Business Challenge

Our client, a major wireless telecommunications provider, was faced with numerous strategic threats and opportunities:

1. Stagnant Growth: Wireless competitors were growing their customer base at a much faster pace and threatened to take an increasing percent of the market share.

2. Market Saturation: The market for wireless telecommunication products and services was highly saturated. As a result, major wireless telecom competitors fought over the same customer base.

3. Consumer Loyalty: The wireless consumer base was not highly loyal to their service provider, representing a potential risk for churn.

4. Customer Service Leadership: Our client had differentiated itself in the marketplace as a leader in customer service. As a result, their churn rates were among the lowest in the industry. Key competitors, however, had made strides in customer service and were closing the competitive gap.

5. CRM and Technology Follower: While our client was a leader in customer service, they delivered service without sophisticated automation or CRM capabilities. Other competitors had an advantage with more current data warehousing, customer analytics, and overall CRM capabilities.

The company’s brand promise was to deliver differentiated customer service, but deficiencies in key capabilities and an aging information systems infrastructure threatened to create a significant brand gap and loss of competitive position. Our client needed a strategy to build on its customer service differentiation strategy.

How Andrew Reise Helped

Andrew Reise was engaged to develop and implement a comprehensive customer experience strategy to respond to key strategic threats and opportunities. Andrew Reise’s engagement included the entire program lifecycle, from initial strategy development through implementation of the strategic roadmap.

Phase 1: Creating the Customer Experience Strategy

Andrew Reise worked with the company to assemble a dedicated team of functional leaders across the enterprise including representatives from Sales and Marketing, Information Systems, Finance, Operations, and Customer Service. By establishing a dedicated team, Andrew Reise consultants were able to effectively facilitate dozens of work sessions to develop a customer experience strategy based on an analysis of consumer, market, competitive, brand promise, and existing CRM capability factors:

1. Value Focus: A compelling mission and vision statement was established to focus on delivering lasting value to the company in the areas of expanding the breadth, depth, and duration of the customer relationship. The result created a clear call to action for all stakeholders at the outset of the program.

2. Customer Needs Assessment: Andrew Reise researched customer insights based on our proprietary customer needs network, collecting and analyzing customer feedback, and incorporating established customer segment profiles and personas. The results provided critical insights into the company’s existing and target customer base in terms of needs and wants.

3. Competitive Assessment: An assessment of the company’s market and competitive environment was conducted to identify key threats and opportunities. The result provided key insights into competitive threats and opportunities that served as an input to the business case and overall strategy.

4. Customer Lifecycle Mapping (current state): An end-to-end customer experience lifecycle process was developed to provide a process-centric view using the customer’s perspective. Internal company processes and capabilities were mapped to the customer experience lifecycle process to analyze the current state issues and opportunities. The result was the creation of an enterprise-wide customer experience lifecycle model for all enterprise programs going forward.

5. Capability Assessment: Andrew Reise conducted an assessment of the company’s individual capabilities using Andrew Reise’s proprietary Capability Maturity Model. The maturity level for each capability area was assessed on a 1–5 scale to determine the strengths and weaknesses of key capabilities. The result was a quantifiable assessment of individual capabilities that served as a baseline and benchmark for the specific goals and objectives of the customer experience strategy.

6. PAID Diagramming: Andrew Reise facilitators utilized a proprietary transformation tool called PAID diagramming (Process, Application, Integration, Data) to further map the customer experience lifecycle to underlying business processes, application systems, interfaces, and data sources to identify more tactical and specific issues and opportunities within the business architecture. The result provided insights into specific realworld issues and opportunities that provided a key input into the development of a realistic and achievable customer experience strategy.

7. Customer Experience Strategy: Andrew Reise helped organize and analyze all input factors to create a series of compelling strategic imperatives serving as the foundation of the customer experience strategy. The strategic imperatives were developed to specifically address the various competitive threats, issues, and opportunities identified throughout the strategy project. Strategic imperatives represented major platforms or themes, such as:

• Developing a deeper customer understanding
• Facilitating more meaningful customer interactions
• Enabling the end-to-end customer experience
• Enhancing campaign and marketing effectiveness
• Establishing powerful business and customer analytics
• Improving speed to market and agility
• Establishing a foundation for operational effectiveness

The result was a clear and compelling customer experience strategy based on a foundation of value creation for the business

Phase 2: Framing Customer Experience Initiative and Solutions

In order to make the strategy more tangible, Andrew Reise collaborated with the company to further build out the strategy by developing the customer experience detailed strategy:

1. Customer Experience Initiative Framing: In order to make the customer experience strategy achievable, common or related issues and opportunities were grouped together and transformed into discrete initiatives. Each initiative represented a distinct project or solution that when implemented, would enable one or more of the strategic imperatives defined in the customer experience strategy. Each initiative was then further defined in terms of more specific solutions that could be implemented. The result was a list of more than 35 discrete initiatives or projects that could be implemented to realize the strategy. Initiatives addressed key capabilities in areas such as an enterprise data warehouse, business intelligence, voice of the customer, cross-sell/up-sell, cross-channel integration, web channel transformation, billing and customer care system transformation, and lifecycle/interaction management.

2. Business Case Development: Based on the identification and framing of the program initiatives, a more detailed 5-year business case was developed for each initiative. The business case was based on both qualitative and quantitative metrics that were specific to the company. The individual initiative business cases were then aggregated into a single integrated business case that clearly demonstrated the significant ROI that the program represented.

3. Transformation Mapping: The individual initiatives were then sequenced into a long-range customer experience roadmap based on dependency, resource, and ROI factors. The result was a detailed program roadmap that would serve as a guide throughout the transformation program.

4. Program Governance: Andrew Reise defined the strategy program governance model for the entire program, including work plan management, risk management, issue management, status reporting, program alignment, responsibility and decision making governance, as well as the overall program organization structure. The result was a program governance model that would be utilized throughout the transformation program.

Phase 3: Implementing the Customer Experience Roadmap

Andrew Reise assisted in the kick off and day-to-day execution of the transformational program, including:

1. Program Management:  Andrew Reise served as the overall program management office for the program, managing all aspects of strategy, program governance, and benefits realization.

2. Benefits Realization: Andrew Reise assisted the company with the financial management aspects of the program, including careful management to the business case and establishing processes and methods for measuring benefits realization on a go-forward basis.

3. Organization Transformation: Andrew Reise assisted in the establishment and staffing of a dedicated program team of more than 325 people. In addition, Andrew Reise assisted with the change management aspects of the program.

4. Process Transformation: Andrew Reise assisted with the establishment of an enterprise process model within the company, including the identification of process owners who would oversee and optimize the implementation of new processes.

5. Technology Transformation: Andrew Reise assisted with the information technology implementation for several of the initiatives.

Results Achieved