ScottishPower is one of the ’big six’ suppliers in the UK’s retail energy market, providing energy to more than 5 million customers. In addition to keeping your home cozy, offering you competitive rates, and delivering a greener energy future, ScottishPower positions itself as an energy leader that you can rely on to make a difference.

“Our industry is unpredictable, just like our customers, so we needed a platform that empowered us to deploy changes across our entire system with minimal effort and resources quickly enough to maintain customer satisfaction.”

Craig Paterson, Head of Digital, ScottishPower

Adaptive Marketing at ScottishPower

According to Craig Paterson, Head of Digital at ScottishPower, adaptive marketing is customer service. ScottishPower wants their customers to always feel known and understood. Creating personalized experiences and convenient services for existing customers increases satisfaction leading to higher retention rates and increased lifetime value (LTV). Exceptional customer service also turns their existing customers into loyal brand ambassadors that help them organically acquire new customers through word of mouth which is significantly more cost effective than traditional customer acquisition efforts.

A Successful Adaptive Marketer™

A successful adaptive marketer at ScottishPower is one that puts the customer relationship first, and is constantly finding innovative ways to turn their customer experience into a unique identifier so that existing customers remain satisfied and ScottishPower maintains a competitive edge in the UK utilities marketplace.

Adaptive Marketer™ Challenge & Objective

Given the unpredictable nature of the UK energy sector, ScottishPower is often forced to change customer rates due to unforeseen changes to regulations and wholesale prices. It is not always possible for the marketing team to predict such events, so having the ability to react and notify their customers quickly of these changes to best support their customers is invaluable in improving customer satisfaction and retention. ScottishPower’s Adaptive Marketer™ challenge was to find a way to deploy messaging changes fast enough to proactively reassure affected customers when an unforeseen standard rate change would occur.

Jills are high value customers whose rate just significantly increased on their long-term standard rate contract. As an adaptive marketer, I want to create an Adaptive Customer Experience for my Jills ... by influencing their decision to remain satisfied by ensuring that her concerns are being addressed ... so that my business can improve customer satisfaction ... and my customers can feel that they are still being taken care of and getting the best possible value.

Previous Customer Experience

It took ScottishPower two weeks to push simple configuration changes, which meant there was a significant amount of time that Jill was not receiving relevant messaging. This put her relationship at high risk of attrition as the timing of the messaging may resonate poorly with the customer following the news event. The following internal deployment workflow inefficiencies and missed opportunities with Jill occurred:

Missed Opportunities

• Every channel needed to be updated individually
• Logic for targeted messages resided within individual channels
• Jill would not see personalized messaging for more than two weeks
• Required to maintain multiple code bases for personalization
• Required to coordinate all changes with multiple teams before releasing to production systems
• 6-step process for each channel (new template code, testing, etc.)

Adaptive Customer Experience™

Using the Chameleon™ Platform, ScottishPower leveraged Insights, Campaign Manager, and our Dynamic Decision Engine (DDE) to upgrade their linear channel-centric trigger campaign to a dynamic customer-centric real-time campaign. They used the power of DDE to centralize their campaign logic and rapidly deploy rules that delivered changes to campaigns from one tool on the fly within hours rather than weeks, allowing for updated and unified messaging across multiple touchpoints with minimal effort..

New Opportunities

• Changes deployed in less than 4 hours as opposed to weeks
• Create and edit decisioning logic from one centralized source
• Deploy changes to multiple environments from one centralized source
• Significantly fewer resources and teams required
• Minimized the changes required within the channels to only the specific channel elements
• Jill receives a proactive and more relevant customer experience within hours

Opportunity Tree™

Jill's New Experience

ScottishPower’s main business objective was to adapt to the unforeseen events that happen in their industry before their customers could react to them. They knew that if they could be one step ahead of Jill with relevant and personalized messaging based on the unpredictable events, they would have a way higher chance of retaining her as a customer..

ScottishPower designed an Opportunity Tree™ to outline their Adaptive Customer Experience™ for Jill related to the industry’s unpredictable rate changes. Opportunity Trees™ show the potential opportunities to align Jill’s needs and concerns with ScottishPower’s business objectives. The following is an example of how ScottishPower is maximizing every opportunity to increase LTV with Jill and creating the best possible customer experience while doing so.

WEB – Jill sees on a news channel that ScottishPower has just announced that they are raising their standard fees. Jill is concerned that ScottishPower might no longer be the best option for her. Jill visits the ScottishPower homepage as an anonymous user. ScottishPower knows that Jill has previously logged in from this device and that she may be impacted by the rate changes, so they present a soft message suggesting that she review her package.

WEB – Jill logs in to her account, where she receives strong messaging to review her package with specific products suggested based on her profile from slow data. Jill believes the estimated usage in her bill is quite high.

MOBILE – Jill goes outside to view her meter read, opens up her ScottishPower app and sees the same promotion suggesting that she should consider moving to the fixed rate product.

WEB – Jill feels that ScottishPower has her best interests in mind, as they have been communicative to her about transferring to a better product offering. She returns to the website and signs up for the new product.

Adaptive Customer Experience™ Platform Process

ScottishPower has a new simplified process that leverages DDE rules to apply updates and changes simultaneously across all channels:

Create New DDE Rulel

Test DDE Rule

Deploy to Production

Changes required within Jill's channels are now minimized to only specific channel elements such as content or presentation markup.

Results & Benefits

• 4 hours vs 2 weeks - Deployment efoort & time
• 90% reduction in deployment cost
• Hours compared to weeks deployment time
• First urgent adjustment based on change in standard rate in February 2017 we deployed in less than 4 hours
• Results available immediately once the platform was implemented