O2 shifted from a mobile operator to a communications provider using Salesforce to improve customer engagement and service delivery. The company leveraged social media and Salesforce's capabilities to enhance both customer experiences and internal communications.
It's always a great question to ask a customer, how well do you know your customers? Followed by how well would you like to know your customers? A lot of our customers and people across the UK recognise us as a company that are doing different things, new things, and bringing a lot of innovation and a different experience into their lives. We realized a couple of years ago that we could no longer become just a mobile operator. If there are a number of things that you're going to do brilliantly, what are those things that you're going to do brilliantly? How do we deliver flexible work? We emptied the headquarters here in Slough, 2,500 people, and we left them to their own devices, effectively. We've got Twitter, we've got Facebook, we've got Chatter, all sorts of social media tweeting in where they were working. And that generated a real buzz about the place, a real buzz. So that's called Joined up business. We couldn't stop just there. We started to deliver fixed line services and broadband services and we call that Joined up communications. Joined up. It is another pillar of our strategy. And then the last part is Joined up customer and Salesforce helps us connect them all together, which is absolutely what we want to do. What's important within O2 is that you've got the insight to deliver fantastic marketing propositions. Salesforce then helps us execute brilliantly. Our relationships with Salesforce has expanded dramatically over the last couple of years and the platform and the partner network that Salesforce has been building out is providing a really rich set of capabilities that we're leveraging in many ways. There's an urgency around delivering brilliant customer experiences and deliver it possibly when they least expect it. One of the first groups within O2 that has leveraged Salesforce capabilities is our gurus, and they've created a community among themselves that uses Chatter to be able to solve customers problems quickly. You've got to enable your people, whether it's your salespeople or your homeworkers or your engineers with the tools to enable them to do the job. We're going to have a sales and service lifecycle that is enriched by Salesforce. I think the experience will be second to none in the marketplace. Social media is taking off unbelievably quickly, and if that's how customers are engaging, we need to be engaging in that way. I think if you're a CIO that hasn't spotted these trends or hasn't got a plan that you're going to proactively drive, I really think you need to wake up because this is happening, it's real, and we're obviously evolving our capabilities to make sure that we truly can be seen as a social enterprise, both in terms of how we communicate internally and how we communicate with our customers. And Salesforce are absolutely helping us, enabling that infrastructure, which is fantastic. We're always looking forward, always trying to create the future, always trying to innovate on the future, and always trying to be better than our competitors so that we can deliver better experiences for our customers, which is ultimately what we're trying to do.
