emagine
Before digital customer experience was commonplace, we pioneered a revolutionary telecom solution that transformed customer engagement in 1996. emagine provided Teligent's business clients with real-time call data and converted missed calls into revenue opportunities—driving users to spend up to 16 times more than non-users.
Background & Context
In 1996, the telecommunications industry was experiencing a revolution. Government deregulation had opened the door for new players to challenge established giants, creating a competitive landscape filled with opportunity. Teligent emerged as a promising start-up with exclusive licenses to provide wireless communication services—voice, video, and data—to small and medium-sized businesses across the US and 12 other countries. But in this crowded marketplace, standing out required more than just reliable service; it demanded innovation that would truly transform the customer experience.
Drawing from the experience launching the first GSM operators in Europe and overseeing Omnipoint (now T-Mobile) in the US, we recognized that creating a customer experience portal beyond basic service and billing could become Teligent's competitive edge. The web was still in its infancy—commercial browsers had only emerged three years earlier—but its potential to change how businesses interacted with their service providers was enormous. With approval from Alex Mandl, former CEO of AT&T and then Chairman of Teligent, the emagine project was born.
Impact
The numbers tell a compelling story about emagine's influence on customer behavior and revenue. Customers who accessed the portal spent 2.9 times more with Teligent than non-users on a monthly basis. Even more remarkable was how this value multiplied with engagement:
Customers accessing emagine just 1-4 times monthly spent 2.8 times more
Those checking 5-9 times monthly invested 3.9 times more
Users engaging 10-19 times monthly spent 5.1 times more
Power users visiting 20-50 times monthly generated an astonishing 16.2 times more revenue
What made these figures particularly meaningful was that the demographic profile between users and non-users remained virtually identical—proving that the tool itself, not customer differences, drove this dramatic spending increase.
Client: Teligent | Year: 1996 | Services: Concept, Prototyping, Customer Trials, Development, Deployment