How AI unlocked $100M+ in customer engagement opportunities for a food and beverage titan

The Challenge

This company wants to evolve customer interactions and create stellar experiences that drive loyalty and engagement.

The emergence of generative AI brought new questions: Can it really transform service teams’ interactions with customers? Can it improve productivity? And can it help reduce churn, increase revenue per customer, and drive revenue growth?

Executives knew we could find answers—fast. Why? Because of our digital expertise, deep understanding of the industry, and laser focus on capturing financial value.

An Undeniably Different Approach

Working closely with our client, we were able to create a strategy for using generative AI in one business unit in just weeks—targeting revenue growth, customer satisfaction, resource productivity, and cost efficiency.

Instead of leading with the technology and forcing it to fit, we asked: What does the business need? And how can the technology help us achieve that?

Through brainstorming workshops, the team generated 85 viable ideas. We then studied their impact and prioritized those with the greatest potential ROI, including:

1. Sentiment analysis of customer interactions recorded in calls, chats, emails, and surveys.
2. A generative-AI enabled chatbot “assistant” that improves first-call resolution; such tools often deliver up to 15% contact center productivity improvement.
3. Customer contract creation and summarization capabilities that save time when onboarding new customers.

Our strategic sourcing experts analyzed the company’s customer service outsourcing contract for opportunities to increase value through generative AI. What we found: The contract structure can be altered, introducing a new productivity and incentive model that will improve collaboration with the service provider to drive labor efficiency and productivity, and lower contract spend over time. This can yield hard dollar savings and mitigate the impact of the inflationary labor market.

Real Results

Our responsiveness enabled the fast answers our client wanted. Once implemented, the eight most promising generative AI use cases could collectively deliver $130 million in annualized value over three years. The three top uses could generate over $100 million in value over three years—$70 million in revenue growth and $30 million in productivity improvements.

By allowing customer and field service teams to focus on sales rather than administrative work, generative AI can reduce customer churn, produce higher value per order, and improve productivity.

The value of our work didn’t stop there. Our approach fostered internal consensus around their AI vision, goals, and priorities—key for moving ideas to value—and a framework for how to develop AI strategies in other business units.