Time Warner Cable is more than television, Internet, and telephone
Time Warner Cable’s residential business is comprised of 14.5 million customers who make more than 17 million monthly visits to each of the company’s websites. Given the company’s size and scale, gaining insights into customer segments is a monumental task, while understanding individual customer behaviors and preferences added even greater challenges. However, that is exactly the approach the company wanted to take to create more personal customer experiences in order to acquire, grow, and retain customers.
“Building successful customer relationships is vital to our business,” says Rob Roy, head of eCommerce & Digital Marketing at Time Warner Cable. “We needed to create the best first impression possible for the broadest audience, as well as create personalized experiences so customers understand exactly how important they are.”
To support its overarching digital strategies and focus on connecting one to one with customers, Time Warner Cable wanted to gain deeper visibility into customer behaviors and preferences, as well as make those insights actionable. By understanding what each customer was looking for and then automating content and offer delivery, digital teams could enrich experiences and sales delivery to boost customer engagement and revenues.
At the highest level, the company wanted to identify new and existing customers arriving on the site to deliver content focused on account login, personalized upgrade offers, or general product information. “By identifying customers on the landing page and delivering optimized experiences, we set a much better impression and more positive tone for customer conversations,” says Jeff Henshaw, director of Web Analytics and Business Intelligence at Time Warner Cable. “It also eliminates redundant conversations and enables us to keep relationships with customers moving forward.”
Foundation for omnichannel personalization
With an eye on delivering dynamic digital experiences, Time Warner Cable chose to retire its disparate digital marketing technologies and implement an extensible, end-to-end digital marketing platform built on Adobe Marketing Cloud. Prior to using Adobe Marketing Cloud, the company had a set of disparate analytics, targeting, and audience management systems in place. However, challenges with integrating and maintaining the various third-party technologies, maintaining interoperability when new version releases came out, and keeping staff proficient on multiple systems limited the value the company was able to extract.
By implementing Adobe solutions, the company upgraded to best-in-class technology in each functional area and improved overall marketing and business performance by moving to a single, unified platform with Adobe Marketing Cloud. As a result, the company saw a significant opportunity to have its marketing initiatives meet the maturity of its business.
To achieve the company’s vision, Time Warner Cable had to do three things. First, it had to create a unified customer profile taking into account all known first-party data including visitor and customer CRM database information, as well as second- and third-party data from partner and paid data providers. Secondly, the company’s need to integrate a unified profile with web and display media channel technology in order to deliver personalized content. And finally, its need to establish a strategy and process to test and target personalized content.
A disciplined approach
The first step was to integrate visitor data with CRM database information and second- and third-party provided consumer data. To do this, Time Warner Cable utilized Adobe Audience Manager. By integrating visitor data captured in Adobe Analytics with the company’s CRM database along with second- and third-party provided consumer data, Time Warner Cable had a complete view of its current customers as well as prospective customers for the first time.
For example, the company can create a segment of current customers who have Internet-only service in the Northeast and are due for a subscription renewal. The output of this step was a unified customer profile with nearly 300 active segments of customers from which Time Warner Cable could target content and offers.
The second step was to integrate this profile information with downstream systems, including display media technology, to personalize display media content with Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Target. In turn, the company could push personalized content to hundreds of customer segments across the website based on profile attributes, such as navigation and indicated interest.
“Adobe Marketing Cloud has accelerated our testing and measurement capabilities,” says Henshaw. “It enables us to interpret customer engagement within different side-by-side experiences and, in turn, make informed, segment-driven marketing decisions.” The net effect was the ability to target detailed segments with precise communication across channels.
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