Every month, 1.4 million people visit dtac’s shops. But with the spread of COVID-19, social distancing and partial lockdown measures have been introduced to control its spread. Hundreds of dtac shops and retail points are now closed across the country. And customers who were accustomed to having sales agents assist them with routine operations such as bill payments and top ups, must now turn to digital channels.
One such channel is the dtac app. And the team behind it isn’t satisfied with making it only an emergency alternative to shops. Instead, their ambition is to make an app that unlocks a whole new customer experience.
Compelling customer experiences with personalization
“Did you know that the main page of dtac app displays differently for each of customers?” asks Panthep Nilasinthop, Head of Digital B2C and Platform Division at dtac. He oversees digital channels across all platforms.
He defines the dtac app as the “preferred channel” because more than 90% of dtac customers own a smartphone. You can manage your services and payments, get help, check for outages and track orders – all while you’re at home.
“From the first day of the development of dtac app, it has been evolving from a self-service channel to a preferred channel that delivers a better customer experience,” he says.
And the secret sauce of a compelling customer experience comes from personalization. Every package or add-on internet are designed to meet each customer’s demand. Artificial Intelligence has been deployed for the use of prediction based on previous data usage.
Early this year, the dtac app launched an upgraded feature on the loyalty program dtac reward, allowing customers to redeem special benefits more easily with more than 25,000 partners covering a wide range of food, shopping and lifestyle category. Geolocalization, via the feature “Near Me,” allows users to find privileges around them, while letting users know how many virtual coupons are left to pick up.
“The dtac reward features will keep getting more intelligent with personalization technique thanks to Customer Value Management team who is dedicated to understanding customer insight from billion sets of data. Presently, reward recommendations are based on customer tier programs – Silver, Gold, Blue Member and Platinum Blue Member. But for the next phase, recommendations will be based on customers preferences,” says Mr. Panthep.
“The key factor of a successful platform is to create engagement, encouraging users to use it more often, which will lead to a higher engagement rate,” he explains. “Recently, the team has enhanced gamification features and also added fortuneteller feature, which meets Thai customer insight.”
In response to social distancing practice amid COVID-19 crisis, dtac customers can make a bill payment, top up add-on internet and entertainment at home, reducing risk of infections. As connectivity becomes more important than ever, the working team has ramped up its digital capabilities in preparation for high usage to keep customer connected. Moreover, they’ve added some special features such as COVID-19 health insurance, games and online shopping deals.
Over the past three years of dtac app journey, dtac app has been gaining more positive feedback from customers with 30% increase app downloads in 2019, compared with 2018. Monthly active usage doubled from 7 to 14 times.
“Personalization will not be limited only offerings, but it will be advancing covering every customer touchpoint. dtac app will never reach that objective if we lack our marketing intelligence to get insights from dtac customers of more than 20 million customers,” he says. “Which is why the Customer Value Management (CVM) team is so critical to the dtac app.”
The rise of mass personalization
Chatsuda Santanond, Head of Customer Value Management at dtac, says, “Our main task of CVM is to understand dtac customers based on their data usage and behavior to offer our products and services to the customers by giving the best values under the concept of “Right product, Right moment and Right Channel.”
Personalization requires a large and diverse sets of information. Today, there are around 400 million sets of data happening on dtac channels daily or 12 billion sets monthly, including traditional channel like voice and SMS and digital channel through dtac app. The collection of massive datasets is considered a precious asset, allowing dtac to offer products and services as personalized as possible.
The collection of datasets is highly diverse, ranging from lifetime value of customers, channel, location, spending, device model, money refill behavior, customer interest, etc. Data scientists will then use the datasets in an AI-powered predictive model in order to forecast customer behavior in the future.
“The CVM team collects and analyzes those datasets, creating a platform called Customer 360o, which contains all information related to customers in one place. This allows dtac to understand and truly build products on customer demands individually,” says Ms. Chatsuda.
Besides product and services, personalization requires consistency of data collection across dtac touchpoints whether via SMS, dtac app, dtac web, call center or dtac halls.
“This creates a seamless experience and digital journey for users. dtac has been pioneering personalization technique for more than five years. Thanks to the stat e-of-the-art technology, personalization contributes around 38% of total packages,” she says.
With high ethical standards of dtac on data protection and privacy, dtac is also compliant with local and the EU regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation that entered into effect on May 25, 2018.
“Customers can be confident that their data is only used for the sake of customer benefits and the industry’s development as a whole,” Ms. Chatsuda stresses.
The dtac app is available on the Apple Store and Google Play.