Liberty Global Put CloudSense at the Heart of their Global B2B Transformation

LONDON, May 9, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Liberty Global is the world's largest international TV and broadband company, with operations in more than 30 countries across Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.

In 2016, Liberty Global embarked on a multi-country B2B digital transformation program, under the program name Catalyst. Prior to the project, Liberty Global's brands were using a variety of different systems - making it hard work to provide the desired customer experience. To simplify this, Liberty Global conceived the Catalyst program with the ultimate goal of 'connecting customers, partners and employees with their brand by driving simplicity and service through an omnichannel approach.'

Brands that have benefitted from the transformation to date include Virgin Media (UK), UnityMedia (Germany), and VodafoneZiggo (Netherlands), with UPC (Poland, Hungary, Switzerland and Austria) taking part in the program during 2017.

Liberty Global selected CloudSense's Salesforce-native Platform in 2015 to address every stage of the sales lifecycle and, alongside Salesforce, provide a 360-degree view and omnichannel service.

Challenges of a successful, growing multinational Communications Service Provider 

In the lead up to the conception of the Catalyst program, Liberty Global encountered a set of challenges unique to successful, growing multinational Communications Service Providers.

Following in-depth market research and internal analysis, Liberty Global determined their overall approach was both overly segmented and product-focused - leading to a disconnect between Liberty Global and their customers, partners and employees. As a result, the focus of the Catalyst program was to turn this on its head and make Catalyst a truly business and customer focused transformation plan.

To meet this challenge, Liberty Global set about providing the tools and capabilities that would improve the connection between their brands and their customers and employees. However, as Joris Vollebergh, Liberty Global's Business Services Director CRM, observed "brands from across Liberty's regions were already taking steps to provide a better experience, but solely from their own market's point of view and focusing on siloed channels, rather than an omnichannel approach."

Consequently, while Liberty Global's brands were often addressing different parts of the sales lifecycle and learning important lessons in the process, ultimately due to segmented teams and siloed channels, valuable information and best practices weren't always shared across the organization.

As well as making internal information sharing difficult, Liberty Global's segmented channels meant brands were unable to establish the 360-degree view necessary to provide an omnichannel service across products, marketing and sales.

B2B digital transformation goals 

After defining the challenges facing the organization, Joris Vollebergh explained that "Liberty Global identified 5 main pillars of improvement the Catalyst program would address."

The core areas of the transformation are:

• Improving Relevancy - Reducing time-to-market
• Improving Consistency - Increasing visibility and efficiency with a simple set of common PE KPIs and real-time reporting.
• Build on Simplicity - Consolidating systems and improving CRM capabilities, enabling a 360-degree view of customers.
• Increasing Sales & Service Effectiveness - Enabling more channels and providing a seamless omnichannel customer experience from lead to payment.
• Providing the Best Customer Experience - Gaining an in-depth knowledge about customers at each point of contact.

A next generation BSS solution 

The starting goal for the solution was to build a 360-degree view to support Liberty Global's sales, marketing and product offerings with an omnichannel approach. The approach is a pan-country cloud based BSS architecture covering Sales, Care, Order Management, Billing - with Marketing planned for 2017.

As Joris Vollebergh details, "Catalyst combines the steps already taken by individual markets to address every stage of the sales lifecycle - along with delivering a new CRM capability to provide a 360-degree view and omnichannel service."

The program as a whole sees Liberty Global "moving from a product-focused offering to a more customer-focused viewpoint, so our B2B customers can focus on their end products or services, rather than worrying about the technology they need to buy to deliver a great customer experience."

To deliver the Catalyst program, Liberty Global selected the CloudSense Platform to utilize their Salesforce-native Configure Price Quote (CPQ), Contract Management, Product Catalog, Order Management, eCommerce and Mobile App capabilities. Alongside this, CloudSense's Communications-specific data model expands and enhances Salesforce, reducing customization and time to value.

Commenting on CloudSense's contribution to the project Joris Vollebergh stated "CloudSense has delivered us the fundamental elements of the Catalyst program's capability by providing a single product catalog model that supports not only pricing but quoting and contract management."

When implementing the project, Liberty Global moved from a waterfall approach to an agile approach - not just in IT, but across the business. By collaborating across the business during the roll out, Liberty delivered maximum re-usability and developed based on business capabilities rather than individual markets - allowing delivery to multiple markets simultaneously.

CloudSense played an important part in the roll out, "not only delivering with their technology, but using their expertise to have a guiding role with other chosen systems integrators."

Reducing time and costs while increasing revenues and visibility 

The results of the Catalyst program to date have been exceptional, providing a measurably positive impact for Liberty Global's Virgin Media, VodafoneZiggo and UnityMedia.

With CloudSense, Liberty Global have optimized their lead-to-order capabilities, reducing the timeframes and costs for launching and selling products, while increasing revenues and visibility across channels.

Joris Vollebergh shared some of Catalyst's results from 2016, "VodafoneZiggo have had a 60% time reduction for processing orders and now have full traceability of orders for new and existing customers. In addition, Telesales, Account Management and Web teams have gone from 50 plus screen activities down to 2 to complete an order. Alongside new omnichannel capabilities, these improvements have led to a 24% increase in revenue for VodafoneZiggo."

Virgin Media telesales team's inbound time from lead-to-order saw a "significant decrease of 70%", and their outbound lead-to-order time went from between 8 days to 2 days. Meanwhile, alongside their lead-to-order system, UnityMedia launched a new billing engine, integrated with Salesforce through CloudSense.

Other milestones have seen the brands launch 4 new products across different markets, something that wasn't possible before, due to the aligned European Product Catalog. And, most importantly of all, considering the initial goal for the program, brands are now offering omnichannel customer journeys.

Liberty Global's Business Services Director CRM has also complimented the relationship between the CloudSense Platform and Salesforce, saying "CloudSense and Salesforce complemented each other and enabled us to go to market quicker, through their capabilities built on top of existing industrial standards we were able to reuse those capabilities and fine tune where necessary to provide a blueprint across markets and regions."

There's plenty more to come from the Catalyst program with roll outs to further markets including Poland, Hungary, Switzerland and Austria on the way. Meanwhile, Liberty Global's markets already undergoing the transformation will continue the program to enable full lead to cash capabilities.

Summing up CloudSense's contribution to the Catalyst program so far, Joris Vollebergh concluded, "CloudSense have enabled us to achieve increased sales effectiveness and revenues in our 3 highest revenue generating B2B markets by delivering hugely improved lead to order capabilities. Alongside Salesforce, the CloudSense Platform has also given Liberty Global's brands the increased visibility across channels we desired at the outset of the Catalyst program in order to better serve our customers, partners and employees."

About CloudSense 

CloudSense is a global leader in Salesforce-native, industry-specific omnichannel commerce applications. The CloudSense Platforms enable customer-centric companies worldwide to transform the way they sell, delivering the capabilities they need to efficiently provide seamless one-to-one omnichannel customer experiences.

Integrating into CRM, ERP and other systems the CloudSense Platforms provide companies with a powerful Commerce SaaS capability for sales teams, eCommerce, mobile workforces, service agents, retail, reseller and telephone sales.

With offices across the world and customers in 26 countries and counting, CloudSense is growing quickly. Both our platform and people have been recognized for their excellence by numerous awards. To learn more, please visit http://www.cloudsense.com