One New Zealand, one of the country's largest communications and connectivity providers, has partnered with global AI CRM platform, Salesforce, to enhance its customer marketing interactions.

This initiative aims to simplify and transform marketing strategies for nearly three million connections including consumers, businesses, government, and wholesale customers across Aotearoa New Zealand.

In the wake of One New Zealand's rebranding from Vodafone in 2022, the company has focused on simplification and customer experience. This includes a commitment to consolidate its four marketing engagement platforms into a single system. The firm had previously acquired four diverse marketing automation systems as part of its expansion strategy.

Summer Collins, One New Zealand’s Chief AI and Data Director, emphasised the company's need for a more streamlined customer interaction system. "Growing and bringing together different businesses was excellent for the company, making us a leading internet and mobile provider in the country. However, it also meant that we acquired several different data stacks, marketing systems and deployment tools from those businesses," said Collins.

This complexity not only made it challenging to provide personalised customer experiences, but it also meant that employees had to be trained in different tools. "Salesforce allows us to build for the future, enrich our view of the customer from a personalised marketing, privacy, and customer service perspective," explained Collins.

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud was chosen for the project. It will orchestrate and improve end-to-end customer journeys across all touch points, personalise product and content recommendations through AI, test out 'Bring Your Own Lake' (BYOL) capabilities with Snowflake and simplify data management.

Since the agreement was finalised in late October, One New Zealand has begun decommissioning its other tools, migrating data, and centralising its customer engagement processes for a more efficient approach. This centralisation will enable One New Zealand to efficiently apply customer rules, maintain compliance with privacy requests, and categorise users by plan, services, and preferences, ensuring that customers receive content relevant to them.

Hamish Miles, Salesforce's NZ Managing Director, expressed his company's support for this initiative. "Streamlining One New Zealand's marketing technology systems is going to have profound efficiency and productivity benefits for the organisation, and deliver trusted, relevant communications to its over two million users," said Miles.

Moreover, potential applications for generative artificial intelligence (AI) have also been acknowledged by One New Zealand. Collins mentioned, "We are already using AI successfully across our business and have built AI frameworks to help us harness its power and potential securely and meaningfully. Salesforce's Marketing Cloud AI tools, with its strong focus on ethics and safety, will offer us the foundation to bring AI benefits to our customers in the future."