2degrees Delivers the Right Message to the Right Person at the Right Time With Help From the AI Data Cloud

2degrees is a full service telecommunications company, infrastructure owner and an energy retailer. The combined business is around 1,600 employees, 2 million customers. We're the fastest growing telco in New Zealand. We've got a real ethos around challenging the market, and that's our DNA that we live and breathe every day. Telecommunications has never been more vital to how we work, live. So we have a really strong responsibility in what we do in the New Zealand market. I think when we first adopted Snowflake, in early 2022, we're very focused on analytics and democratizing data, but it's turned into a wider data platform for us, which has allowed us in particular for our mergers and acquisitions to move really fast. In 2022, we had a significant merger where 2degrees and Vocus came together.

The merger presented us with a huge opportunity from a data perspective. Overnight, we had three billing platforms. We had two finance ERPs, two data warehouses and two completely separate data teams. 

So the primary reason we chose Snowflake was because it's a data platform that's been built specifically for the cloud. Previously, with a NICE platform, we spent three months loading that data into our warehouse before it quickly blended with all of our other data sets. With Snowflake, it was as simple as asking NICE, Can you turn on Data Shield? Instantaneously, we had access to all of our customer-interaction data, and that includes historical data, and it would show up in our warehouse within probably 15 minutes of the event happening.

That's three months worth of work we didn't have to do. It was a seriously big win for us.

Before Snowflake, we had a lag in terms of data that was available, so we were having to wait at least 24 hours before we could actually access the data as a marketing team. We didn't have a common understanding across brands of what products and services our customers had.

So unifying our data onto Snowflake has allowed us to experiment with generative AI really easily. Aligning to our data strategy has meant that we can experiment quickly and provide real value through data-driven marketing, through understanding our customer interactions in the call center. We've probably got the richest data we've ever had, and the ability to analyze that data has never been easier.

One of our pillars is actually around singular scale, like unifying experiences and that's kind of layered down from customer experience, your platforms that support that, your data underneath that, your infrastructure, and Snowflake has been essential in doing that easily, seamlessly.

With the single customer view that we now have using Snowflake, we have a much richer understanding of products customers have across brands, and we're really using that to inform our marketing campaigns and how we can go out to customers with the right message at the right time.

Snowflake has been a standout for me, and it's an example I use whenever I meet other CIOs. Like, this is how it should be. This is how all SaaS should be.