Helping a private equity firm disrupt the CX market

Our Impact  

A private equity investor set its sights on acquiring and building a platform that would disrupt the market for customer experience (CX) services—creating a portfolio company with attractive growth potential. That was a challenge tailor-made for West Monroe. 

After conducting diligence on five potential investments, the firm acquired and merged two of them, creating a new company that today serves 3,000 of the world’s top brands. As the investor’s partner on this journey to disrupt the CX market, we have supported pre-close diligence, carveout and merger planning, post-close execution, and five subsequent tuck-in acquisitions—as well as designing the future platform strategy and product innovation. This rapid pace of acquisition and innovation has created a platform that brings together intelligence from customers, employees, and the market, and the portfolio company is well on its way toward shaking up its market. 

The Full Story 

The Challenge 

With customer experience being a true differentiator across all sectors, this private equity firm wanted to find a target with potential for disrupting and becoming a dominant player in the market for CX Voice of Customer/sentiment/feedback data and services. Recognizing that its long-term goal may require continuously acquiring and assembling the right capabilities at speed, the firm wanted a partner that could support it across the journey—from initial diligence to value creation. From past experience working with West Monroe, the investor knew it would need to make just one call.  

An Undeniably Different Approach 

Our multidisciplinary team brought expertise in transaction due diligence, software operations, customer experience, carveouts and merger integration, and platform consolidation. This enabled us to get right to work on a disruptive platform strategy as we evaluated acquisition targets and tuck-ins. 

We rolled up our sleeves and worked with the client’s team to design a future product/platform strategy capable of differentiation and the next generation of architecture that can deliver on the investor’s value expectations. We also helped design its engineering and services teams, align commercial and technologies strategies, and establish financial management—all with an eye toward balancing accelerated delivery with the ability to meet synergy targets. Our combination of experience, proven approaches, and established tools even guided the investment and integration process, enabling the new company to exit its transition services agreement (TSA) sooner than expected.  

Actions

• Performed software product diligence for five target companies 

• Supported due diligence and post-close integration for the two acquired companies, including conducting a competitive assessment, performing carveout and integration diligence, and developing a Day 1 commercial product plan for the two acquired businesses 

• Supported design of a future product strategy and architecture 

• Created a technology platform and services merger integration plan and then managed its execution 

• Evaluated data center and cloud-hosting options for near-term and long-term platform consolidation 

• Analyzed customer segments to define a migration strategy to minimize customer disruption and support the migration process 

• Provided diligence and integration support for five subsequent tuck-in acquisitions 

• Completed a security assessment with ongoing remediation 

Outcomes 

• Identified opportunities and secured board approval to execute automation opportunities that will reduce operating expenses 

• Identified strategic investments that will create competitive advantage and moved up in Forrester’s research to a near-tie for market leader 

• Exited its TSA nine months earlier than expected—producing a longer-term savings opportunity of 33% 

Real Results 

The company is now well on the way toward becoming a market leader and innovator. Our work helped minimize customer disruption during the transition, expedite platform consolidation, and develop efficient, flexible operations capable of accommodating the acquisition of additional capabilities. The company has moved significantly in Forrester’s Customer Platform Wave, moving from third to a near-tie for market leader after 18 months.  

We helped the company with product differentiation, which allowed for greater market position and identified automation opportunities that led to internal efficiencies, capturing 10% in near-term software and services savings. We also revised the TSA to include a metric-driven approach to exit tracking, allowing for quick win savings of 11% in the first three months with an early exit. The company also has a longer-term savings opportunity of 33% by exiting specific components of the TSA nine months earlier than initially planned. We also identified 15% in longer-term synergies made possible after platform consolidation and customer migrations.