Telstra’s AI powered insights platform

A connected future, where everyone can thrive: that’s Telstra’s ultimate goal. In Australia, Telstra is the largest telecommunications organization by market share. And in a world where working from home is likely here to stay, Telstra is seeing an increase in customer demand for quality connectivity.

Alex Mihalovich, Telstra’s Manager of CX Research, Analysis and Design, says Telstra’s insights team’s focus is to deliver the independent voice of the customer. The team’s mission is to push insights all the way up the value chain for customer-centric decisions and high return on insights. Dr. Violet Lazarevic, GM of Customer Insights adds, “We want strategic research to live on… and an intelligent platform lets us leverage research beyond a single point in time. We can create new insights and maximize the utility of each piece.”

The challenge: long-lost research collecting dust and losing value

When Telstra went agile in early 2019, the insights team needed to leverage insights faster to keep up. But with no centralized library, insights information was impossible to find because it was spread across different functions and servers and lost during a period of staff turnover.

The insights team found themselves wasting several hours a week pinging colleagues to find research, and they couldn’t keep up with stakeholder expectations. Meanwhile, Telstra’s multiple stakeholder groups acted independently with nothing to connect the dots between their siloed knowledge.

They tried SharePoint, but Alex says they quickly realized it didn’t solve their problems. It was too clunky. It didn’t use AI. And it was far too difficult to search. “We wanted to come up with a solution that allowed us to make information more accessible while preventing us from repeating research,” he says. All this culminated into an extensive search for the right solution, and Telstra eventually landed on Market Logic’s end-to-end insights platform.

The solution: The Insights Hut—an all-in-one insights platform with powerful AI capabilities

The Insights Hut puts Telstra’s $40 million knowledge asset at the fingertips of thousands of marketers, service designers and customer service and strategy professionals so they can find and use insights faster and make winning decisions. The platform offers every user a personalized experience, with AI-recommended content alongside expert-curated advice. Here are three solutions Alex highlights as key to the platform’s success:

AI-Powered search. Thanks to AI, the Insights Hut allows Telstra’s executives and decision-makers to easily search and find high-quality insights with a few clicks. What’s more, when a document is scanned into the platform, AI steps in to automatically produce a short summary, saving the team data entry time. With AI-recommended summaries and content alongside expert-curated advice, time-pressed executives can quickly search and grab key insights or data points to inform their decision making. “AI was a big factor for why we were attracted to the program,” Alex says.

Clear and easy expert channels. Targeted expert channels make it easy for stakeholders to find and use information related to their roles and needs. Telstra’s insights team curates the most relevant information for hot topics like 5G and COVID-19 so users have an easy way to find the best insights without having to sift through every related piece of information. Telstra designed the Insights Hut with different stakeholder audiences in mind and researched each group’s needs to deliver content specific to them. With channels, “it’s easier for stakeholders to find and use documents that relate specifically to them,” Alex says. Additionally, the insights group was relieved to find that, when it comes to the more sensitive information, they could selectively distribute reports and limit access to certain user groups.

User-friendly onboarding. The Insights Hut is intuitive and user friendly, making quick onboarding a breeze. “We found that when we did the training sessions, it wasn’t long before our users were comfortable uploading and searching documents and navigating their way through the environment to find and use what they need,” Alex says. In fact, champions in each user group are now leading their own discovery process and empowering colleagues in their sector to upload documents and use the platform to answer their questions. “The proof is in the pudding,” Alex says, “If people have a question, they go to the Insights Hut and they find a report. Then, guess what? The next time they have a question, they’re going to do that again.”

The Result: strategic research renewed and maximized

Telstra’s Insights Hut is proving its ROI as years-old reports find their value again on the platform. Alex points to a two-year-old report, originally bought to the tune of $100,000. Before the team added the report to the Hut, Alex says its market value was zero. Now, the report is being searched, read, and used by stakeholders.

“All of a sudden the value of that report re-emerged.” The platform is home to over 1,000 reports from the past five years, each searchable, connected, and ready to equip close to 300 of Telstra’s professionals so far with the knowledge they need to make winning decisions today. “We’ve found that users have become much more self-reliant,” Alex says, “They can find everything they’re looking for, which has been a huge advantage for the Telstra business, and maximizes the value of our complex, strategic research.”