Integrated B2B marketing agency Thinksmart Marketing (TSM) has managed to execute a campaign from 3,000ft up in a hot air balloon.

NICE inContact, approached TSM earlier this year to build preference, drive demand and generate strong leads for the brand across ANZ, with a campaign focusing on showcasing the capabilities and agility of its global-leading CXone cloud contact centre software.

The brief was to bring to life how CXone empowers contact centre agents to be there for their customers and to deliver consistent customer experiences, from anywhere.

TSM built the campaign around a product demonstration in the form of a challenge – asking if by using CXone could a contact centre agent really work from anywhere? Voters were asked to decide on a remote Australian location, where an agent would be sent to set up their remote office.

TSM executed a multi-platform digital campaign to drive votes and out of three options: A boat on The Great Barrier Reef, a hot air balloon over Canberra and a cable car above the Blue Mountains, with the hot air balloon coming out as the clear winner.

As dawn broke over Canberra on a clear morning in November, TSM sent an agent from NICE inContact customer, Toyo Tires, up in the balloon, headset and tablet in tow, proving a call centre can be run from anywhere, using CXone.

Consisting of a full comms launch executed by TSM, the campaign took on two parts across owned, earned and paid media, including native content, paid search and display, paid social, eDMs, partner content, and PR. With the first to drive votes and interest in the ‘Be there from anywhere’ challenge and the second part of the campaign using content from the hot air balloon challenge, to drive conversions for NICE inContact’s free 60 day trial of the CXone platform.

“We firmly believe that B2B marketing is ripe for disruption and creativity through smarter thinking, so when we presented an opportunity to, not just talk about the platform, but demonstrate it in an arresting way, the NICE inContact team really rallied behind the idea and helped bring it to life.” said TSM creative director Adrian McNamara.

Covid-19 has highlighted the need for organisations to be agile and maintain high levels of customer experience during any event. For many running on-premise contact centre solutions (rather than cloud solutions), Covid-19 exposed gaps in their critical operations, suffering customer service breakdowns as they struggled to shift their contact centre staff to remote work seamlessly.

TSM saw the opportunity for NICE to join in the conversation and provide a solution. Partnering with the NICE inContact ANZ marketing team, they decided to put their value proposition delivering exceptional customer experience from anywhere to the ultimate test, developing the ‘Be there from anywhere’ campaign.

Toyo Tires strategic marketing & PR manager José Angeles said: “Mobility is central to the Toyo Tires brand in both our tyres and in the way we do business, making participation in this challenge with NICE inContact a perfect fit.”