MultiChoice Group isn’t just Africa’s leading entertainment business. It’s part of the fabric of many of its communities too. More than 21 million households and businesses in 50 countries enjoy MultiChoice content and services across multiple platforms, channels, and formats. It creates thousands of jobs every year across the continent, in its own companies, and its extensive supply chain.

MultiChoice’s passion is to give homegrown African talent the opportunity to thrive in the content creation industries and associated businesses. In this way it is encouraging African storytelling, enriching lives through education, and contributing to sustainable economic prosperity.

For many, MultiChoice is the voice of Africa. We spoke to senior executives at MultiChoice about the challenge of building personal relationships with customers, even when there are many millions of them dispersed throughout a huge continent, and how Salesforce is helping the company to achieve its goals.

To deliver its diverse range of entertainment services, MultiChoice is increasingly focused on its technology. But its priority remains providing great customer service and constantly improving the experience. Which means using data-derived insights to shape communications that are personal, relevant, and seamless.

“Historically, we’ve been good at communicating with our customers,” explained Vincent Maher, MultiChoice’s Group Executive Head of Digital. “But a lot of it isn’t automated, and that’s where the real potential for us lies. The key is having access to directly actionable data that informs personalisation – specifically, understanding exactly where each customer is on their journey with us, and what’s important and relevant to them at that time.”

MultiChoice’s own digital transformation journey has seen significant achievements over the past five years, as it wrestles with Africa’s unique communications infrastructure challenges.

Omnichannel self-service is already a reality for many customers, even in remote rural areas. For example, in areas with sporadic internet connectivity, people can access MultiChoice services using USSD ‘quick codes’ on mobile phone networks. And where the internet is available, users can hop on the MultiChoice mobile app.

But MultiChoice wants to move from reactive communications and responsive services into a proactive omnichannel mode. It wants to send customers targeted messages about service enhancements, prompts about new offers based on their interests or preferences, and actions they need to take about their account or subscription package.

“It’s a fundamental shift in mindset and approach,” said Maher. “The group is modernising its core technologies and digitising its activities, and when we were looking for a partner, Salesforce came out top in our market evaluation. We’re starting by deploying Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud within our television business, as part of a major, long-term rollout across the group.”

As MultiChoice forges ahead with its Salesforce partnership, Marketing Cloud is delivering the first round of benefits in the drive for personalisation.

Using Marketing Cloud Engagement, the company quickly automated complex email and SMS messaging journeys for a key set of core activities. For example, the welcome experience for new customers now creates a great first impression through a series of helpful messages and prompts.

Next up, the company will deploy Data Cloud for Marketing, Marketing Cloud Personalisation, and Marketing Cloud Advertising. Combined, these will drive digital journeys for personalisation across important elements of its app, website, and social media activity, addressing common issues such as abandoned carts and product recommendations.

“To take these first steps on our Salesforce journey, we worked directly with Salesforce Professional Services in South Africa as our Marketing Cloud integration partner,” explained Maher. “It’s been a very fruitful and productive experience and has given us the opportunity to build a strong and talented base of in-house resource, with the support of Salesforce. Their advice on technical and architectural issues has been invaluable. And even better – we’re learning as we go along and building capacity within our own teams.”

“The roll out of Marketing Cloud has been relatively easy and we were able to complete our first phase within six months, which is ahead of schedule and testament to the teamwork we’ve enjoyed with Salesforce,” said Maher. “Now our data is ready – and we can kick on.”

Maher reports a substantial reduction in time and effort to carry out routine communications with customers, which means internal resources can focus on more strategic work. In a recent major campaign, MultiChoice saw a reduction in effort of around 30-40% – as well as cost savings of 27% – thanks to more efficient journey optimisation.

There’s been an immediate and direct cost benefit of routing messages – previously going out on SMS – to push notifications, with a 15% increase in response rates. This has resulted in fewer customers missing payment dates, and more customers taking up offers. The quality of communications has improved, and the ‘beautiful and pristine’ data means they’re timely, personal, and delivered on the right channel.

“The way our teams think about the future has changed too. Marketing Cloud brings a lot of capabilities that we haven’t had before and there’s a lot of excitement about what’s now possible. It’s invigorated everyone involved in these communications to start thinking out of the box and to execute great ideas using technology and data.”

Another important capability is the ability – through Marketing Cloud Advertising – to deliver targeted digital advertising campaigns based on rich data and insights. Which, ultimately, produces improved returns on investment. MultiChoice has increased the reach of its customer-focused campaigns by over 108%, compared to its existing Audience technology. And it has decreased its cost per conversion by 40-45%.

Munyaradzi Nyikavaranda, Group Executive Head of Digital Analytics and Marketing Technology explained: “Because we now have this unified platform, and people are super excited, it’s opening up broad, cross-functional conversations at an organisational level. With Salesforce, we can look at everything through the customer lens.”

MultiChoice is already closer to its customers than many organisations and Maher believes that Marketing Cloud will boost its capability to target customers with the right communications. Whether they’re using the app, visiting the website, or seeing advertising messages, MultiChoice is creating a seamless and coherent set of experiences.

“With Marketing Cloud, we can actively orchestrate and personalise our communications with all our audiences, at scale,” explained Nyikavaranda. “The benchmarks, the thinking, the methodology is all in place. Now, we can accelerate these activities, and deliver value for customers and great results for the business, in a much more simple and efficient way. It opens lots of exciting opportunities in our markets.”

More than 10 million customers are enjoying the enhancements in customer service made possible through Salesforce. Now the success of those deployments has been confirmed – in South Africa, Kenya, and Mozambique – the focus is on aggressive ongoing rollouts in other African markets.

“One of the most valuable things about Salesforce is the sheer volume of performance data and analytics that are available in Marketing Cloud Intelligence to track the effects of these interventions,” said Maher. “It’s still early days but we’re confidently expecting an uptick of between 15% and 25%, on average, across all our key measurements, like engagement and conversion rates.

“When we embarked on this journey with Salesforce, we thought we knew what to expect and which benefits we could unlock. But we’ve unearthed so much more. For example, we had no idea how much Salesforce would enable our behavioural scientists. The influx of data from Marketing Cloud gives us a very powerful combination that will be vital for our business success.”