Helping deliver customer loyalty rewards

Offering an end-to-end solution, SEMA helped deliver a national customer loyalty reward campaign to one of the largest consumer customer bases in Australia.

Telstra is one of Australia's leading telecommunications and information services company, with one of the best known brands in the country. The company offers a full range of services and competes in all telecommunications markets throughout Australia, providing fixed lines to more than 9.86 million Australians and more than 8.9 million mobile services.

When Telstra decided to give a large number of its consumer base the opportunity to receive "a gift for being with Telstra", they sought our assistance. We worked closely with all levels of Telstra and their partners to deliver an end-to-end solution.

The challenge

Executing a national campaign that offers cash-back/voucher style gifts to one of the largest consumer customer bases in Australia presented a number of challenges. It was clear from the start that a flexible, secure, cost-effective and scalable group of systems and processes was needed. As a gift was being provided (that demonstrated appreciation for custom), interruptions and failures in the process where unacceptable.

The solution

As SEMA were engaged early in the campaign development, we where able to contribute at strategic, creative, technological and operational levels. The total service SEMA provided was an end-to-end solution.

The solutions architect and project management team leveraged the power of SEMA's integrated service offering to deliver on the promises of this quality solution. SEMA's:

• Marketing and operation strategists provided advice on how best to overcome the challenges of complexity, user experience and operational logistics
• Creative services were engaged to design user-friendly, brand-compliant digital interfaces for customer interaction online. Our copywriting services were also used to develop appropriate communications using brand-suitable language that ensured a respectful communication throughout the process
• suitable language that ensured a respectful communication throughout the process
• Software development and digital execution services enabled those creative and strategic visions via digital channels (which included automated digital communications, secure financial systems integration and reporting/reconciliation services)
• Physical execution services were engaged to physically provide (in an accountable and secure manner) the dispatch and reconciliation services needed for gift distribution
• Back-office processing services provided high speed scanning, return mail processing and manual exception handling to turn around customer requests quickly and professionally
• Contact centre services acted as the voice of our client to respond to customer enquiries regarding the gift selection and receipt process

The outcome

This campaign has been declared a success by all parties and the customer engagement throughout the process has exceeded expectations:

• 17,415 claims were received, processed, validated and fulfilled
• Over 9,200 telephone enquiry calls were managed during the offer period
• Over $700,000 in rebates/gifts/vouchers were processed via the SEMA system
• Approximately 30% of all claims where digitally processed (70% via physical means)

SEMA and Telstra

SEMA has been a strong partner of Telstra for more than 14 years and assists Telstra to manage its complex business and technical challenges. Telstra regularly sets targets for SEMA's services which we enjoy delivering on. Telstra has set SEMA a KPI for document retrieval and service availability of 95%, SEMA achieved 99.96% for document retrieval and 99.87% for system availability. As a result of our ongoing efforts, SEMA won the Telstra 2006/07 Vendor of the Year (Excellence in Quality category).