How can you delight a customer who didn’t pick your service? When one company acquires another, impacted customers can feel like their choices have been taken away — and are highly prone to churn. This large internet provider had acquired a new consumer division, and it wanted to prove to its new customer base that the change would mean an upgrade to service. With more than 110,000 new broadband subscribers and more than 250,000 additional active services to impress, the pressure was on to make the transition a positive one — and make customers happier than ever.

As is the case with most service delivery centers, the consumer division’s management team had always kept the focus on efficiency of service in order to keep costs to serve in check. Associates were rewarded for high volume and low handle time, but quality was a secondary concern. We worked with business leaders to move the culture of the consumer division away from defining success based purely on time and cost, and into a focus on delivering the best possible service. The division’s old, efficiency-focused quality guidelines gave way to a Net Promoter scoring system that included customer-focused processes and customer loyalty measurements. “These new methodologies and customer experience best practices were a fundamental change in how we operate,” said the consumer division’s contact center manager. “We had to change our approach from a transaction-based model to an ownership model — where every employee is responsible for resolving customer problems without concerning themselves with traditional metrics.”

Brand loyalty is built with more than just metrics — we integrated customer feedback processes into every facet of the company’s sales and support practices. Our consulting team created data-driven strategies and action plans around verbatim customer input — to enhance the customer experience based on the real experience of customers. Using this same approach, new training was designed around customer verbatims, so employees could receive coaching “directly” from customers. We worked with the company to upgrade technologies and refine the processes that support the new customer-centric culture, so that every interaction had a strong technical and procedural foundation.

When the consumer division team first started measuring their Net Promoter Score, it was sitting at negative 45. Within two years, the score was between 30 and 35 — a 228% increase. This company has taken what it learned and evolved into a customer experience champion.