USING AI TO HYPER-PERSONALIZE EXPERIENCES ON THE DATA CLOUD

Spark New Zealand is New Zealand's largest telco and digital services provider. We're known globally to be innovative. So we were the first telco to flip to Agile several years ago, and we've also been leading out in the application of AI and data capability to improve our operations as a telco. 

I'm Matt Bain, Data and Marketing Director at Spark New Zealand. 

I'm Kallol Dutta. I am the group lead for data and automation in Spark New Zealand.

Our purpose is to help all of New Zealand win big in a digital world. So a lot of what we do is about how we serve our customers better, how we serve New Zealand better. We offer services to a large proportion of the country. So what we do makes a real difference here in New Zealand.

Brand and customer experience is extremely important. So anything we can do to take friction out of customer experiences, target customers better, makes a huge impact on our business.

We were one of the early adopters of Snowflake in the region. We use Snowflake as a way to unify our data capabilities together in a cloud-based, future-facing capability.

We also enable Snowflake to essentially solve all the customer problems, and that has really helped us to accelerate our migration from legacy into future.

When we think about Spark and Snowflake's journey so far, it's really just the beginning. So we’ve started with marketing—and we think about a digital twin of the marketing environment—but the infrastructure we've built is now allowing us to roll that capability across the entire organization, whether it's our workforce, whether it's our supply chain. So applying the same capability and methodology to bringing AI and machine learning to those environments.

There was a decision to invest in data and AI to improve and change the customer experience. And that's where Brain came in. Brain is a full form of building robust AI for next best action. It is an AI-based decisioning capability to find the right message for the right customer at the right time. It is a cloud platform built on Snowflake, and it has four major components: an attribution engine; machine learning models; a way to bring all the customer data together. And that can be really transformative to generate more efficiency but also opportunities for growth.

Now that we're using both batch and real time data and have access through Snowflake to that in real time and can manipulate that data, we can now with precision predict who's in market at any given point in time, and what they’re in market for. And without that flexibility on how we access and use the data that Snowflake provides, that wouldn't be possible. And that's made a huge impact on our returns. So up to twenty times improvement in performance of campaigns.

We have a lot of suppliers, but not all of them are partners. And Snowflake is one of those suppliers who actually partner with us. So we've from the very beginning felt the collaboration, the support, and the ability to get stuck in together to get the right outcome. None of the innovation or business benefit that we've achieved would have been possible without the right infrastructure to start with. Having a world class capability, partners like Snowflake that you can rely on to keep you ahead of the curve is why we really value the relationship.