Unica support from Purple Square frees Three Ireland to focus on its business

A business-critical system  

Three Ireland uses Unica marketing automation software for controlling communications to customers and targeting them with specific messaging. These communications may be aimed at retaining customers with a view to upgrading them eventually; proactively supporting them through service issues to avoid their having to call Three for support; or promoting associated products, such as accessories, mobile phone insurance and Three’s own prepaid credit card.

From the company’s Dublin head office, Head of Customer Value Management Declan Boyle outlines the importance of the Unica system to the business and how its use has developed over time, “Unica is critical to so much that we do in our business. It simply has to work. It’s expanded from originally being a customer retention system to becoming more service-oriented, as well as a means of selling on to our customer base.”

The natural choice

Three Ireland’s version of the system had reached end-of-life for vendor support. While an eventual migration to a newer version of Unica or an alternative system is on the cards, in the meantime the business could not risk letting things slide in the quality of system support.

However, in looking to recruit skilled resource to support its version of Unica, it encountered a major difficulty. Declan explains the challenge, “We couldn’t neglect a system that was so critical to our business but, try as we might, we couldn’t find anyone in Ireland with the right experience in such a niche area. At the same time, our provider of first-line support didn’t have the specialist product knowledge to assist us in resolving technical issues.”

Fortunately, Three Ireland had worked with Purple Square for a number of years and had experienced its expertise in both supporting Unica and providing training for employees on its effective use. Members of the Purple Square team had also previously worked on-site alongside Declan’s own team at times of resource shortages. This made contracting Purple Square to provide support on Unica a straightforward decision.

Declan says, “We require support from people who really understand the system inside out, who can cope with its complexity. I’d personally worked with Purple Square for over three years. They were a known quantity and I had every confidence in their ability to deliver what we needed. Once it became obvious that we wouldn’t be able to recruit support for Unica in-house, it was an easy decision to make. Purple Square was the natural choice.”

“Unica is critical to so much that we do in our business. It simply has to work.”

Free to focus on the day job

Purple Square has now been supporting Three Ireland’s Unica system and Acoustic Campaign digital marketing platform since July 2019.

In addition to covering day-to-day user support on application issues, the contract includes a number of consulting days whereby Purple Square is able to work more strategically with Three Ireland to optimise its use of the software.

Purple Square approaches delivering support with the aim of tackling common problems and improving the user experience. Declan’s expectations of excellent service are being met. “We call on Purple Square with regularity. With their in-depth expertise, they help us to understand the root cause of the issue. We find that they diagnose and resolve problems quickly.”

The impact of being able to entrust support to Purple Square is evident to Declan and his team, “We were spending too much time trying to fix the system, when really we didn’t have the right skills. Purple Square frees us to focus on our day jobs. I’m very happy with their service.”

“We were spending too much time trying to fix the system when really we didn’t have the right skills. Purple Square frees us to focus on our day jobs.”

Declan Boyle, Head of Customer Value Management, Three Ireland