Transformation to an omnichannel customer care experience results in $40M in value creation

Our Impact 

A multinational quick service restaurant was struggling with outdated, expensive, and cumbersome customer care processes in their United States market causing friction in the end-user customer care experience and missed opportunities to capture valuable customer insights. They needed to modernize their digital customer care experience and address inefficiencies to add value to the enterprise.  

We leveraged our multidisciplinary expertise to help their team gain internal alignment and tackle their challenges. Our work resulted in an executable plan that united leadership and stakeholders around a common goal. We helped them breakdown departmental siloes, creating an omnichannel strategy that addressed the post-sale customer care experience. Today, the client has more streamlined processes, better-informed employees, and reliable customer data.  

The Full Story

The Challenge  

The client’s processes and technology were major hurdles to improving customer and employee experience. Their disconnected systems and outdated data made gathering customer feedback and proactively righting wrongs difficult. For example, the client’s contact center had accumulated thousands of reasons why someone might contact them based on 25 years of historical data. Overly manual processes and aging infrastructure had tarnished the reputation of their contact center and were slowing down processes, limiting scale. 

An Undeniably Different Approach  

The current systems and processes were not built overnight, so we knew we needed to crawl, walk, then run, and demonstrate incremental value along the way. We also knew a Band-Aid approach would only focus on the symptoms and not address the root cause, so instead, we built a long-term plan to attack the underlying issues.  

Since an omnichannel customer experience was the goal, we first needed to gain cross-functional organizational alignment. We started by forming a senior steering committee across departments, which would help us connect to the overall digital strategy — creating convergence at the highest levels.  

We also leveraged multidisciplinary expertise and a systematic approach to ensure organizational changes were done sustainably. Keys to the success of the project included:  

• Human-centered design (HCD). We applied HCD principles while working through the vision, customer experience, and employee experience.  
• Data-driven decision making. We reviewed the data and technologies they were using and dug deep into their contact centers — analyzing factors like contact volume and handle time, channel switching rates, interaction costs, and customer feedback.  
• Organizational alignment. In our work to form a steering committee, we assembled executives from different departments, including marketing, technology, data, and operations. This created transparency between departments and facilitated cross-functional integration.  

Our team took the research further by consulting external stakeholder perspectives when shaping the strategy and vision. By combining internal and external stakeholder opinions with in-depth data analysis and industry standards, we were able to create an accurate benchmark for what “good” looks like. These attributes gave our teams the alignment needed to build an actionable roadmap and the corresponding financial model to ensure success. 

Ultimately our approach stood out for three reasons:  

1. We took a holistic, omnichannel approach from the start; looking at how they could become digital across people, processes, and technology 
2. We strived for a sustainable pace, with the knowledge that we couldn’t bring every system up to modern standards overnight
3. We put a multidisciplinary team in place from day one, including expertise in digital products, change management, organization design, customer experience, contact center, technology, and the retail industry.

Real Results  

Alignment starts with people. To this end, we began our work with a focus on helping the client hire and build a team of people who embraced digital and understood how digital works. Because we had alignment at a high level through the steering committee, the client’s CFO approved a four-year budget to complete the job.  

During this project, we addressed important workstreams, leading to a 3% increase in the internal rate of return (IRR) compared to their store opening IRR. We also used contact center data to streamline the customer care intake process – significantly simplifying case fields, enabling agents to provide more efficient and effective customer care. Additionally, internal process improvements included an intuitive new knowledge management tool, improved first call resolution rates, and higher employee engagement. Due to our partnership, the client is on the path to recognition of $40M in benefits return. As we continue to work with them to assess and implement new technologies, we’re sure this trend will continue.