Personalised Customer Engagement Sees HKBN’s Sales Quadruple

Challenge:
HKBN needed to harness the power of personalisation to boost customer engagement, drive sales and increase longterm client retention in a highly competitive and advanced telecommunication market.

Solution:
Using Tealium iQ™ Tag Management, EventStream™ and AudienceStream™, HKBN orchestrated and activated its omnichannel data by stitching offline and online customer data in order to provide a holistic customer view and increase its digital marketing agility.

Results:
Not only has HKBN seen a 30% improvement in Return-On- Advertising-Spend since using Tealium, it has also seen 30% higher engagement rates and quadrupled clickthrough rates from personalised campaigns.

Siloed data creates a barrier to personalisation

HKBN Group (HKBN) is one of the largest residential and enterprise integrated telecom and technology solutions providers in Hong Kong. HKBN currently serves 1 in 2 active companies and 1 in 3 households. Its powerful network covers 2.4 million residential homes and 7,300+ commercial buildings and facilities across Hong Kong, offering route diversity and high reliability for customers.

In a very competitive and advanced telecommunications market, increasing market shares and client retention are top KPIs. HKBN wanted to better understand its extensive customer base on a more personal level, yet siloed data streams meant information collected online and in-store remained largely separated. For instance, if a customer visited a HKBN store and purchased a 24-month broadband package, HKBN’s website would have no record of this data. As a result, the online team would continue marketing to an existing customer with retargeting ads aimed at new customers, displaying increasingly competitive deals.

This disconnect meant that customers who had made purchases in-store would regularly call HKBN’s customer services team demanding the company to honour the advertising deals. The poorly optimised customer experience resulted in dissatisfied customers and media dollar wastage. 

The telecommunications market in Hong Kong is famously saturated, with multiple competitors ready to poach customers from those who missed the mark. HKBN needed a solution that would set them apart from the crowd and help distinguish their customer experience offering from other market players. HKBN knew that the key to defining its USP lay in personalisation and segmentation through marketing automation. Not only would optimising data lead to better targeted marketing, but it would also build customer’s trust, resulting in increased client retention and an increase in new sign-ups.

Today, when a deal is closed in a retail store, HKBN stitches this data to the customer’s online profile and suppresses irrelevant online media targeting. Instead, the customers only see personalised ads offering value-added services or upgrades to their current plans.

Cross-stack integration helps to launch campaigns in record time

HKBN knew that to bridge the gap between online and offline data, its perfect partner should have the ability to work nimbly and seamlessly across its multiple omnichannel connections. Long term Tealium partner and leading Asian Performance Marketing consultancy, Inetasia, implemented the Tealium platform in multiple phases in order for HKBN to successfully achieve its data orchestration goals.

Samuel Hui, Co-Owner and Chief Transformation Officer at HKBN said, “We elected to work with Tealium due to the flexibility that comes hand-in-hand with its ‘build your own stack’ model. The hub means we have full visibility of customer insights both on- and offline in real-time. On top of this strong Digital and Data foundation, our team of digital experts can then add new technologies to suit an individual campaign or business need – rather than blindly subscribing to a pre-existing ecosystem.” 

The number of turnkey integrations with other marketing technologies also allowed HKBN to set up new tools in record time. “Tealium’s integrations are critical for our campaign execution,” said Yoky Ku, Assistant Manager, Digital at HKBN. “Once we needed to A/B test two different email platforms. Tealium was able to deliver the results in less than 2 weeks, thanks to its extensive integration sets, which eliminated the need for us to rebuild the data structure in-house.”

To achieve the objective of getting to know customers on a deeper level, HKBN uses Tealium’s tag management solution, Tealium iQ™, to collate data across multiple platforms and determine the customer’s personal interests. When the customer visits HKBN’s mobile page, HKBN can orchestrate that data with EventStream™ and harness the power of AudienceStream™ to influence email campaigns for segmentation purposes.

Gregory Smyth, Founder and Chairman, Inetasia, Hong Kong said, “As we continue to build our best in class marketing technology stack, our skilled strategists and local engineers work together with HKBN from digital marketing strategy to implementation and higher ROI. Our Performance Marketing initiatives focus on integrating online and offline activities, understanding cross-channel and cross device customer behaviour, channel attribution on lead generation and conversion, as well as improved customer experience and retention.”

Tealium facilitates this data orchestration and is at the core of the technology stack deployed by HKBN.

Customer engagement skyrockets while marketing spend drops

Since integrating Tealium into its marketing campaigns, HKBN has got data activation down to fine art. Now that HKBN has full omnichannel visibility, it has redeployed an incredible 30% of its marketing budget previously spent on chasing customers who had already converted. Now the company is redeploying that spend to upsell additional products to existing customers.

Increased personalisation in HKBN’s comms not only prompted a 30% jump in click rates, but also quadrupled clickthrough rates from personalised campaigns, compared to generic non-personalised campaigns sent to the same segment of customers.

“The results we’ve seen through using Tealium have changed the way we do business at HKBN. We’re using our budget more efficiently, so we’re now working smarter, not harder. Simply put, the results speak for themselves,” said Hui.

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