How this GM is bringing Dodo into the digital age

GM of consumer and digital of telco and energy retailer shares the digital transformation journey he's on and the people, process and technology changes it involves


Securing buy-in

Getting buy-in for such a tech overhaul was no mean feat and French approached it in two ways. With stakeholders who’d previously worked in large corporates and seen sizeable investments being made into next-gen platforms, he worked to demonstrate the lower-cost nature of a best-of-breed stack.

“I was spending $2-3 million on tech, which is a fair amount of money, but I showed the calibre of features and execution of CX these tools can drive is comparable to a $15-20m stack that a Telstra or NAB might have put in,” French said. “Building a componentised and customer-facing architecture gave us a lower-cost approach.”

Winning over stakeholders that hadn’t seen such tech investments or didn’t know what good CX looked like has been much harder.

“There’s no way to win that argument on day one. The best thing to do was wrap up how much maintenance costs were involved with keeping legacy tech alive and show that compared to something sitting on cloud, with high service levels and lower operating costs,” French said. “That I didn’t completely win, but I got ears to prick up once I made noise about how buying something off the shelf would costs one-tenth of what we were spending and give us much better CX.

“Then it’s about showing what we can do with CX, as we can make changes more quickly and be more agile in market.”

French pointed out Dodo’s heritage was as an industry disruptor. “I believe one of the reasons we lost our foothold in the market is because there are so many things in the business that stopped us operating in that way anymore,” he said.

“Technology was one, people are another. This [digital transformation] is about bringing people, process and technology that allows the business to resume the foothold it once had.”

Staff investment  

Instituting such technology-led change is nothing without the right staff. French’s response has been to get a lower but higher calibre headcount. The consumer digital team has 12 staff and French aims to build that to 24. 

“We’re very lean, and working hard to deliver outcomes. We had to bring talent in to show throughput and benefit the investment could deliver to the business,” French said.

Key staff attributes included tenacity and a doggedness to not give up. “Change is so hard to drive…That meant strong personalities and communicators who are very articulate, and who can tailor the conversation. The second skill was people who also have technical depth.

“The third was people wanting to drive a true transformation agenda who could see this as an opportunity to do all these things. It’s been the only way to counter the lack of brand position Vocus has.”

Measuring success  

To showcase success, a number of digital metrics laddering up to KPIs are being employed. Key ones include boosting digital registrations, digitally active users, conversion rates online and customer satisfaction.

Already, French said Dodo’s digital services interactions have risen from 8-9 per cent six months ago to 16 per cent. “All our digital marketing leads are still going to lead capture forms, so any growth has just been through delivering better CX through technology and UI improvements,” he said.  

Since converting the legacy self-service portal to responsive design, Dodo has also seen an 80 per cent uplift in digital service. The next step is a self-service relaunch under the 'MyDodo' platform in December.  

At present, Dodo only tracks Net Promoter Score (NPS) across call centre interactions, but French said introducing strategic NPS across service, sales and the buying experience will further help. The new sales funnel and website are showing 25 per cent improvements to experience NPS, with the goal being to double this again once the team has retired the decade-old Dodo digital assets still live, he said.

Overall, French rated his digitisation efforts a 7.5 out of 10. “The reason we haven’t hit the 8 or 8.5 I was aspiring for is we underestimated a couple of key things,” he said.

A big one was how hard it is to replace technology as old as Dodo had. “All businesses have legacy technology, but not at every layer of the experience and that’s what we found here,” French said.

What he’s been pleasantly surprised by is customer take-up of new experiences. Meanwhile, the rebrand has given the digital team a platform to update online creative and user interfaces, going a long way to removing that cheap and nasty feel.

“It’s been the vehicle for getting support to drive change in creativity in digital, but also the tone of voice, language and content,” he said. “Where it’s challenging for us is experience. We’re going to market with a promise of trust, transparency, progressive, digitisation and CX. But the reality for the majority of our customers… is there’s limited trust in the experience because they’re getting harassed to buy stuff. That’s not a brand that talks to customer value.

“The next big brand challenge is a fundamental change in CX so it’s not about selling anything to anyone at any point of day, but about selling at the right point in time, with the right products and for right challenge customer face.”  

Read more of CMO's digital transformation case studies

Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia, or check us out on Google+:google.com/+CmoAu 

Join the newsletter!

Or

Sign up to gain exclusive access to email subscriptions, event invitations, competitions, giveaways, and much more.

Membership is free, and your security and privacy remain protected. View our privacy policy before signing up.

Error: Please check your email address.
Show Comments

Latest Videos

More Videos

More Brand Posts

What are Chris Riddell's qualifications to talk about technology? What are the awards that Chris Riddell has won? I cannot seem to find ...

Tareq

Digital disruption isn’t disruption anymore: Why it’s time to refocus your business

Read more

Enterprisetalk

Mark

CMO's top 10 martech stories for the week - 9 June

Read more

Great e-commerce article!

Vadim Frost

CMO’s State of CX Leadership 2022 report finds the CX striving to align to business outcomes

Read more

Are you searching something related to Lottery and Lottery App then Agnito Technologies can be a help for you Agnito comes out as a true ...

jackson13

The Lottery Office CEO details journey into next-gen cross-channel campaign orchestration

Read more

Thorough testing and quality assurance are required for a bug-free Lottery Platform. I'm looking forward to dependability.

Ella Hall

The Lottery Office CEO details journey into next-gen cross-channel campaign orchestration

Read more

Blog Posts

Marketing prowess versus the enigma of the metaverse

Flash back to the classic film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Television-obsessed Mike insists on becoming the first person to be ‘sent by Wonkavision’, dematerialising on one end, pixel by pixel, and materialising in another space. His cinematic dreams are realised thanks to rash decisions as he is shrunken down to fit the digital universe, followed by a trip to the taffy puller to return to normal size.

Liz Miller

VP, Constellation Research

Why Excellent Leadership Begins with Vertical Growth

Why is it there is no shortage of leadership development materials, yet outstanding leadership is so rare? Despite having access to so many leadership principles, tools, systems and processes, why is it so hard to develop and improve as a leader?

Michael Bunting

Author, leadership expert

More than money talks in sports sponsorship

As a nation united by sport, brands are beginning to learn money alone won’t talk without aligned values and action. If recent events with major leagues and their players have shown us anything, it’s the next generation of athletes are standing by what they believe in – and they won’t let their values be superseded by money.

Simone Waugh

Managing Director, Publicis Queensland

Sign in