2012.05 liferay and emeldi road show, dusan bystriansky
TRANSCRIPT
Online Customer Self-Service
Maximizing the Customer
Experience
Liferay & Emeldi Roadshow
Bratislava April 18, 2012
Radoslav Volny
Senior Manager for Online
Dusan Bystriansky
Director – Business Development
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High Level Summary
The objective of this
presentation is to:
Summarise why it is
increasingly more important
to maximise the quality of
the customer experience
over online channels
Outline what challenges
does this pose for Telecom
IT solutions
Offer suggestions how
these challenges should be
addressed
Illustrate these points on case study
of implementation of Telefónica O2
Slovakia (O2) integrated ePortal
built on Liferay framework
Trends and directions of EnterpriseB2C portals:
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Portals’ Role Within the Enterprise
Over past 5 years, online
sales channels have
assumed an ever-
increasing role in
determining an
enterprise's financial
success
Portal applications have
emerged as one of the
single most critical IT
assets within any
enterprise (Telcos,
Banks, airliners, etc..)
Gartner research shows
80% of enterprise
executives think customer
experience is more
important now than three
years ago.
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Community vs. Enterprise
Both functional and technical
differences between Enterprise
portal solutions and community
portal solutions are vast.
Compared to Community
portals, implementing an
Enterprise portal solution is no
trivial matter.
Enterprise portal solutions
must:
Integrate heavily into pre-
existing multi-system backend
architectures (CRMs, Order
Management systems,
Identity Providers (IdP), etc…)
Be scalable to 100,000’s
users
Capable of processing high
volumes of transactions
Be extremely resilient
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Enterprise B2C Portals
5
Motivation for Enterprises:
reduce cost to operate while maintaining
quality of service
increase revenue through differentiation
Customers (end-users) demands:
higher purchasing flexibility
shopping convenience (anytime, anywhere,
anyhow),
highest standards of service delivery
Excellent Customer Experience means
Increased loyalty
Increased Revenue
Prevented churn
Fertile ground for web-based self-care and web-based shopping
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….but
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The probability that something
goes wrong with online
shopping and self-care is very
high.
Only reliable, resilient and fault-tolerant online solutions enhance
the customer experience
68% of Customer defections occur because customers perceive "An
Attitude of Indifference“ . Customer experience accounts for everything.
Telefónica O2 Slovakia - Background
Pop. 38 mil
Pop. 10 milPop. 5.4 mil
Pop. 10 mil
Pop. 8.2 mil
Pop. 82 mil
ERASlovakia – population 5.4 million
Telefónica Slovakia:
02.02.2007 - Launch of commercial
service (3rd mobile operator)
~400 employees
>18.4% market share (EOY 2011)
Telefónica O2 ePortal – Business Goals
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4. Stay lean in terms of internal call center and sales network
• focus staff on the most value added operations and let everything else on
self-care
and
• move care traffic:
Call centre ShopsSelf-care
1. Competitive advantage via easy to use online self-service and e-commerce
2. Everything is online enabled
3. Support multichannel organization (the same data on all touch points)
Telefónica ePortal – IT Goals, back in 2008
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1. Consolidation of existing online applications under single framework
- website
- e-shop
- mobile content downloads
- online prepaid credit top-up
- email electronic invoice
- non existing self-care
5. Other requested features:
- SSO, authentication of O2 customers against CRM
- security: respect O2 security zones standard
- Allow for profiling and personalization of customers across all portals
4. Keep doors open for multiple vendors to develop future applications
2. Robust front-end for new CRM
3. Find reliable vendor who has both the UI and backend integration expertise
6. Limited budget and internal resources
2 steps transition
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Customer self-care solution challenges
1. Simultaneous project - new Siebel CRM
challenge: launch ePortal prior to the rollout of a new CRM system but
still be prepared for reversed sequence scenario
- Integration considerations
- Maximal re-use, minimal waste
2. Keep existing php/mysql applicationsBe able to integrate existing portal applications while still integrating
them under the unified portal umbrella.
Upgrade those applications in 2nd phase
3. Telco IT systems vs. online portal
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Addressing these challenges (1)
Simultaneous project - new Siebel CRM
-The so-called SafeWay initiative prepared ePortal project for
hot-swapping the interface from the old CRM to the new one.
-How this was accomplished?Services were designed to be identical in both solutions (legacy systems via BEA
and new via TIBCO). Both versions vary only in minor parameters.
-Was it successful? Yes. As the SafeWay name implies, ePortal was prepared for both contingencies
(launch either before or after rollout of new CRM). This was accomplished
within an acceptable cost of less than 10% of the project value.
Addressing these challenges (2)
Integration of existing applications with minimal changes
Existing, external PHP/MySQL E-shop and Forum only occupies the main part of
page, remainder is rendered by ePortal.
Solved by:
•URL scrapping (Customized Portlet Bridge – portlet proxying)
•Enhanced SSO of ePortal
Challenges:•session handling, cookies handling, get/post parameters handling
•JS frameworks used (jQuery 1.2.6.)
•CSS clashes
•New URLs on page usable only within valid session
Was it successful? Yes, we have used old e-shop for nearly 2 years and finally migrated it to new one 01/2012. New
ecommerce solution is powered by Emeldi Commerce ®
Addressing these challenges (3)
Major differences between Telco systems and online world
Not real-time response from CRM, Billing, ProvisioningSolved by:
-implementation of user “dashboard” with users requests and their actual
statuses
-confirmation SMS and e-mails, proper wording
24x7 operationsTelco is used to couple of hours maintenance windows of their systems. This
is not acceptable in online environment.
Temporarily solved by:
- maintenance windows and notification in advance
Complexity hidden from end usersCustomer care and shop agents are well trained, but our customers are not…
Solved by:
Proper naming conventions, predefined configurations, endless fine tuning of
particular screens according to user feedback.
….and some statistics
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Over 20% of website visits touch My O2 self-care part
20% increase of number of registered users / month
Most visited content are pages related to cost control (actual expenditure, status of Extra-packages)
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With the introduction of Web 2.0,
the elevation of the portal
application’s role and importance
within the enterprise is now
entering into a next phase.
Customer Profiling and
Personalization is the hottest
rising trend in ecommerce
O2's portal-wide SSO &
Federated Identities
Management has left the door
open for very interesting
opportunities to be developed
in this area:
Customer Profile data is stored
and aggregated
Customer Online Channel Data is
stored and aggregated
Business Intelligence rules are
applied to this data to determine
which personalized content can be
driven to them
15
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Customer Profiling and Personalization
Customer Profile Data:
Date of birth, gender, name, locale,
registration date, order history, product
list, etc…
Customer Online Channel Data:
Search keywords - This is a clear
indication of what the customer is looking
for (they explicitly told you) and
navigational behavior
Product Browsing Attributes - What are
the traits of the products the customer is
looking at? Are they looking at relatively
expensive items, clearance items, core vs.
accessory products, etc.
Referring URL - This speaks to how they
entered the site and can have a big
influence on how you personalize the
experience for the customer.
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Personalization: pitfalls
Perhaps more important than
knowing what to present to the
customer, is knowing what
NOT to present:
Successful prediction models
require both corrective &
reinforcement learning
Strongest indicator of a visitor's
motivation for visiting a site is their
actual behavior during the current
session
Weights must be applied to past
session history
Current session behaviour must
be analyzed and interpreted with
considerations to past behaviour
(is current behaviour in-line with
what we already think we know
about the user?)
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Best Practices
Introduction – “Slowly, but surely” vs.
Big-bang
Use as a base the simple data from
customer profile data set
Introduce a small number of variables
from online channel data set (keyword
search data is a very good candidate)
Define simple rules to drive
popular/generic content (the more
variables, the more targeted and
specific your content can become)
Measure success
Global improvements in portal performance
(revenue, number of visits, number of bounces,
time on site…)
Evaluate business metrics based specific visitor
behaviour in reaction to specific personalization
attempts. For each instance ask “Did the visitor
respond positively or negatively? Was this ‘hint’
useful?”
Notifications and reporting - React quickly to
under-performing models
Simulate (Before releasing into the wild)
Internal simulations on actual customer data, can
be automated
Regression testing can be performed
continuously on real production data
Improve
Key success factor is to correct bad rules,
reinforce good ones.
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Some other applications…
Customer data and business
intelligence rules can be used
in other ways than just driving
cross-sale & up-sale content:
Targeting specific marketing
emails to specific customers
Offering specific discount
promotions to specific
customers
Determine different content
based on user’s
demographics.
Display different skins or
themes based on the user’s
demographics
For a particular customer and
product, and which NOT to
show.
Reports: which products are
performing best within which
segments, which are under-
performing?
The possibilities are endless…
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Increased Online Sales - Emeldi
Commerce®
New business transformation was
to enhance its online sales
channels capabilities
Ready-made ecommerce product fully
deployable into Liferay
Simplified and standardized 3rd party
integration
Ability to upgrade and further develop
the solution and solution flexibility
Advanced web 2.0 functionality and
social networking capabilities including
personalized shopping and targeted
marketing campaigns
Utilize synergy of single framework for
ePortal (self-service) and Emeldi
Commerce® (ecommerce)
ePortal
Emeldi Commerce®
E2E Online
Channel
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Emeldi Commerce® in
TO2
Fully modularized architecture
Full freedom to build enterprise
portal with targeted application
components and functionality, while
leaving out those which don’t fit into
the online strategy.
Deployment in TO2:
Emeldi Commerce® - Platform
Core
Emeldi Commerce® - eCommerce
Portal Extension
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Emeldi Commerce® in o2.sk
• State-of-the-art in front-end layer and rich on features
• Easy integration with J2EE, group development standard
• Optimal fit into landscape and total cost of ownership
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Summary messages
Enterprises have fully emerged
themselves into the online world,
portal dominance is now a reality
The heavy requirements imposed
on Enterprise portals set them well
apart from standard community
portal applications
Negative feedback is viral, one bad
review has more negative and
wide-reaching impact than 100
good reviews
Only reliable, resilient and fault-
tolerant web-based solutions
enhance the customer experience,
and therefore succeed.
Web 2.0 has pushed forward the
concept of the personalized web.
This trend will continue to gain
momentum and carry enterprise
portals forward into the next 5 years.
Key concepts:
SSO
Federated Identities
Customer profiling
Site personalization
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Thank you for your attention
For questions about this case
study please contact us
Telefónica O2, Slovakia, www.sk.o2.com
Radoslav Volny -
Emeldi Group
Dusan Bystriansky -
United Kingdom: Emeldi Ltd, UK, http://www.emeldi.com
Czech Republic: Emeldi Software Services s.r.o.,
http://www.emeldi.com
Emeldi Technologies s.r.o. http://www.emeldi.cz
Slovakia Emeldi Software Service Slovakia s.r.o.
http://www.emeldi.sk
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BACKUP
Addressing these challenges (3)
Multilanguagemissing possibility of different site structure in different languages
Solved by custom development:• set default language to never-used value (in our case Japanese)
• menus rendering checks if current language version exists
• page checks if proper language version exists, otherwise displays upper page
Increased control over user login names- example: MSISDN cannot be used as user login name. As a mobile provider,
this creates difficulties, many customers want to use their phone number as
their user name.
Developer Documentation- As for all technologies, the more comprehensive the technical documentation,
the higher quality output and faster times-to-market.
other Liferay “features”
What would be nice to see in upcoming Liferay versions…
Taking Liferay Features Further…Enhanced SSO & Federated Identities
Enhanced SSORequired: enhanced SSO functionality across Liferay and external portals
-SSO between portals within the Liferay container and external (php, .NET, etc.)
-Cross Domain SSO, portals on different domains (eg. sk.o2.com,
o2active.sk,…)
Solved by custom development:• A new SSO plug-in (sitting on top of Liferay’s authentication framework) was developed capable of
bridging authentication between LR accounts and external user stores
Federated IdentitiesAccount Profile attributes needed to be aggregated and sharable across all
portals (internal and external)
Example: user changes email address in external portal (o2active.sk), change is
propagated and viewable across all portals.
Solved by custom development:• Federated Identities management was implemented on top of the custom SSO plug-in.
e-Portal Implementation