Vocus uplevels customer engagement with Salesforce Professional Services

Vocus Group is a leading provider of specialist fibre and network solutions that connect people, businesses, governments, and communities across Australia and New Zealand, to the world. The group’s retail business has developed over the years with the acquisition of multiple brands, including Dodo, iPrimus, and Commander. For a long time, these brands have operated in silos with different underlying technology supporting customer engagement. However, this is starting to change as a result of the retail business’ transformation with Salesforce. 

“Our entire transformation is aimed at aligning our brands to a consistent architecture and approach and with Salesforce we’re providing them with a unified platform for sales, service, and marketing,” said Marianna Wickert, Customer Marketing Manager at Vocus. 

Vocus has partnered with Salesforce Professional Services to maximise the value of Salesforce and use it to engage with customers in real-time and provide a more consistent experience across channels. Results include a shift from ad hoc communications to customer-centric journeys that will help Vocus deepen customer relationships.

Vocus’s engagement with Salesforce Professional Services to date has focused on evolving its marketing capabilities. The group has had Marketing Cloud for several years, but it’s use was limited. For example, audience segmentation and automation of communications was managed outside of Marketing Cloud and if the marketing team wanted anything changed, they needed to raise a request via the data or development teams. 

Vocus wanted the flexibility and control to send more contextual targeted communications, as opposed to the campaigns sent previously which were largely adhoc and not scalable or always on. Also, customer expectations were increasing; the group needed to provide a better, more personalised experience across its digital channels. What’s more, it needed to do all this while improving internal efficiency. 

Marketing Cloud offered all of the tools Vocus needed to achieve its goals. It just needed to use them to their full advantage. 

“Bringing in Salesforce Professional Services helped us leverage all of the features and industry best practice that the platform brings,” said Wickert. “Maximising that off-the-shelf capability was really important to us as we thought, who are we to reinvent the wheel when everything was just waiting there for us to use it?”

To kick off the transformation project, Salesforce Professional Services conducted an audit to understand the group’s current processes and capabilities. Through the audit, Salesforce identified opportunities to improve Vocus’ ways of working and increase customer engagement. 

A key focus was to set marketers up for success and give them greater control in executing and optimising campaigns and journeys. The first stage of this transformation included putting the architectural foundations in place for Marketing Cloud and providing email templates, documentation, and training to the marketing team. The training was recorded as well and now forms part of the onboarding process for new starters. 

“The journey we’ve been on has been a bit like building a house. Salesforce has helped us design and build the foundation for that house and we are confident that it’s structurally sound and going to accommodate our future needs,” said Wickert. “The communication and collaboration with the Professional Services team has been amazing as well. They always take us through the solution design so we know exactly what will be delivered. They’ve also gone above and beyond in educating and explaining things to different teams to get them onboard.” 

To help Vocus manage compliance and ensure relevancy of its communications, Salesforce Professional Services has also set up a preference centre on Marketing Cloud. The preference centre enables customers to opt-in or opt-out of communications based on product or channel. The Professional Services team has also provided Vocus with a ‘consent sync framework’ to help it manage customer consent and compliance for business units not yet using Salesforce. 

Vocus is now using Marketing Cloud to build out journeys based on customer actions and different points in the customer lifecycle. One of the first to be completed is a new welcome and onboarding journey. Engagement with this journey is around 75% compared to only 55% before. 

The marketing team also now has much more flexibility to update and optimise journeys. For example, if they want to add or delete an SMS from a journey, they can do this in a matter of days as opposed to the three weeks it may have taken previously in legacy systems. 

“We are thoroughly enjoying the efficiency of optimising campaigns and being able to continuously improve the customer experience,” said Wickert. 

Vocus is continuing to work with Salesforce Professional Services to expand on its current capabilities and move all brands and communications over to what it calls the ‘new world’. 

Wickert shared that the Professional Services team had been especially helpful in guiding their path forward and solving different problems along the way. 

“There’s often five or six ways to do things and one of the most valuable aspects of working with Salesforce is that they will explain each one to us and tell us which way to go and why,” said Wickert. “No one else gives us such confidence.”