How Philips Innovates Digital Marketing Strategies with Celonis Process Mining

Philips is a leading health-tech company with the ambition to touch billions of lives with its products, solutions, and services. Originally known for its wide range of electronic devices, covering TVs, computers, mobile phones, and kitchen appliances as well as lighting, the company is focusing more and more on health technologies. Today, Philips offers B2B professional health systems such as hospital equipment as well as B2C products for personal care such as electric toothbrushes and shavers, all presented and sold in its online shops. Philips’ online offerings are a sign of its spirit of innovation that not only reflects in its new product range but also in the company itself, being on a big wave of digital transformation.

To get insights into the visitor’s web journey on its company websites and online shops, Philips has always used best-in-class digital analytics solutions. Besides other tools, web analytics has been what Philips mainly relied on to study online performance. It provides Philips with very detailed data on everything happening on the Philips websites. And yet, the company was searching for an additional solution, which was able to show a customer journey-oriented view on this data and perfectly complement the existing analytics solution. The objective that Philips pursued by adding a new data analytics solution was clear: The company intended to fully understand customer behavior, continuously adapt its marketing strategies to the wishes of the customer, improve the self-service experience of the users on the websites, and finally boost web orders by improving lead conversion. Philips wished for a solution that opens up new views on the customers’ behaviors and allows easy interpretation of what is actually happening. To be able to compare the effectiveness of customer journeys and to proactively identify new improvements. Philips’ search is driven by its internal marketing strategy: “Becoming a customer-obsessed, data-fueled winner in the global landscape.”

Philips chose Celonis Process Mining, a big data technology that allows looking at customer journeys as a sequence of business events. It provides a more holistic view than a web analytics system typically does, helping to understand the patterns of customer behavior on Philips’ online shops from a high level back into great detail. “Process Mining is a very unique analysis method,” says Gerwin Hendriks, Digital Analyst at Philips. “It automatically generates visualizations of the data you have, so you do not have to configure data into a report to look at something specific – which you would typically do in a dashboarding tool.” What fascinated Philips about Celonis Process Mining from the very beginning is its process orientation. Like most of the large companies in the world, Philips aims to get a grip on the customer journey. “The customer journey on the Philips website creates such an overwhelming amount of information that it can be difficult to keep the overview and pinpoint specific issues or opportunities. The visualization of the customer journey makes it easy to interpret and communicates a story with key actionable insights for our marketers,” says Paul Poels, Global Head of Digital Analytics and Marketing Effectiveness at Philips. With the support of Celonis, Philips has an overview of all the business sequence events that a single customer experiences. “Web analytics solutions can do some of this but not as easily, focused, and complete as Process Mining.” In order to best benefit from the strengths each data analytics solution provides, Philips uses both Celonis Process Mining and a Web analytics platform. While Web Analytics technology provides a Business Intelligence solution that offers insights through Performance KPIs, Celonis helps to understand why the KPIs would highlight underperformance and also provides hypotheses for effective change. More than Web Analytics, it is possible to quickly understand what happens to customers and why – hypotheses do not need to be predefined so much. “Web analytics, and its extensive drill-down analysis capabilities, is ideal for many use cases: If you already have an analysis question in mind, you can look up and compare specific performance numbers. To answer a hypothesis you have defined upfront,” says Gerwin Hendriks. “With Celonis Process Mining, we add a unique and complementing way of looking at data. The way Celonis shows the data is closely linked to our business goal of realizing the best possible customer journey.”

• By using Celonis Process Mining, Philips can keep track of what potential customers do online and adapt accordingly. Philips knows which way its customers prefer to go, can shift marketing budget where necessary, maximize persuasion, and get consumers to eventually make a purchase.
• The enhancement of the customer journey with the support of Celonis Process Mining is not only made for marketing purposes at Philips but also to drive efficiency within the company itself. By providing customers with user-friendly and effective user interfaces, Philips can reduce the likelihood that customers contact Philips on technical matters – the aim here is to maximize the number of consumers that use troubleshooting instead of directly contacting support.
• Philips’ objective is to train more and more data analysts of different departments besides the global and local marketing analysts who are already successfully using the Celonis software. In order to guarantee the best possible training effect, employees at Philips are trained personally in groups of 1-2 persons.
• The use of Process Mining at Philips is new and unfamiliar – even for senior data analysts. Process mining as a method of analysis is still quite unknown and an innovation in the field of digital marketing. Plus analyzing external and customer-focused processes is quite unique for a process mining solution to be used for. It introduces unique demands for the technology in terms of data volume, variation, and decision-making scenarios.

• Philips completed the implementation process in September 2017 and after a couple of weeks was able to already rank around 40 employees among its users.