT, Consumer and Small Business at Telstra. "We have now brought that time down considerably and freed up our agents to provide a better service. They can have proactive conversations about what other pain points we can solve or simply let customers get on with their day.”

Some of these time savings are the result of a new agent console which is powered by Salesforce and provides agents with a complete view of the customer. Agents can see which products and services customers have used in the past and leverage Einstein Next Best Action to see what they should recommend next. The console also streamlines the ordering process and removes the need for customers to fill in paper-based forms.

Communications Cloud also helps to power Telstra’s eCommerce experience which can be accessed right from the store agents' view of the customer or by customers purchasing their plans online.

All customer interactions and journeys are tracked through Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio, while Journey Builder ensures a consistent experience across SMS and email, with information tailored based on where a customer is at in their journey with Telstra. For example, if a customer is due to update their phone they will receive an email with a suggested plan upgrade.

“Salesforce has really enabled us to put the customer first in everything that we do, even down to enabling our engineers to quickly get new capabilities out to our frontline. Salesforce has also helped us to establish a rapid feedback loop, so we are constantly getting feedback from customers and agents and embedding that into our products,” said Hughes.

Salesforce Customer 360 has also given Telstra’s Enterprise business a single view of customers, empowering collaboration like never before. In the past, sales and service teams often lacked the information required for meaningful customer engagements and would often need to ask customers for information that they should have already known.

Now, they have all of that information at their fingertips and Tableau CRM helps to surface the insights most important in the context of each interaction. This helps them to be more proactive, and make recommendations tailored to each customer.

Telstra's extensive Enterprise partner network is pivotal to its success and the service it provides to its Enterprise customers. For this reason, Telstra has also transformed all aspects of partner engagement and simplified processes like onboarding. One of the biggest benefits will be streamlined quoting and contracting which will bring cycle times down from weeks to minutes.

All of this has been made possible through Experience Cloud which provides partners with access to the same customer insights as Telstra’s account team. It also allows the two groups to collaborate in real-time.

“For the first time, we have everybody collaborating on the same platform for the benefit of our customers, and with the help of Tableau CRM, we’re able to focus on the things that really matter,” said Mirko Gropp, Digital Adoption Principal, Telstra Enterprise.

Telstra is committed to building a sustainable future and creating long-term, shared value for its customers, partners, shareholders, employees and the community. Its journey with Salesforce and innovation in areas like 5G will help it to deliver on this commitment. It will also fundamentally change the way that businesses and consumers connect in the digital economy.

“What I’m really excited about is that we’re just at the start of our journey. We are working to eliminate customer pain points, digitise our experiences with Salesforce, and are now making those experiences available to more people,” said Ackland. “It is helping us live up to our purpose and enabling people to get access to the things they need so that they can make a difference in their own lives and in the lives of others. That’s a responsibility Telstra takes very seriously and one that we’re incredibly proud of.”