Windstream: Building the Website Around the Customer Experience

customer story:

Building the WeBsite Around the Customer experienCe

a publication from

About WindstreAm CommuniCAtionsWindstream Communications, a leading telecommunications firm,

keeps rural residential consumers in the U.S. connected via phone,

broadband, and digital television services. The S&P 500 company also

provides cloud computing and managed services to businesses and

government agencies.

Since 2006, the Little Rock, Arkansas company’s residential unit has

grown on the strength of its High-Speed Internet offering and bundled

services.

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The Monetate Success Team sat down with Ryan Dahlstrom, Staff Manager, Interactive Marketing at Windstream Communications, to talk about how the company uses Monetate.

How did Windstream initially use Monetate to improve the online customer experience?

We started out using Monetate for A/B and multivariate testing,

mainly around our quarterly offers and promotions. The only logic we

had on our website before our recent replatforming was geographic

targeting via an IP sniff that drove our promotions and pricing. We

used Monetate on top of that to identify new and existing customers,

serving promotions to prospects while hiding these same offers from

customers.

Monetate basically was the default messaging medium on our website

before we rebuilt it. We previously had no flexibility or intelligence on

the backend to serve content in different ways.

What role did Monetate play in your replatforming initiative?

We worked closely with our Client Success Director at Monetate, who

attended some of our strategy sessions on-site and helped guide us in

terms of what content Monetate could deliver to better optimize the

website experience. That information gave us the direction needed to

develop the new website in a way that maximizes our ability to be more

strategic in our messaging.

We now have parts of the website that we consider “Monetate sections,”

which are 100% dynamic and driven entirely by the optimization logic

built into the Monetate platform. I’m excited about that, as it’s far and

above anything that we could have imagined doing before.

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How are you leveraging Monetate on the new website?

We view Monetate as a customer experience management tool. To that

end, we plan to use Monetate to enhance the overall experience of any

given user on our site based upon the information that we know about

them by serving up relevant products and/or promotions, or directing

them to browse content that is directly relevant to them.

In order to get to relevancy, we layer geolocation with type of customer,

and (if applicable) what products a customer has purchased. Together,

these pieces of information inform which product messaging or

promotions, if any, a website visitor is eligible for. We’re continuing to

use Monetate to test what combination of products and messaging

works best for conversion and ROI.

We’ll also be using Monetate to test different aspects of the site layout.

From button placement and color to headline verbiage and placement,

we have a lot of areas to test. Given that it’s a brand new website, we

essentially have a clean slate on which to test. I’m excited about that.

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Now, where it gets really cool is with current customers on the site. We

now know, based on the backend logic, more about each customer

who visits the website. We are able to use Monetate in order to serve

relevant promotional messaging based upon this information.

For example, if a current customer is already maxed out in terms of their

product set, we serve one set of messaging. If they’re not maxed out

and have the eligibility to upgrade, we dynamically change the content

to take advantage of this opportunity.

We’re now able to find out what is most important to our customer base

online. Is it upsells that generate new revenue streams? Or is it support

and providing them with the right information at the right time and

in the right place? Finding out the answers to these questions around

new customer acquisition and retention will be huge for our business.

I love how Monetate gives us the ability to make down-and-dirty quick changes to the website.- Ryan Dahlstrom, Staff Manager, Interactive Marketing, Windstream

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Any favorite campaigns?

Rather than a favorite, I can point to the campaign where we hid

information in the cart as an example of when the results really

surprised us. We used Monetate to find out how our cart page would

perform when customers could no longer see the cart subtotal or the

functionality that allowed them to change their specified geographic

location. It turned out that hiding the change location function worked

well, but hiding them both worked even better. That generated a 7.1%

lift in conversion for us.

More importantly, we learned from this campaign that it’s not necessarily

what you show on your website that can be powerful, but what you

don’t show. This insight helped shape how we built the new website.

Actually, my favorite campaigns are those still to come. I’m stoked

about what the new website is able to do, and how we are planning to

use Monetate going to forward to power the intelligence and drive the

messaging. There’s really cool stuff to come! Hiding the cart subtotal and change location functionality on the cart page streamlined the checkout experience for customers.

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What do you like most about Monetate?

Just having our Client Success team, especially our Client Success

Director, involved in those early strategy discussions about the new

website was priceless.

On top of that, from an organizational standpoint, the online space is

becoming much more important to Windstream as we progress in our

corporate lifecycle. Being able to get the website as robust and smart

as possible is key to our continued success. Having Monetate in place

to help us maximize our opportunities, whether around targeting the

right visitor at the right time or gaining insight into what works best at

any point in time, is a major part of that plan.

From a practical aspect, I love how Monetate gives us the ability to

make down-and-dirty quick changes to the website—like throwing up

some new terms and conditions that legal passes our way until we can

get that content changed concretely. That’s pretty powerful.

I’m stoked about what the new website is able to do, and how we are planning to use Monetate going to forward to power the intelligence and drive the messaging. There’s really cool stuff to come!- Ryan Dahlstrom, Staff Manager, Interactive Marketing, Windstream

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