How Vattenfall is powering personalized customer experiences

Vattenfall is one of Europe's leading energy providers. In the world of utilities, where customer retention is key, Vattenfall aims to transform every aspect of its business to be fully customer-centric. Vattenfall chose Relay42, now part of Supermetrics, to implement intelligent personalization across all its marketing channels by orchestrating individual customer journeys for approximately 2 million customers in real-time.

The challenge: personalization at scale

Vattenfall views the world of energy marketing as a series of customer journeys — journeys that don’t end when a customer converts, but rather begin. To create this vision, Vattenfall selected Relay42 to address three key challenges: switching its strategy from channel-focused to one-to-one omnichannel personalization at scale; seamless technology integration; and increasing efficiency in bringing offers to market.

Their first project focused on personalizing their website to every visitor’s preferences and then sharpening their paid media bidding strategy based on that data.

Going forward, the marketing team aimed to personalize every marketing touchpoint, adapting their message, timing, and channel to meet the needs of each individual customer at every stage of their customer journey.

The Solution: From connected framework to journey orchestration

As a first step to becoming fully customer-centric, Vattenfall had to connect all of its existing channels and systems.

The Relay42 Platform allowed the marketing team to swiftly connect their proprietary Content Management System, display advertising, search, and web analytics. This setup allowed for a flexible and scalable solution to serve dynamic content to the right customer and prospect, at the right time. With the basics in place, Vattenfall could implement the next level of personalization: full journey orchestration.

With the Relay42 Orchestration Engine, the marketing team personalized every step of the customer journey, tailoring their messaging on all channels in real time, based on behavior and the individual journey phase of the visitor.

Case study results at a glance:

• +3% increase in conversion rate
• +12% increase in click-through rate
• +86% increase in leads
• +4.2% increase in contract value

Case study: How Vattenfall Retained Customers and Gained an 888% ROAS

The marketing team at Vattenfall had managed to decrease the churn rate by 1.12% while achieving a Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) of 888%. We couldn’t wait to share their story. To tell us all about the results, we sat down with Laure van Ravensberg, Digital Marketer at Vattenfall.

Digital Transformation - Identifying a common goal among different teams
As a leading European energy provider, one of Vattenfall's main long-term strategic pillars is the digitalization of the entire energy value chain in order to leverage flexibility and better serve its customers. As we’ve written previously, data-driven marketing is at the heart of Vattenfall’s digital marketing team, and their strategy is fully focused on providing a personalized experience across all channels of the customer journey.

As such, in her role within the digital marketing team, Laure was looking for opportunities that would drive digital transformation within Vattenfall. With strong expertise in both programmatic marketing and web analytics, she possessed the technical background and strategic knowledge to be able to expertly identify opportunities across different teams.

Her first step was to organize an internal customer journey session to give different departments the chance to discuss their current challenges. The idea was to use this brainstorm as a way to identify the project that would bring the most value, and in the end, they all agreed that they wanted to shine the spotlight on customer retention.

Solving the challenge of identifying customers online
The first step of the project was choosing a method that would allow the marketing team to recognize the right customers online, and most importantly, make sure that this method was compliant with European privacy laws, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Ultimately, the marketing team decided to use identity resolution based on anonymized email addresses from their CRM system. They evaluated a few channel options and finally chose the Facebook and Instagram display network, as it offers a relatively high match rate via (hashed) email addresses compared to other channels.

The trouble with customer recognition
“There are a few available methods for recognizing customers," explains Laure. "However, the main requirement for us was to choose a method that would protect the data of our customers according to the European privacy regulations. It sounds like a small step, but this is a crucial one to even get approval to start the use case.

“It was crucial to ensure that we protect the customer information in the right way, which included anonymizing the email addresses, using the right security hashing algorithm (SHA) for Facebook, and making sure that there’s no Personally Identifiable Information (PII) going into the Relay42 Customer Data Platform.” Laure worked with specialists from both the Vattenfall Customer Intelligence team and one of Relay42's consultants, Yannick Debije, to ensure optimal compliance on this project.

Creating a relevant and consistent customer experience
For some context, energy contracts in the Netherlands are similar to mobile phone subscriptions, in that there are several energy suppliers and every household can choose the one that best suits their needs. Contracts are usually at a fixed rate for at least a year, after which the rate becomes variable depending on the market. As such, it's not uncommon for people to switch providers just before the end of their fixed period in favor of a new provider with a more beneficial fixed rate.

As you can imagine, this makes customer retention a challenge, which is why the Vattenfall marketing team decided to target customers whose fixed-term contracts were coming to an end. As data from the CRM and Vattenfall's website were already streaming to the Relay42 CDP, it was only a matter of setting up the right audiences in Relay42 based on contract expiration date.

Prior to this use case, Vattenfall was reaching out to customers via email and phone about a month before their fixed contracts were due to expire. With the Customer Retention use case, the communication with banners on Facebook and Instagram would now start two months earlier, thus increasing the awareness of the benefits for loyal Vattenfall customers before any phone communications would take place.

The proposition? Staying with Vattenfall pays off.

The Facebook and Instagram banners communicated the extra benefits that customers would get if they continued with Vattenfall instead of switching to another energy supplier. The banners also promoted a special offer that allowed customers to extend their fixed-term contracts.

“We communicated that we valued our customers. Although we also included an offer, the main goal was not getting conversions but convincing our customers to stay with us — and they did,” says Laure.

How do you prove the value of a use case focused on customer retention?
The primary business goal for this use case was to reduce the customer churn rate. However, since this was the first digital customer journey focused on customer retention, the team’s main goal was to test and learn from the experience.

“In terms of KPIs, we hoped to be able to decrease the churn rate by 0.5%. But to be honest, this type of use case had never been done before, and we had no idea what we could expect.”

“The main problem was there was no fixed baseline for customer retention that stays the same throughout the year or year-on-year," explains Laure. "So the only way to measure the result was to do an experiment with test and control groups.”

The marketing team was able to recognize 52% of their audience in the test group, which meant that in order to prove the value of the use case, they would have to determine the statistical significance. “Only after we weighted the data did we realize how high the significance was: 99.19% — the highest I’ve ever experienced in my practice.”

The result was far beyond the team's expectations — a statistically proven reduction in churn of 1.12% and an 888% return on advertising spend (ROAS) !

An added value to the case was a customized dashboard that shows the results of the use case in real time.

“People are naturally resistant to change, so having a dashboard visualizing all of the most important metrics really helps to show other teams that the use case works.”

Another key learning from this use case is that it proved the value of a banner. “Simply telling your customers that you value them is a powerful message that motivates them to stay with you. In the age of ad blockers and banner blindness, proving that display advertising can work so well demonstrates that this channel is still relevant.”

Building up for the future
When you have a successful use case, the next logical step is to build on it. The Vattenfall marketing team has therefore already expanded the banners with a video, and is working on new ways for increasing the customer recognition match rate.

Of course, the long-term value of this use case lies in the fact that Vattenfall can now distinguish customers from online prospects, and thereby create truly personalized customer journeys. Being relevant, while simultaneously decreasing unnecessary advertising costs, is a big step towards making Vattenfall future-proofed and towards fulfilling its mission to best serve the needs of its customers.

Laure’s Tip for Marketers
“Don’t be shy to share the results of your use cases with the rest of the organization. Take your time to explain in simple terms what your project was about and why it was important. Especially when you’re working with other teams, make sure that you acknowledge that it was a team effort and that you recognize the role of each team member for the success of the project.”

Case study: Driving qualified leads

Above all, data-driven marketing is about being agile and goal-oriented. Vattenfall’s New Energy Solutions team was on a mission to reach its solar panel sales targets as efficiently as possible. As Guido Noodelijk, Database Marketer at Vattenfall, sees it, "It all goes back to reaching the right person at the right time on the right channel.”

In order to get there, they're working hard to connect online and offline channels so they can hone their omnichannel approach and create a 360-degree view of the customer that will enable them to further personalize, optimize, and fine-tune their customer journeys.

Vattenfall’s New Energy Solutions team takes on the lead qualifying process
Vattenfall’s solar energy campaign was designed to guide interested customers and prospects through an online funnel to the "Do the Sun Check" test. Thanks to a highly successful offline advertising campaign, the company has had no shortage of interested leads. On the contrary, the New Energy Solutions team has been struggling to properly handle the huge surge of incoming leads.

Their flow was set up in such a way that if a prospect qualified as a lead by scoring high on the Sun Check test, they were shown a button to request a price quote. Once they requested a quote, their information was sent to a sister company, which would review the details of the lead’s test, compile a quote, and then contact the prospect by telephone to discuss their options.

This highly personalized approach for hot leads is a time-consuming process for Vattenfall’s sister company, and eventually, they couldn't keep up with the high demand for price quotes.

“And that’s how we got started with this whole story,” says Giovanni Zebeda, Senior Digital Marketing Specialist at Vattenfall. “The problem really began as a capacity issue. Leads were delivered and couldn't be picked up until two weeks later, or sometimes not at all, and customers were putting comments on Facebook like, ‘Hey, I requested a quote, and I haven't heard anything.’”

On top of that, 90% of the leads being delivered weren't qualifying. “And that means you might be disappointing clients or giving them a negative experience,” says Gio. “We realized the only thing we could do to improve the situation was to improve the quality of the leads, so we got to work finding a solution.”

A/B Testing
The New Energy Solutions team started experimenting on their own by setting up the website so that only half of the visitors would see the button to request a price quote, and the other half would see an “email me advice” button. It delivered fewer leads, which was good, but because it was set up to randomly determine who would/wouldn’t see the option to request a quote directly, Vattenfall was potentially losing highly qualified leads.

The New Energy Solutions team liked the general idea, but they wanted to be able to do it based on user behavior, such as who had engaged with relevant solar panel content on their website.

“This was already happening last year,” says Guido, “but at that point, I wasn't working with Relay42. I didn't even know what it was. And that's actually a really good example of how the link between the marketing and online teams is way too minimal. I didn't even know what Relay did a year ago.”

Improving lead generation
Vattenfall had already been working with the Relay42 platform since 2012, but in such a large organization, not everyone knows about every tool being used. Once Guido and Gio began looking for a way to solve their lead scoring problem, they found about the perfect tool for the job — one that they already had.

They got in touch and started working with Relay42 consultant Dick Heerkens. From there, Gio, Guido, and Dick worked together in weekly meetings to come up with a new lead scoring model and process for qualifying solar panel leads.

“Gio, Dick, and I did all of this together. It was really nice that Dick was there, with so much expertise in Relay42, so we didn't have to lose any time on that.”

The big experiment: a new lead scoring model
“We have all kinds of online channels, and then the website,” explains Gio, “and Relay42 is the layer on top of it all that allows us to track everything, do lead scoring, qualify leads, and perform trigger-based actions based on behavior. So Relay42 has a really wide reach over our marketing organization.”

The first step to improving the lead process with the Relay42 platform was to define a new lead scoring model. The team began by dividing the customer journey into three phases and then assigning a specific number of points to various possible interactions within each phase.

After mapping out the customer journey, Lesley Declercq, Technical Consultant at Relay42, got involved to create a brand new lead scoring model in the Relay42 platform for Vattenfall.

In the infographic below, you can see one of the possible customer journeys.

"The road to shaping the model was quite complex,” says Dick, “but working together in a multidisciplinary team meant we could act quickly and develop the model in a relatively short period of time."

Then they built a few shortcuts into the process, such as if a person engages with specific bottom-of-funnel content, they get so many points that they qualify directly. By working with points, they are able to manipulate lead scoring in such a way that prospects with enough interest always fall into the last phase — and those who aren’t interested enough or not qualified, don’t.

Finally, they set up a dynamic results page for the Sun Check so that only qualified leads would see the button to request a price quote, and everyone else would see the button to request more information via email.

Next steps
“But does the current scoring make sense with those phases?” Guido ponders. “We don't know yet, but we'll find out soon with this experiment. Do people land on a page once or ten times? Should you only assign points for unique visits or not? Those are all questions we have that should be answered with this campaign.

Once the results are in, it will be the team’s task to continue their data-driven marketing efforts by adjusting their KPIs to fit with the new model, and then test and optimize again. They already believe that visitors who have more engagements convert more easily; the question is whether the data from this campaign will prove that.

“Right now, we actually don't know what someone's journey looks like,” Gio explains. “If someone is looking for a solution online, for example, does it take a day or a month? We hope to get some insights on that.

“If this gets more traction within the organization, then a lot more teams are going to start thinking about how they can apply it,” says Guido. So, in addition to improving their customer journey, perhaps the New Energy Solutions team is also improving their colleagues’ journeys as well.