How Proximus Gets Up to 3× More Customer Engagement
What we achieved
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ROI Boost by 3x
in call-center response rates
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Real-time Customer
activation with +600 Million interactions/year
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Scaling Loyalty & Personalization
with 70 Million personalized emails, +15 Million messages orchestrated
To who
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Industry Telecommunications
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Products: HCL Unica/HCL Unica+
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Region Europe
Overview
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Part 1
Challenge
Proximus was using disconnected MarTech tools for its campaigns, leaving inbound and outbound channels out of sync, slowing real-time responses and making customer journeys hard to scale.
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Part 2
Solution
HCL Unica helped Proximus Unify its MarTech platform for communication, real-time interactions, hyper-personalization, and GDPR compliance, without limiting customer experience and operational efficiency.
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Part 3
Results
With HCLSoftware’s unified marketing automation, Proximus now orchestrates hundreds of millions of interactions and personalized messages, fostering innovation and close collaboration between marketing, data, and CRM teams to drive 2–3× higher response rates, building trust with a privacy-focused, and customer-centric engagement approach.
The Challenge
Unifying Customer Experience at Scale
As Belgium's number one telecommunications operator, Proximus needed to connect with millions of customers in a way that felt personal and immediate. This required a unified MarTech solution to orchestrate both inbound and outbound communications, without limiting their ability to leverage real-time customer interactions.
With a fragmented MarTech platform, true hyper-personalization is difficult and prevents teams from moving beyond basic segmentation. Furthermore, protecting customer privacy and ensuring GDPR compliance at a massive scale would be a major challenge, creating a risk of sending inconsistent or irrelevant messages. Aligning the efforts of marketing, data operations, and CRM teams would’ve been a constant struggle, hindering their ability to deliver a seamless, customer-centric journey.
Why Millions Stay Loyal to Belgium’s #1 Telecom
After we engaged with HCL Unica, we're able to automate a lot of the activities and go with something more robust.
- Stephane Sloodts, Proximus
The Solution
A Unified, Hyper-personalized Marketing Engine
To overcome these challenges, Proximus partnered with HCL Unica, unified marketing automation platform. This transformation consolidated their efforts, enabling a single targeting logic across both inbound and outbound channels. With Unica, Proximus can leverage real-time decisioning to deliver relevant next-best offers during live customer interactions.
The automation significantly reduced time-consuming manual work, freeing teams to focus on strategy and innovation. Proximus unlocked true hyper-personalization, tailoring not just offers but the entire experience, including tone, imagery, and even background colors, focusing on individual personal, customer interests, such as cycling or football.
Central to this was a robust framework for managing customer consent and contact rules, ensuring GDPR compliance and customer trust were built into every journey, not treated as an afterthought. HCL Unica became more than a tool; it acted as a strategic partner, bringing marketing, data, and CRM teams together to continuously improve engagement and enhance the customer journey.
The real challenge is to be able to look at the customer from a CRM perspective... to put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Working with a firm technological partner enables you to constantly evolve to the next step, generate an idea, try to implement it, and then move on to the next idea. And that's really the strong focus we had.
-Stéphane Sloodts, Proximus
The Results
Measurable Impact and an Enhanced Customer Experience
The adoption of HCL Unica delivered significant, quantifiable results for Proximus, transforming its ability to drive customer engagement and loyalty at scale. The platform now powers over 600 million inbound interactions annually with real-time decisioning, while orchestrating more than 70 million emails and 16 million SMS messages through a unified strategy. This precision and scale led to a remarkable 2-3x increase in response rates within their call centers.
Beyond the numbers, automation dramatically accelerated campaign time-to-market. The customer experience improved through context-aware hyper-personalization, making each message feel unique and relevant. Robust contact rules eliminated inconsistent messaging, and a privacy-by-design approach strengthened customer trust while keeping every interaction GDPR-compliant. Proximus can now deliver a consistent, respectful, and highly effective customer journey across all touchpoints, solidifying its position as a market leader.
The real-time decision engine has really helped us increase the response rate by 2 to 3 times what we had in the past. In every call center it was really an explosion of success.
-Stephane Sloodts, Proximus
About the company
Proximus is Belgium’s leading telecommunications group offering fixed, mobile networks, TV, internet, digital services and enterprise ICT solutions to millions of customers. It is often used as a best-practice customer experience (CX) reference for its ability to operate at national scale while delivering highly personalized, data-driven customer journeys. By combining rich customer data, advanced analytics, and marketing automation, Proximus consistently demonstrates how large organizations can shift from product-centric communications to truly customer-centric engagement across channels.
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