Redefining customer experiences through empathy at scale

**Summary

From personalisation at scale to empathy at scale

For YouSee, Denmark's largest telecommunications and entertainment provider, serving close to 50% of households, the goal was not to move faster than the competition. It was to break the pattern entirely. With Adobe Experience Platform at the core, YouSee reimagined what it means to know its customers, not through demographics and discounts, but through real-time understanding. Not as subscribers, but as individuals. This marked a shift from personalisation at scale to empathy at scale, moving beyond we know you to we understand you, and laying the foundation for how telcos can connect human needs with digital intelligence.

I can finally talk to customers like a real person. It's not just product-pushing anymore, I can suggest what truly fits, whether it's an upgrade, a downgrade or just a service message. And customers are genuinely happy, which makes my job so much easier.

/q YouSee Customer Service Agent
Customer Service, YouSee

**Background

As loyalty vanished, the race began

In Denmark's hyper-competitive telecommunications market, probably the most competitive in the world, loyalty is short-lived and choice is abundant. With nearly a third of customers switching providers each year, the industry runs on churn, where attention is hard-won and easily lost. In theory, success should be simple: the right offer at the right price. In reality, it is a relentless race in a market that never stands still.

But YouSee started far from where it is today

Like most telcos, YouSee was trapped in legacy complexity, fragmented data, scattered channels, and siloed teams that made personalisation nearly impossible. Customer journeys were disconnected, data was disjointed, and teams were divided. With no unified data foundation, there was no single customer view, leaving frontline staff in stores and call centers to fill the gaps between disconnected experiences. Marketing spend was tied up in analogue channels, not optimised for digital engagement.

**Strategy

Not just a digital transformation, a data revolution

YouSee's ambition was not to optimise the old way of doing things, but to build a new, experience-led foundation powered by Adobe. Every step was guided by a single principle: empathy at scale, using real-time data to make every interaction meaningful, measurable, and human. The strategy was grounded in quantitative behavioural insights from YouSee's own channels and qualitative studies on moments of friction across digital journeys, customer service call centers and retail stores.

The strategic ambition was clear

To set a new benchmark for customer experience in telco by modernising a fragmented landscape into a unified, Adobe-powered foundation, built on three pillars:

1. Build the foundation of the future (AEP, RT-CDP, CJA), enabling real-time data activation and omnichannel insights while reducing cost of ownership and simplifying the architecture.
2. Deliver empathy at scale (AJO, RT-CDP), through customer-led journey orchestration and next-best-experiences to enable key digital conversions around cross-sell, up-sell and self-service, as well as preventing churn.
3. Empower people through insights (CJA, Target), designing with emotion and context, and adopting an experimental mindset across teams, transforming culture as much as technology.

**Solution

Built for the future instead of patching the past

YouSee did not just modernise its ecosystem, it rebuilt it from the ground up. Designed entirely on Adobe Experience Platform, the new architecture is not an iteration but a reinvention. A scalable foundation, the first of its kind in Danish telco, built to pivot what is possible for customer experience. The solution consists of three parts.

01 - A connected 360-view data foundation

A unified first-party data foundation on Adobe Experience Platform and Real-Time CDP creates a single, trusted 360-degree customer view across online behaviour, products and services, and offline interactions. It enables sophisticated AI-driven segmentation, predictive insights and omnichannel activation to power one-to-one communication with 4.2 million unique profiles and more than 1.2 million customers, with a continuous insight loop via Customer Journey Analytics.

02 - Personalised, dynamic, always-on journeys

YouSee moved from isolated, one-size-fits-all email campaigns to more than 10 always-on personalised journeys through Journey Optimizer, seamlessly connecting digital and physical touchpoints. Consistency now spans more than 25 digital and physical placements, with Next-Best-Offers targeted through Decisioning. Frontline agents are supported with live Next-Best-Experience prompts in their systems, uniting sales, service and marketing into one conversation.

03 - Unified data and decisioning, creativity and analytics as one

Every Action, Offer and Experience delivered by Decisioning is designed with emotional resonance, so experiences do not only convert, they connect. Digital, CX and Design teams have adopted an experimentation mindset, and through continuous A/B testing in Adobe Target and AJO, creative elements are refined based on data and response patterns. Analogue channels have been minimised as digital content now leads the customer experience.

Proof of concept: Mobile Plans Up(grade)

What was once a one-off, email-only campaign process driven by commercial timing is now a fully customer-led, adaptive journey. Built on AEP and AJO, it uses predictive intelligence, decisioning, and real-time triggers to serve context-based offers across more than 10 placements, connecting digital, human, and physical experiences in one continuous and consistent flow. Every journey step is closely tracked through integrated reporting in CJA, and actionable insights are shared across teams.

**Results

When we orchestrated journeys around empathy, customers responded

These are not campaign KPIs, they are tangible results powered by an Adobe Experience Platform foundation built for real-time decisioning. YouSee achieved a +75% uplift in upgrade conversions and +9.3% upgrades without permission, driven by personalised in-store service and call-center prompts. Empathy paid off across the business: a +25% increase in ARPU, a -53% reduction in churn (from 30% to 14% for the largest audience), and a +330% increase in online self-service migrations (from 15% to 64%), reducing cost by 70 DKK per interaction.

The same mindset drove a -97% reduction in analogue marketing spend (from 35% to 1% since 2022) and a +1054% uplift in bNPS. And YouSee did not just transform marketing, it rewired the entire organisation around empathy at scale: go-to-market processes were reduced by more than 1000 hours (99%), cutting campaign development and launch from six weeks to six hours.

We didn't patch the past, we engineered the future. Our Adobe foundation proves that real-time empathy can scale seamlessly across every channel. Now we're pushing even further, integrating conversational AI and predictive intelligence to elevate and redefine customer experience and impact.

/q Lasse Schmidt
Digital Transformation Director, Brand & Marketing, YouSee