Elisa

Elisa has set the standard for what people expect from a modern telecommunications and digital service provider. During our partnership, we have helped Elisa turn services into critical, and often new, businesses – phenomenally fast.

Whether it’s generating new digital sales, tweaking online customer service to perfection, or making data accessible, understandable, and processable with the help of AI, our work has been possible thanks to true cooperation and experimentation culture. Time after time, we’ve joined forces and built trust through repeated successes, unafraid of little missteps in the spirit of trial and error.

We’ve seen Elisa become the market leader on many fronts, evolving from a teleoperator to a pioneer in digitalization, entertainment services, and e-commerce, among other things. During this journey, we’ve mastered how small dedicated teams using agile methods can make all the difference in the biggest of companies.

Since starting our work together in 2007, we’ve helped Elisa substantially increase its business through service and UX design, full-stack development, growth hacking, analytics, business development, data engineering, and AI. 

From the get-go, we’ve advocated agile practices and the growth hacking mindset that Elisa has adopted and refined. In building and further developing B2C and B2B e-commerce and self-service platforms or mobile apps, we always ground our work on actual user data and insight, A/B testing, and a hands-on mindset. No guesswork, just pinpoint accuracy resting on massive, accessibly made data. 

In the end, the most important result of our collaboration is the confidence we’ve built. Because of it, we have become a trusted advisor for Elisa’s leadership in their digitalization strategy. Whenever Elisa needs to create results out of uncertainty, they turn to us to make leaps of progress fast. 

A company in the data business thrives or struggles depending on how it can store and then use its most valuable asset. A breakthrough in our work together was to create a Data Lake that contains all the essential data from Elisa’s previous, multiple data sources. The ‘dumb’ data lake itself brings some value, but that’s only the start. 

The big victories are found in the many ways the data can now be used. The vision behind our work is to make Elisa a customer-oriented organization that is built on uniform data. This also allows for AI solutions that bring great results fast. 

Say, Elisa wants to offer its customers on-point product recommendations during the checkout. Without AI, this would happen through rule-based models that are inaccurate and laborious to tweak and maintain. With organized customer data in data lake, retrieved and analyzed by AI, the recommendations’ accuracy becomes something else. In Elisa’s case, we managed to increase the CTR of checkout recommendations by over 400 percent. The effects on customer satisfaction and sales are indisputable.

In addition to solving valuable use cases that make or save money, our way of working also speeds up Elisa’s development processes. Since data can now be collected and retrieved in real-time, tests and analyses are run much faster, cultivating and supporting growth hacking, iteration, and agile development. 

Experimentation culture, growth mindset, and growth hacking tools guide all of our work with Elisa, from e-commerce and customer service to AI implementations. Our autonomous teams are driven by two principles: we should find ways to grow Elisa’s e-commerce sales and create a superior customer experience.

We work by utilizing data-driven methods such as personification, recommendations, and multi-channel retargeting. Each new feature or change is validated in A/B testing, so we always have data to back up our work. True to agile development, we can ship very fast and go from an idea to production within a day.

Growth hacking is iterative experimentation, avoiding big projects that move blindly towards uncertain targets. Yet, it’s not quick and dirty hacking. Sustainable growth comes from a systematic data-driven experimentation and learning process, where diverse capabilities align with the business. By making constant tweaks, we push sales and customer experience up. In the long run, these small splashes make great waves.

For example, we found that many customers hadn’t given their date of birth which meant asking for marketing consent in these cases wasn’t possible. With small tweaks, like a friendly reminder in the OmaElisa customer service portal, we increased submitted age data by 700 percent, thus enabling much better marketing opportunities.

Our long-term goal with OmaElisa has been to make it the best of its kind, beating the competition hands down. We have achieved this with meticulous UX design and by optimizing the service, using many of the same agile and growth hacking methods that we’ve applied to Elisa’s e-commerce and data management. 

The most significant result of our work has been making Elisa’s customer service run almost automatically. For instance, the customer can solve almost all connection-related problems through remote diagnostics in the customer app and the service portal. This speeds up resolving connectivity issues, lowers customer service costs, and frees resources anywhere they’re needed.

Throughout the years, a common thread in our work has been to move away from a platform and technology approach to focus more on use cases and results. By implementing only actual use cases that bring compounding business value, we can ensure that we are not just building a technical solution but always solving real business problems that make the investment worthwhile.