Increase
customer lifetime value
Reduce
call times
Improve
call center performance
TELUS (TSX: T, NYSE: TU) is a dynamic communications and information technology company with annual revenues of approximately $17 billion and 17 million subscriber connections. TELUS provides a wide range of communications products and services, including wireless, data, internet, voice, television, entertainment, video, and home security.
“Any transformation is a marathon, so you have to pace yourself. You start slow, show value, and then you scale. It’s the cultural change that drives the technology transformation within a company.”
As a leading provider of essential communications and digital services for 17 million customer connections across Canada, TELUS was named Canada’s best provider for consistent mobile network quality by independent global analytics company, Opensignal, and as the fastest mobile provider in Canada by U.S.-based Ookla in the Q1-Q2 2022 Speedtest Awards.
TELUS is also a leader in customer service excellence and loyalty, earning the top rating as Canada’s most respected mobile service provider two years in a row. To build on its award-winning customer-centric approach and promise to deliver future-friendly services, TELUS embraces innovation and collaboration as key values.
The ability to harness data to deliver personalized, insight-fueled customer experiences is central to helping TELUS maintain its market edge. To achieve this, TELUS needed to create an enterprise-wide view of each customer—including their product and service details—which could then be used for customer service, marketing, operations, analytics, and reporting.
“We’ve had a lot of positive outcomes from our investment in Informatica’s MDM solution, including increased prospect acquisition, enhanced cross-sell for existing customers, and increased customer lifetime value.”
Master Data Management to innovate the customer journey
As a provider of flexible cloud platforms and comprehensive managed cloud services, TELUS supports single cloud and multi-cloud deployments to deliver better CX and ROI outcomes for customers. To help fuel TELUS’ internal digital transformation, while also jointly developing new products and services, the provider has partnered with Google. By doing so, TELUS will drive greater operational efficiency across its core IT and network infrastructure.
TELUS recognized that master data management (MDM) technology was a critical step along the journey to create an end-to-end view of each customer, and selected Informatica MDM solution.
To achieve the fastest business value, TELUS opted for a cloud-based solution, deploying Informatica MDM Cloud Edition of Customer 360 hosted on AWS. MDM, along with the data integration capabilities of Informatica, helps TELUS create a golden customer record from unique customer data discovered across various systems.
"MDM proved to be a great fit for us. We were looking for a cloud-based, TM Forum-standards compliant, API-enabled data store that had the ability to keep our data segregated from the rest of TELUS while meeting all legal, privacy and regulatory requirements. Having MDM in place saved us the time and resources required to establish another data store while meeting all business needs. The MDM support team was very responsive in fine tuning the solution to our needs,” said Harpreet Singh, Manager, Products & Services, TELUS.
TELUS deployed the solution in just nine months, gaining a single view of each customer and household as well as all services and products owned, based on the customer’s billing or service address. Informatica Data Quality cleanses and standardizes customer data before records are matched and merged, while Informatica Data as a Service verifies customer email addresses for completeness and accuracy. The company established the TELUS trust model for data governance, providing guidance to all teams on how to use data in a way that builds trust, generates value, promotes respect, and promises security.
TELUS wasted no time operationalizing and scaling Informatica MDM across the enterprise, embedding golden customer records into core processes such as marketing and customer service. This included ingesting customer data from its acquisition of ADT Security, folding it into the household view.
“Our Informatica MDM deployment has evolved into a robust solution ingesting both batch and real-time data coming from six different sources,” explains Tommy Tse, Technology Architect at TELUS. “The solution also allows our call center applications and data lake to consume golden customer records and household groupings.”
TELUS consolidates data ecosystem
TELUS built on its strategic partnership with Google Cloud by adopting BigQuery as its Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) for advanced, democratized data analytics. TELUS expects to reap the benefits of lower operational costs, added scalability, elastic capacity, and machine learning optimization. Users across TELUS gain powerful insights at scale with significantly reduced query times.
Leveraging the strong collaboration between Informatica and Google, TELUS purchased Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) through Google Cloud Marketplace, a convenient way to acquire top-rated solutions that are integrated with Google Cloud. A seamless transaction, this option not only simplifies the procurement process, but also streamlines the fulfillment of cloud solutions for the enterprise.
Data analytics infusing insights into every customer interaction for better outcomes
TELUS now takes a more holistic approach in its marketing with the ability to identify household product sets and intensity. This helps the company increase prospect acquisition and cross-sell existing customers. For example, it can identify households with wireless and internet service but without home security. TELUS can then send relevant offers to those households to encourage them to purchase new services.
"The MDM system and team has helped us extraordinarily with the transformation of our wireline business into new markets. The integration and analysis of recent acquisition data sets in MDM has enabled us to measure our marketing campaign success rates, helping us innovate and pivot quickly with our programs,” said Scott Galacher, Manager, Entertainment and Connected Home, TELUS.
"The MDM system and team has helped us extraordinarily with the transformation of our wireline business into new markets. The integration and analysis of recent acquisition data sets in MDM has enabled us to measure our marketing campaign success rates, helping us innovate and pivot quickly with our programs,” said Scott Galacher, Manager, Entertainment and Connected Home, TELUS.
Call center agents interact with customers in a more personalized and contextualized manner. TELUS integrated MDM with call center applications, giving agents efficient and secure access to customer vital information allowing to personalize customer interactions, resulting in shorter call times, fewer transferred calls, and superior customer service. With higher quality information, the volume of incoming calls declined by approximately 50 percent.
“Informatica MDM fuels our digital journeys,” says Jaime Tatis, Vice President of Data Strategy and Enablement at TELUS. “Agents have a current, unified view of each customer, helping them connect during interactions and reducing the time to add services to seconds.”
Similarly, TELUS streamlined credit checks using context from MDM, eliminating external credit checks for about 18 percent of wireless applications and 7 percent of traditional wired-line applications. This insight reduces TELUS credit check fees and enhances the buying experience.
Building future-friendly services and loyalty with a 360-degree view
As part of the data quality workflow, TELUS writes back cleansed, mastered data to legacy customer data repositories, improving data quality for downstream systems that continue to leverage those legacy sources. For example, after MDM technology cleanses, matches, and merges data from a legacy system containing wireline information, key customer profile attributes are written back to the legacy system to provide a more consistent and updated view of the customer data. This enhances the lifetime value of customers.
"We’ve had a lot of positive outcomes from our investment in Informatica’s MDM solution, including increased prospect acquisition, enhanced cross-sell for existing customers, and increased customer lifetime value,” says Stephen Lee, Director of Data Engineering Platforms at TELUS.
TELUS recently upsized its MDM footprint from medium to large capacity to increase performance and accommodate increased demand as TELUS scales to more applications and business users. TELUS also plans to expand its MDM usage beyond traditional retail consumers to include business customers and prospects, ranging from small to commercial and corporate.
“Migrating to the cloud and implementing new tools for the organization is great but that's only one part of the journey,” says Lee. “Anytime you go through a digital transformation like the one TELUS is going through, it’s very important to have technology and business leadership buy in and support. This helps to set and reinforce expectations and priorities for a multi-year journey.”
Tatis concludes, “Any transformation is a marathon, not a sprint, so you have to pace yourself. You start slow, show value, and then you scale. It’s the cultural change that drives the technology transformation within a company.”
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