Transforming customer success management for a SMB digital services leader

When companies armed with hyper-scale technologies set big growth targets, middle and back offices often hamper expansion, leaving customers disappointed.

This leading global internet company adopted a human-centered design-thinking approach combined with analytics, technology, and process design to address these challenges and make big gains in customer loyalty, revenue, and market share.

This enterprise initially enjoyed exponential growth, reaching four times the size of its largest competitor within three years of launching in the US.

But it struggled to grow at the same pace in emerging markets. The customer experience was far from ideal, with the typical customer journey punctuated by multiple friction points that required considerable time and effort to navigate the purchase, service, billing, renewals, and refunds processes.

Customers didn't receive targeted sales strategies either. There were no product recommendations for website visitors, reactive customer service and crisis management, billing issues, and delays in refunds. Customer engagement wasn't sustained through social media or proactive alerts and support. As a result, the company wasn't maximizing the lifetime value of each customer relationship.

To improve the customer experience, Genpact helped establish a customer success and renewals operation to support technical issues, manage end-user queries, and consult on product purchases.

This foundation of industrialized operations harnessed the data-to-insight-to-action loop (figure 1), using meaningful data to extract relevant insights at scale.

We started by identifying target outcomes such as increased revenue growth, improved customer satisfaction, and reduced costs. Next, we selected target metrics, such as call volumes per day, conversion rates, average order size, and outbound revenue per day, to measure progress toward the target outcomes.

The company used insights from the metrics data to create models for NPS improvement, revenue improvement, call and revenue forecasting, and capacity planning. This included:

• ML-driven bots analyzing complex data (~40 parameters relating to calls and chat) to make recommendations to improve performance
• A personalized ML-based prediction model that identifies dissatisfied customers and detractors on 100% of calls to improve the customer experience
• A call forecasting model to map call volumes to factors such as marketing campaigns, new product launches, and seasonality
• A revenue forecast model to estimate conversion rates
• Capacity planning modeling-aligned customer support with demand

Finally, we implemented a centralized tracking system to track callbacks and resolution, enabling the client to monitor this component of call conversions.

Additionally, a smart-scheduling system helped align the right skills within teams and links top-performing teams with the prime shifts or peak loads.

The result is an intelligent operating model in which business processes could now sense the environment, act appropriately, and continuously learn from the effectiveness of those actions at scale.

We adopted Genpact's Lean Digital^SM approach – a practical and effective way to achieve bold outcomes. It amplifies the power of digital technologies and analytics using Lean and design-thinking principles.

A cross-functional team of company leaders and members of sales, marketing, and operations took part in a design-thinking workshop with Genpact's training, human resources, digital, and customer success analytics experts. This revealed what customers – as well as stakeholders within the organization – valued. It also helped prioritize actionable ideas, enabling rapid prototyping and iterative testing of digital solutions.

Multiple ongoing projects have now jointly implemented across the client's operations. Rapid prototyping and an agile implementation approach have helped accelerate the acceptance, deployment, and impact of key solutions:

• Effective cross-selling and upselling of higher-value products, using technologies such as NLP, predictive analytics, and dynamic workflows to identify which customers are likely to buy additional products or services, the best channel to use, and which customer success manager should contact the customer
• Campaign effectiveness by combining structured and unstructured data, such as engagement data (online behavior, contact reason, and so on) and historical data (customer history, preferences, segment, and so on)
• Sophisticated analytical techniques such as customer response models, customer profitability models, customer churn models, reactivation models, and customer lifetime value models are then applied to optimize channel mix, communications, offers, and targeting strategies
• Renewals-as-a-service using multivariate analysis to optimize the offers, pricing, or customer segment targeting to maximize renewals
• A crisis response mechanism that proactively monitors multiple channels (social media, surveys, and calls) to capture customer concerns and applies automated workflows to triage by severity/risk and assign to resolver groups
• Geography-specific social media platforms monitoring for a faster, more effective, and tailored response to alerts and positive/negative comments and a 360° view of customers

Our combination of analytics and technology, supported by a feedback loop for continuous learning and improvement, have helped the client target customers more effectively and use resources more efficiently, resulting in significantly higher conversion rates.

• Conversion rates improved from 17% to 25%
• Outbound per-day revenue has shot up by roughly 30%
• Effective consulting has increased the average order size by over 15%
• The client is realizing 20% more revenue from these operations compared to just a year ago with reimagined processes

The robust operating model and enhanced visibility into the customer base have laid the foundation for the next quantum leap to generate significantly higher revenue growth and increase the NPS by 10%.