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7 Successful Customer Experience Case Studies

Customer experience, or CX, is essential for your brand’s longevity, profitability, and customer loyalty, so it’s worth considering this factor in your marketing strategy. It’s no stretch to say that delivering high-quality customer experiences is critical if you want your brand to remain competitive in the modern business environment.

But it’s one thing to try to incorporate solid CX strategies and methodologies into your workflow. It’s another thing to see them in action as a success story. Today, let’s break down seven successful customer experience case studies. By the end, you’ll be well-equipped and ready to implement the techniques and methods that these successful companies used to bolster and reinvigorate their CX philosophies .

1. Macmillan Research

Macmillan Research, a scientific research institution, discovered in 2012 that various individuals affected by cancer needed extra support with practical tasks like cleaning, shopping, and so on. Approximately one in four people diagnosed with new cancer in the UK lacked support from close family or friends (or roughly 70,000 people each year) at the time of this project.

To solve this, Macmillan devised a Team Up service. The goal was to create an accessible, intuitive online marketplace that would help those affected by cancer get the practical support they needed.

To accomplish their goal, Macmillan worked hard to ensure that Team Up was easy-to-use and accessible across many different devices. It also needed to recruit new volunteers plus appeal to a younger demographic of workers.

Thus, Macmillan faced two primary challenges:

• Getting enough early adopters to test the earliest iterations of the service
• Acquiring the new technologies needed to make the whole project work

Macmillan focused on customer experience by hiring a dedicated community manager. This community manager then worked with various local groups in order to sign people up for the prelaunch of the product.

Furthermore, Macmillan integrated data into its CX testing by running biweekly user testing sessions. These guaranteed that members of the community provided their feedback to the project early on, where it could still be incorporated easily.

Thanks to these CX practices, Macmillan was successful in its overall goal. The Team Up service exceeded its initial expectations and registration KPIs by approximately 40%. Most practical tasks for cancer patients had a turnaround time of fewer than three days overall.

The car sales company CARFAX always looks for new ways to leverage its extensive vehicle database and use its customer knowledge to make new, intuitive digital tools and solutions.

Among the most recent improvements that CARFAX has made to its product is CARFAX for Police, which is a mobile and web application that helps to streamline accident report filing. Customers can now use CARFAX to file accident reports with local police precincts, making the entire process much more streamlined and easier.

To develop this app, CARFAX needed to focus on customer experience. CARFAX did some research to learn about the challenges police officers face while on the job and the difficulties they experience when filing accident reports. Fortunately, the technology to incorporate a solution like this was already present.

CARFAX and its clients conducted extensive user research, including interviews, measuring application user patterns, and so on, with a handful of police officers. They also leveraged skilled developers and mobile app programmers to make navigable, easy-to-use systems that successfully led to a great app.

By the end, CARFAX’s focus on CX resulted in an app that enables law enforcement officers to reduce accident report times by about 50%, as well as capture more data in law enforcement systems.

PBS previously wanted to transition from a more traditional media company into a leading digital media giant. To do that, PBS recognized that it needed to discover new marketing channels and formats through which to deliver educational, informative content to audiences across all age groups. More broadly, PBS wanted to connect and unify its overall network of approximately 200 member stations.

The CX-focused improvements were multifaceted from the get-go. PBS constructed a new technical infrastructure to serve content on multiple channels. This made PBS content more accessible to its users, thereby improving their customer experiences.

Furthermore, PBS developed iPad applications and APIs to ensure that content could be seamlessly delivered on any channel. This required the construction of custom content management systems, too — a high initial expense, but one that ended up being very worthwhile in the long run.

PBS also pivoted into a digital-first culture across the board. This allowed its members to focus on delivering exemplary customer experiences to online users, not just individuals watching television programs.

Trex was a home improvement company that specialized in providing sustainable deck materials. It wanted to improve its customers' experiences by creating a deck design app through which customers could create photorealistic mockups or simulations of what their decks might look like after constructing them.

The deck app would solve a huge pain point by helping customers who had only themselves to rely on when designing and building a deck of their very own. In creating a photorealistic application, Trex could eliminate a lot of the time and costs required in outsourcing the design process.

Therefore, Trex focused on creating an intuitive, navigable app with a good UX experience. This involved performing very deep, comprehensive user testing, as well as designing and building an initial solution and providing it to testers before incorporating their feedback.

In the end, the final app was very user-friendly. Customers were able to upload an image of their deck spaces or backyards, input certain deck dimensions, and even share their preferences. The app then recommends various eco-friendly deck materials and products so they can design and build the deck of their dreams in no time.

5. Thomas Cook

Thomas Cook, a travel agency and operator, wanted to improve its direct relationships with its target audience members and expand its customer base to those who weren’t currently its customers. Thomas Cook also wanted to know more about online customer journeys, as well as better understand customer purchase lifecycles.

With so many disparate goals, Thomas Cook needed to focus on customer experience and data-gathering above all else. To do this, it launched a targeted lead-generation campaign in addition to a travel survey.

The point of both of these methods was to capture key data and information about customers' future buying intentions, as well as specific customer requirements (which could, in theory, affect whether a given customer might buy something).

Furthermore, Thomas Cook utilized a nurturing program to deliver individualized, highly resonating messages and bolster user engagement. After completing the survey, consumers were presented with several different headline offers or redirected to the primary Thomas Cook website.

Thomas Cook didn't stop there. It also displayed various retargeting tags in the marketing campaign, helping the brand deliver more personalized display banner advertisements to respondents. All in all, this marketing effort allowed Thomas Cook to gain much more information than before.

It also acquired over 15,000 leads, saw email engagement rates boosted by over 30%, and saw email open rates at over twice the UK national benchmark average. All in all, it was a very successful CX data-gathering campaign.

6. RS Components

RS Components previously needed a better user experience. Specifically, the CX here was not conducive to quick or efficient processing.

This was a big problem for RS Components, as its marketing campaign was doing well, delivering over 10 million visits to various associated websites per month. Unfortunately, 70 million of those prospective customers left the site right at the search stage over the year.

To bolster conversion, RS Components look to improve its online customer experiences. With 60 websites in the group, this was a monumental task.

To accomplish it, RS Components:

• Collected customer feedback from online surveys, in addition to performing customer lab testing in the real world
• Prioritized things like speed and ease of identifying products. RS Components aimed to make it easier for customers to find and purchase the products they wanted
• Practiced search term correction
• Made significant improvements to search result categorization and presentation
• Emphasized and optimized its websites for mobile searchers

All in all, these efforts were highly successful. RS Components didn’t focus so much on changing its customer experience in terms of customer support or marketing. However, it did make a change in its CX in terms of searchability, website navigation, and product purchasing. This highlights how customer experience can incorporate and encompass many different elements of an online enterprise.

7. Vodafone UK

Vodafone UK wanted to develop an interactive, graphical representation of network performance. This was to be a first for the overall UK telecoms market. Unfortunately, Vodafone UK faced a significant challenge: making this rather technical and complex subject more accessible and simpler to understand for customers.

The primary objective was to create a tool to route queries into a call center using a self-service portal. Then, Vodafone UK aimed to develop a system to help communicate any planned outages to customers that would be affected. By the end of development, the tool needed to be very easy to maintain and be able to update itself in real-time 24/7.

To accomplish this, Vodafone UK focused somewhat on CX or customer experience management. Specifically, it:

• Created a cross-channel working group that included different business areas and people in industries like network operations, public relations, technology, security, and more.
• Carried out various usability studies with the public. This helped to validate its initial graphic design plan and user experience before implementing and improving upon it.

With this CX-focused approach, Vodafone UK successfully constructed a system where telecom information could be updated moment by moment by field engineers. The system was also linked to an email notification center, which enabled affected customers to immediately be notified of outages or changes in their coverage.

These days, users can still register their email addresses with the Vodafone UK telecoms system. This automatically sends an email if an issue is reported or if the network operations center has to impose an outage for technical or maintenance reasons.

The Impact of Customer Research on Customer Satisfaction

Many of these studies show how social media, digital transformation, and customer-centric optimization strategies can have a major impact. Using touchpoint analysis or leveraging contact centers can have an incredible impact on the bottom line.

Customer relationships — for both current and potential customers — only grow if you focus on world-class CX like these companies. Provide your customers with good day-to-day service in the online shopping world. Leverage automation where it makes sense, but don’t forget about the impact of a personal, human touch.

Chat With Awesome CX Today

As you can see, good customer experiences are absolutely vital for your brand. As you look to improve your CX overall, review your customer satisfaction metrics. Decide what pain point you can solve and anticipate the kind of improvements that loyal and new customers will most likely appreciate.

If the ideal way to make sure that your CX improvements are actually improvements and not just changes to your website or customer journeys for the sake of it.

Fortunately, if your CX philosophy needs a bit of work, there are partners you can turn to for help. Awesome CX is well-equipped and ready to assist with all of your CX needs.

In fact, we’ve assisted over 90 brands with their customer experience services , ranging from backend or office support to customer experience center aid and more. No matter what your industry happens to be, Awesome CX can help in more ways than one.

Send us a message today to learn more.

Customer Experience | Tech Target

What Is Customer Experience? | Forbes

What is Customer Experience? | IBM

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September 7, 2021 Customer Experience Insights

Customer experience case studies.

We’ve talked a lot about the impact of CX, how it’s changing, and why you should care. We also know that it can be difficult to grasp exactly what that means for your business. How CX initiatives impact day-to-day work or how you’ll interact with customers and what that looks like in action are just a few examples.

This article highlights some customer experience case studies that make the benefits of investing in customer experience far more tangible. We’ll look at customer experience examples from our experience working with clients from various industries and the impact CX investments had on various parts of the business.

Trex: Bridging the Gap Between Analog & Digital

Trex , a home improvement company specializing in sustainable deck materials, reached out to 3Pillar Global to help them build a photorealistic deck design app to extend the customer experience.

The company wanted the app to address a major pain point: deck customers were largely on their own in terms of design. Either it was on them to try to design and build a deck on their own OR they’d need to hire a designer or rely on a builder to take care of the design AND build process.

By creating a photorealistic app, Trex saw an opportunity to eliminate the time and expense of outsourcing the design process. A: it allowed customers to reallocate that budget to better materials and B: it ensured that they could get the deck of their dreams—on the first try. In turn, that means more revenue, referrals, and recommendations for Trex.

They also knew that building a custom deck design app was an opportunity to offer something their competitors didn’t.

Rather than building an application from scratch, many Trex competitors simply white-label existing technology without considering customer feedback. Unfortunately, that approach creates a subpar UX experience. Users don’t walk away with an understanding of what their design will look like in real life. Customers are left wondering if the deck would match their home and if they choose the best material for the job.

3Pillar Global experts worked with the Trex team to build a custom app that could really bring DIY deck designs to life—beyond basic floor plan sketches or outdated 3D designs.

We started the process by performing deep user testing, which enabled us to design and build a solution that solved for real-world needs.

The final product was a user-friendly app that allows customers to upload an image of their backyard, input dimensions, and share preferences. From there, the app recommends specific materials and products to help them make their dream deck a reality.

At the end of the process, customers receive a blueprint, estimate, and a shopping list for everything they’ll need to complete the job.

Customers were really impressed with the app. They were impressed by the app’s baked-in photorealism—including the wood grain, colors, textures, and details that allowed them to really make their designs their own.

We also built an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system directly into the app’s backend to support the Trex team on the job. As a result, the sales team now has access to more data and contacts. This data is helping them fill their pipeline with qualified leads and provide personalized support and solutions throughout the entire sales process.

CARFAX: Tapping New Markets

Sure, helping B2C customers find vehicle history information might be their bread and butter, but CARFAX is continuously looking for new ways to use its extensive database and deep customer knowledge to create new digital solutions.

Throughout the course of our decade-long partnership, we’ve helped CARFAX bring six new products to market—including CARFAX for dealers—a digital B2B solution helping used car dealers reach more potential customers.

Most recently, 3Pillar Global helped the company expand into the public sector with CARFAX for Police—a mobile/web app that streamlines the process of filing accident reports.

This customer experience case study is a great example of how you might repurpose an existing solution to meet the needs of a completely different market.

When 3Pillar Global developed CARFAX for Police, a big part of this process was learning more about the unique challenges officers face on the job and what they wanted from a potential solution. While the technology was there, we had to get to know a completely different user segment—with completely different priorities than car buyers and dealers.

3Pillar Global conducted user research (interviews, app usage patterns, etc.) with 8 officers. The team interviewed them to learn how to create something they’d actually use—and could be adapted to fit different county/state workflows, while at the same time, providing some flexibility for different forces to adapt the solution to their unique needs.

The 3Pillar Global solution helped CARFAX reduce report completion times by 50%, which enabled law enforcement organizations to capture and integrate more data across their systems.

This made it easier for officers to collect better information at the scene using their smartphones, also reducing the amount of work involved in filing a report.

While this particular application focuses on one specific part of policing, it does indicate the potential impact similar digitization efforts might have in other areas—shared data between jurisdictions, transparency between police forces and the community, better information, fewer opportunities for paperwork to “go missing” or get destroyed.

E-commerce Client:

A major online brand specializing in custom blinds, shutters, and shades reached out to 3Pillar Global to modernize their e-commerce site.

At the time, the brand realized that their aging infrastructure could no longer support the incoming traffic they were seeing. At the same time, they were looking to expand into new geographical markets.

The solution covered two main areas. The first was modernizing the client’s system. We built them a new website, along with a fully-integrated point of sale system.

3Pillar Global worked with the client to redefine the front-end technical infrastructure and improve website performance. We ran a performance test report to capture the parameters of our response with the goal of being able to support 200+ users at the same time.

We revamped the website’s front-end design but kept backend APIs the same.

We also sought to improve the user experience to drive sales and boost satisfaction.

All hands were on deck for this engagement. From design to product and engineering teams, all worked together to define aspects of the buying process (an effort that can take several weeks, depending on how many touchpoints/segments you’re dealing with).

The new website allowed the client to penetrate international markets and increased online sales by 20%.

Fortunately, the client had a really clear voice and well-defined customer values—which made the process of modernizing and improving the shopper experience much easier on our end.

Kathryn Rosaaen, one of 3 Pillar Global’s experts who was involved with the project, says, “it was about understanding the customer journey from the beginning. Where do people start, and what devices and touchpoints do they use to interact with the brand along the path to purchase—the iPad browsing experience at home, the point of sale experience in the store, the desktop website, the point of sale experience out in the field, and so on.”

She also noted that while much of the process was about making sure the systems were integrated and all APIs were synced so that they could communicate with each other, the core focus was about making sure the entire experience—from design to editorial positioning—was unified, consistent, and easy-to-use at every touchpoint.

PBS: Modernizing Public Broadcasting

We’ve worked with PBS since 2009 when the public broadcasting giant sought out our expertise to begin transitioning from a traditional media company to a leader in digital media.

The organization recognized the need to find new channels and formats to educate and inform audiences of all ages and backgrounds—and unify its disconnected network of nearly 200 member stations.

For more than a decade, we’ve helped PBS optimize and expand their digital footprint as part of an ongoing collaboration.

3Pillar Global helped PBS build the technical infrastructure needed to serve content on multiple channels and in various formats. We developed original iPad apps and created APIs that enable content delivery on any channel and built custom content management systems (CMSs) that made it easy for member stations to deploy a consistent stream of online content. At the same time, PBS is in full control over when and where its content appears.

What’s more, we also helped the broadcasting organization develop a digital-first culture and the Agile development methodologies that enabled them to sustain and expand on those initial digitization efforts.

The 58M app downloads and hundreds of millions of videos streamed each month speak for themselves. However, we think the real takeaway from this customer experience case study is what can be achieved through long-term partnerships.

CX isn’t a one-and-done effort, it’s something that requires constant attention. With PBS, we’ve laid a strong digital foundation that allows them to anticipate and respond to viewers’ needs, rather than scrambling to play catch up like other legacy broadcasters.

Key Takeaways

In the end, these examples demonstrate that improving CX isn’t a one-size-fits-all effort. As you can see, each of the CX case studies we looked at focused on a very different set of goals. The key takeaway is, initiatives should align around a specific business case and be driven by the customer.

To find out more about how 3Pillar Global experts can help you reach new markets, build breakthrough solutions, or completely revamp the online shopping experience, contact an expert today .

Special thanks to these members of FORCE, 3Pillar’s expert network, for their contributions to this article.

FORCE is 3Pillar Global’s Thought Leadership Team comprised of technologists and industry experts offering their knowledge on important trends and topics in digital product development.

Customer Experience (CX) Table of Contents

• Ch. 1: Customer Experience as a Competitive Advantage
• Ch. 2: Customer Experience Trends
• Ch. 3: What Makes a Great Customer Experience?
• Ch. 4: Customer Experience Lifecycle – Adopt a Customer Mindset at Every Stage
• Ch. 5: How Customer Experience Has Evolved
• Ch. 6: Capturing the Omnichannel Customer Experience
• Ch. 7: How Customer Experience Impacts the Bottom Line
• Ch. 8: Importance of Customer Experience
• Ch. 9: Digital Transformation and Customer Experience
• Ch. 10: Owning the End-to-End Customer Experience
• Ch. 11: Why CX Design Matters
• Ch. 12: The Common Culprits Behind Bad Customer Experiences
• Ch. 13: Customer Experience Case Studies
• Ch. 14: How Customer Experience Impacts Retention
• Ch. 15: The Effects of Customer Experience on Brand Loyalty
• Ch. 16: 16 Statistics that Drive Home the Value of Customer Experience
• Ch. 17: Overcoming Common CX Challenges
• Ch. 18: Customer Experience (CX) vs. User Experience (UX)
• Ch. 19: Creating a Customer Experience Culture
• Ch. 20: Why Run a Customer Experience Audit
• Ch. 21: How to Define Customer Experience Strategy
• Ch. 22: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience
• Ch. 23: Impact of Social Media on Customer Experience
• Ch. 24: A Customer Experience Roadmap for Success
• Ch. 25: Innovation Begins with Customer Feedback
• Ch. 26: 10 Steps for Improving the Customer Experience
• Ch. 27: Self-Service is the Future of Customer Experience
• Ch. 28: Building an Enterprise Customer Experience
• Ch. 29: Achieving Real-Time Customer Experience
• Ch. 30: Using Automation to Create a Consistent Customer Experience
• Ch. 31: A Practical Guide to Customer Journey Mapping
• Ch. 32: A Guide to Personalized Customer Experience
• Learn how we can help you design successful customer experiences.

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Customer Experience

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Memorable personalized experiences

Finding the perfect blend for the digital customer experience

5-MINUTE READ

illycaffè, the premium Italian coffee brand, offers a unique taste and aroma that’s recognized by coffee lovers around the world. Leveraging its 80 years of coffee-making heritage and expertise, the company sells its products and services to consumers and trade customers in 140 different countries.

Looking to capitalize on its success at home and expand its growth internationally, illycaffè decided to embark on a radical reimagination of its  digital customer experience .

Combining the power of digital with a customer-centric mindset, illycaffè wanted to offer truly memorable personalized experiences on both B2B and B2C channels. The ultimate goal? To delight and engage its customers, bringing them ever closer to the brand—and fueling new growth for the illycaffè business.

Strategy and solution

Leveraging knowledge from across Accenture—in strategy, technology, digital experiences and more—we’re helping illycaffè every step of the way as it drives its transformation forward.

Beginning with a digital transformation roadmap, we’re setting the business on a path to transform customer experience in everything from the website to the contact center:

Rebuilding illycaffè’s website, with a refreshed front end fully integrated with e-commerce, producer and training channels

Reimagining the digital B2B channel, emphasizing a “consumer-style” buying experience

Helping illycaffè create, manage and optimize its social media and other online content

Co-innovating a completely new approach to digital content management, building new streamlined workflows and ways of working

Developing new ways to engage with customers, supporting enhanced customer analytics and new campaigns to grow brand awareness and generate a larger pipeline of new leads

Implementing a new system for customer care at illycaffè’s contact center, putting a customer-centric mindset at the core

Transformation

We’re 18 months into our collaboration, and we’ve already started what we call our "DIGITAL TRANSFORM-ACTION" approach by allowing illycaffè to evolve its relationships with customers.

The business is developing a much deeper understanding of customer lifetime value and customer segmentation—important components in supporting truly personalized customer experiences.

Our work together has already improved revenues on illycaffè’s site from SEO activities by 24 percent. We’ll also soon launch an entirely redesigned site that reflects illycaffe’s new approach to the commerce experience.

Our data-driven, comprehensive and consistent social media strategy is optimizing the creative effort, ensuring premium content with that unique “illycaffè” blend reaches the right audience at the right time on the right channel. Social media activities have increased engagement and reach by 15 percent.

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, best buy: creating a winning customer experience in consumer electronics.

Publication date: 11 October 2017

Teaching notes

After a successful run for many years as a resilient consumer electronics giant, Best Buy was under intense pressure at the end of 2014. Even as competitors like Circuit City melted away, Best Buy had been able to withstand the onslaught of online behemoth Amazon and discount retailers like Target and Walmart. However, its competitive position was threatened as online shopping became more popular, particularly among millennial customers.

With a new leadership team, Best Buy had recently undertaken bold initiatives to expand and refine its online presence and position itself for success. These initiatives had produced encouraging results, but Best Buy needed to do more to stem the loss of market share to Amazon and to become more relevant to millennial customers. To address these challenges, Best Buy approached the Kellogg School of Management to solicit ideas from student teams by sponsoring a Business Challenge competition. The teams came up with several strategic initiatives. Best Buy needed to evaluate these initiatives on two criteria: First, how well did these initiatives leverage Best Buy's privileged physical assets (stores, salespeople, and Geek Squad services staff) to create a winning customer experience? Second, how effective would these initiatives be in attracting and retaining millennial customers?

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Sawhney, M. , Goodman, P. and Keerthivasan, G. (2017), "Best Buy: Creating a Winning Customer Experience in Consumer Electronics", . https://doi.org/10.1108/case.kellogg.2021.000032

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Dive into the Secrets Behind Apple's Stellar Customer Experience

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“You’ve got to start with the Customer Experience and work back toward the Technology, not the other way around” – Steve Jobs

Before the iPod, Apple was primarily known for their home computing devices. Even though it wasn’t the first portable music player on the market, the iPod succeeded where other competitors failed.

The iPod exemplified Apple’s customer first approach – clearly a lot of research had been done on what the average music listeners pain points were when it comes to portable music. Technology played second fiddle to better  Customer Experience .

Takeaway  – All your songs in the palm of your hand. More storage, Better battery life, easy to use – these were the primary selling points for the original iPod, and as it turned out – for most people it was more than enough, which they made clear by establishing Apple as the leader in portable music, both in terms of volume and reputation.

A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary smartphone, a breakthrough internet communications device. Steve Jobs kept repeating these 3 phrases at the iPhone reveal till the audience got the hint – they were one and the same.

As with many Apple products, the iPhone was not the first touchscreen device, nor was it the first entertainment focussed mobile device or one with internet connectivity for that matter.

Earlier smartphones were unwieldy, tough to use and were usually focussed on out and out productivity. Oh and it also incentivized developers and users to buy into the Apple ecosystem – promising the developers a stable target audience, and the consumers the ability to carry their apps, purchases, music, notes, and so much more across several devices no matter where they are. Apple not only delivered a better  customer experience , they changed the game on Mobile Customer Experience entirely, which allowed them to leapfrog veterans in the smartphone segment and create a user base that were willing to buy into the Apple ecosystem.

Takeaway  – The iPhone managed to give the best possible Customer Experience across many domains of mobile users – ensuring that EVERY user would be aiming towards owning a smartphone in the future, no matter what they used it for.

“It turns out people want keyboards . . . We look at the tablet and we think it is going to fail,”

These words were uttered by none other than Steve Jobs himself, nearly a decade before he revealed the iPad to the world. So how did a company that laughed off the very concept of a tablet turn around and make the most successful tablet of all time? Insights. By 2010, Apple had carefully surveyed and analyzed just what people do with their smartphones and their computers. There was a sizeable chunk of laptop/computer users who did not exploit much of their machine’s capability and instead were using them for emailing and consuming content. Admittedly, the iPhone could handle all of those tasks, but its smaller display definitely hampered its abilities.

Enter the iPad – Just the right amount of power to handle a bit of productivity, a vibrant display to consume content and a responsive touchscreen to ensure the typing experience was as good as it could be without a keyboard.

The iPad enabled Apple to sell large numbers and practically create a segment by itself.

Takeaway  – With the iPad, Apple defied themselves to become the leader in the Tablet segment, delivering the best  Custom er Experience  that its core user base needed.

Apple store experience

“get closer than ever to your customers. so close that you tell them what they need well before they realise it themselves” apple’s mission stated by jobs apple store.

Apple doesn’t simply relegate its focus on Customer Experience to its products. Apple stores are designed to be the best possible Customer Experience anywhere(not just in retail). When opening the first Apple store, instead of improving on their competition’s services, Apple decided to benchmark itself against the masters of human interaction – the hospitality industry, which led to the creation of the Apple Genius Bar – knowledgeable, empathetic employees who could get virtually anyone using their devices in a jiffy.

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Takeaway  – Delivering excellence in the retail Customer Experience has allowed Apple to retain its user base and gain an entirely new customer base – those who aren’t the most congruent with technology. Read more about how you can improve your retention with our  customer retention guide .

There’s no getting around the fact that Apple has contributed to a paradigm shift in how companies value Customer Experience, especially over the last 2 decades. While other companies like  Amazon  and  Uber  have managed to craft their own brand of excellence in CX, Apple remains the leader in Customer Experience for hardware companies by a fair margin.

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Experiential Marketing

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Experiential marketing has become an indispensable tool for all types of businesses across multiple sectors. This book provides an all-encompassing, practical, and conceptual map of contemporary experiential case studies, which together offer insights into this exciting approach to customer experience.

Experiential Marketing incorporates 36 international case studies from 12 key sectors, from technology, consumer goods, and B2B to luxury, events, and tourism sectors. With a selection of case studies from leading brands, such as Coca-Cola, Nutella, Chanel, NASA, The New York Times , Pfizer, and Amtrak, the reader will learn and practice the experiential marketing tools and strategies through these examples. Expert testimonials, practical applied exercises, and the author’s online videos provide both theoretical foundations and concrete application.

This is a must-read for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate Marketing and Customer Experience students and an excellent teaching resource. It should also be of great use to practitioners – particularly those studying for professional qualifications – who are interested in learning experiential marketing strategies and developing knowledge about the way big brands in different sectors are designing the customer experience online and offline.

Online material includes lecture slides, a test bank of questions, an instructor’s manual, and explanatory videos.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 | 49  pages, customer experience in the technology sector, chapter 2 | 30  pages, how consumer goods firms are leveraging the customer experience, chapter 3 | 21  pages, the customer experience in the retail sector, chapter 4 | 24  pages, the customer experience in the food, tourism, and leisure sector, chapter 5 | 27  pages, the customer experience in the luxury and fashion sector, chapter 6 | 25  pages, how b2b and consultancy firms are leveraging the customer experience, chapter 7 | 29  pages, the customer experience in the banking and insurance sector, chapter 8 | 25  pages, the customer experience in the media and communication sector, chapter 9 | 20  pages, the customer experience in the transportation sector, chapter 10 | 25  pages, the customer experience in the healthcare sector, chapter 11 | 28  pages, the customer experience in the arts and culture sector, chapter 12 | 25  pages, the customer experience in the sports, events, and entertainment sector.

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Customer Experience and Marketing: 3 quick case studies to help you think like your customers

This article was published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter .

“The world does not need ‘expert’ marketers; the world needs marketers who are expert at thinking like consumers,” Flint McGlaughlin taught in Value Proposition Credibility: 3 ways to help people instantly believe your message .

To help you get into a customer-focused mindset so you can communicate a believable value proposition, we bring you three stories in this article.

First, a bakery chain that used A/B testing to better understand its customers. Then, a cloud storage company that tried to channel its customers’ pain points through humorous music videos. And finally, a content website’s SEO approach that pleases Google’s algorithm presumably because it creates a better customer experience – internal linking.

Quick Case Study #1: Bakery chain increases email conversion rate 39% with A/B testing

Magnolia Bakery is a globally recognized brand with 10 brick-and-mortar locations in the U.S., a rapidly growing direct to consumer (DTC) business, as well as international franchises. The bakery chain has gained worldwide fame and loyal fans thanks to scenes in Sex and the City and Saturday Night Live.

Having outgrown its “batch-and-blast” approach to email marketing, the team wanted to focus on personalized approaches and test-and-learn strategies using A/B testing.

For example, the team builds automated series of messages for different audiences, including a welcome series for new customers as well as offers for existing customers based on past purchase behavior, abandoned carts, or product preferences.

And now it conducts A/B testing to gain a stronger understanding of customers and their purchasing habits.

“There are limitless ways to test and learn, to the point where you should never feel comfortable as a marketer. With each placement we put out into the world, we try to tweak something within the tactic or strategy to uncover a new learning about our audience, and 99% of the time, we do, which makes the next thing even more effective,” said Adam Davis, Media & Marketing Manager, Magnolia Bakery .

Here is a look at two of the bakery chain’s email subject line tests.

For Valentine’s Day, the team conducted subject line testing for the below email.

Creative Sample #1: Bakery chain’s Valentine’s Day email

• One treatment focused on gifting – “Gift them a special Valentine’s Day dessert.”
• The other treatment focused on the general collection of products offered – “Enjoy our limited-time Valentine’s Day desserts!”
• Both subject lines had a heart emoji at the end.

The open rate for both subject lines was the same – 39%. But the general subject line drove $1,900 in sales while the gifting subject line drove $1,100.

Here’s another test the team ran. They launched one of the chain’s best sellers – Banana Pudding Variety Pack – in January, and wanted to tease the product to people who have purchased pudding through the direct-to-consumer channel in the past.

Creative Sample #2: Bakery chain’s teaser email

The execution was similar to the Valentine’s Day email test. The team tested two subject lines:

• Direct response – “Open for VIP(udding) access to our most exciting pack yet” and included the side eyes emoji.
• Callback to previous purchasers – “We heard you like Banana Pudding and we just dropped a NEW pack!” with the fire emoji.

The latter drove a higher open rate (58% versus 51%), but the former drove higher revenue ($800 versus $680). The total audience for these was a lot smaller (~8,700) than Valentine's Day (~160,000).

Thanks to its email personalization and testing efforts, average time spent on-site for Magnolia’s email subscribers has increased 35% and the average open rate has increased by 36%. Conversion rates have increased by 39%. On the days the team sends email they see a six to eight percent revenue lift.

Recently the brand tested a paid social media campaign for its prospecting strategy. New customers were invited to register to receive welcome offers like 10% off and discounts on the shopper’s birthday.

“If you uncover something that works on one channel, apply the same strategy elsewhere, even if it doesn't feel natural. When you start thinking about your audience in the lens of who they are vs. where they are, you'll learn more things about those audiences than you would if you tested different things in different places,” Davis said.

They have begun to engage in SMS messaging experimentation as well.

“Relationship marketing really works to sustain brand loyalty. Email and SMS together are what most of my customers see as the next step,” said Paige DiGregorio, Customer Success Manager, Sailthru (Magnolia Bakery’s marketing automation provider).

Quick Case Study #2: Cloud storage company generates 100K+ video views by tapping into its ideal prospects’ pain points

Wasabi Technologies’ main target audience is IT leaders and decision-makers. The marketing team typically reached this audience by advertising the company’s services and products via technical papers, solution briefs, and banner ads. In order to really break through the clutter, they realized they would have had to spend a lot of money on advertising… or shift their strategy and mindset to think outside of the box of what B2B companies typically do.

The team chose the latter approach. They identified a pain point felt by the IT leaders and decision-makers that are its main target audience – it is difficult for the IT team to get its ideas across to the C-suite management team.

Inspired by this insight, they created the IT Hero Nate Campaign to empower the IT community and connect on an emotional level. “To do this we tapped into our CEO and co-founder, David Friend’s background in music,” said Julie Barry, Vice President of Global Brand & Communications, Wasabi Technologies .

“Dave is a six-time tech CEO who happened to have also studied composition at Yale with a double degree in Music and Engineering and started a company, ARP Instruments, whose synthesizers powered famous tracks from beloved artists such as Stevie Wonder, The Who, George Harrison and Led Zeppelin,” she said.

The campaign consists of a series of three-minute music videos featuring Nate, the every-person IT pro, who shares a critical message directed at businesses through the lyrics of a power ballad. “I had worked with viral content creator Penn Holderness of The Holderness Family in the past, so I connected him with Dave to co-compose the power ballad for Nate’s music videos,” Barry said.

The videos serve as public service announcements to educate the enterprise audience and beyond about IT topics that are close to their day-to-day, while also telling IT professionals’ stories and their struggles.

Creative Sample #3: Comedic music video for information technology company

The first video, #MigratewithNate, came out in 2020 and was aimed at elevating the profile of IT professionals while educating enterprises about the benefits of cloud storage. There was also a Migrate with Nate 2.0 in 2021. The two videos have generated 21,322 views on YouTube.

“The #ThinkBeforeYouClick music video and ballad, the third installment in Wasabi’s ‘Nate’ series, was launched during a time when ransomware was on the rise and businesses’ data and operations were at risk,” Barry said. The video featured Nate warning about the dangers of ransomware and how to find more effective models for communicating cybersecurity awareness/ransomware education. Now, less than two months after the launch in May 2022, the YouTube video has reached 95,888 views.

“We didn’t start out seeking a completely new medium for our campaigns, but we are fortunate enough to have found a clear blank space in the industry. This use case isn’t unique to cloud storage but it could easily be played out elsewhere in enterprise tech. For example, Nate could be the overworked developer seeking a more user-friendly DevOps environment or a security professional who isn’t equipped with the right tools to keep a company’s network safe. As the enterprise tech space continues to heat up amidst rapid digital transformation efforts, marketing teams need new approaches to reach B2B audiences,” Barry advised.

Quick Case Study #3: Content website gets #4 SERP ranking from internal linking

On September 8, 2021, the team at Smallbiz Tools posted a blog article titled “Top 10 Lifelock Alternatives for Identity Theft Protection in 2022.” The post had no external or internal links pointing to it. It had no ranking.

Creative Sample #4: Blog article on content website

The team added nine internal links and waited one week. The article ranked #4 for “Lifelock alternatives.”

Here are the blog posts they added the internal links from, along with the anchor text they used:

• Top 8 Ad Tracking Software Tools for 2021: Tried Tested & Rated – anchor text: security
• ZZ Freshbooks Introduces ACH Payments – anchor text: secure
• Top 30 Sales Productivity Tools for 2021: Tried Tested & Rated – anchor text: secure
• 8 Types of Collaboration Tools (w/ Top Tools To Use in 2021) – anchor text: secure
• 12 Crucial Tools To Get Instagram Likes On Your Posts – anchor text: secure platform protects
• 5 Reasons QuickBooks Is The Best Accounting Tool for Small Businesses – anchor text: securely
• How to Create an Effective Email Marketing Strategy for Your Business – anchor text: security
• Nusii vs Proposify – A Brief Comparison of 10 Key Features – anchor text: security
• Inventory Management: What You Need to Know Before Opening a Business – anchor text: security

They then added three external links to it and now it ranks #1 for this term.

The team has since tried a similar approach with subsequent articles.

They wrote and published an article called, “9 Best Calendly Alternatives In 2022 [Tested, Ranked & Rated]” and it had no ranking. They added six internal links and waited two weeks. The article ranked #11 for “Calendly alternatives.” They added five external links and now rank #5 for “Calendly alternatives.”

They wrote and published an article called “10 Help Scout Alternatives You Should Consider in 2022” and it had no ranking. They added six internal links and waited two weeks. It ranked #13 for “Help Scout alternatives.” They are now adding external links to try to get it to jump to the first page of the Google search engine results page.

“Internal linking may have more impact on your ranking than getting other blogs and publications to link to you. Focus on internally linking to articles you want to rank on your own blog,” advised Dmitry Dragilev, Founder, Smallbiz Tools .

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10 B2B Case Study Examples to Inspire Your Next Customer Success Story

• October 24, 2023

Case studies, also known as customer stories, are valuable content assets for attracting new customers and showing your expertise in a competitive market.

The more case studies you have, the simpler it gets for your customers to make decisions.

Case studies provide a firsthand experience of what it’s like to use your product or service, and it can give an “Aha!” moment to potential customers.

While product demos and white papers are great for generating leads, their use is limited to highlighting product features. 

On the other hand, case studies showcase the transformation a business has undergone while using your product.

A case study offers potential customers a glimpse of the positive changes they can expect, which is more compelling than simply showcasing your product or service’s excellence.

• Customer mission should be given at the beginning
• Follow up about specifics and metrics
• Use quotes from their side to highlight
• Work out the biggest benefits of your offering and make reference to them
• Make sure your success story follows a brief and logical story structure

In this article, we’ll review 10 examples of outstanding case studies that have collectively helped secure millions in new client business. Let’s get started.

What Is A Case Study?

In simple terms, a case study highlights how a product or service has helped a business solve a problem, achieve a goal, or make its operations easier. 

In many ways, it’s a glorified and stretched-out client testimonial that introduces you to the problem that the customer is facing and the solution that the product has helped deliver. 

Case studies are invaluable assets for B2B SaaS, where sales cycles tend to get lengthy and costly. They’re a one-time investment that showcases your product’s features and benefits in rooms your sales team can’t be in. 

What Makes A Good Case Study? 

There is no one-size-fits approach to a good case study. 

Some case studies work better as long, prose-forward, and story-driven blog posts. Whereas some are better as quick and fast-fact content that doesn’t add to the chatter but gets straight to the point. 

Here are some of the tenets of good case studies:

• Product-Led : Focuses on showcasing the product as the solution to a specific problem or challenge.
• Timely : Addresses the current issues or trends relevant to the business’s ideal customer profile (ICP) . 
• Well-structured: Follows a clear, organized format with easily digestible writing style and synthesis. 
• Story-driven: Tells a compelling and relatable story that puts the reader in the customer’s shoes. 

Case studies must tell the customer’s story regardless of style or content density.

Other than that, visuals in case studies are powerful in increasing conversion rates, by providing real evidence and taking attention.

Companies can also use their website, social media, and newsletters to promote case studies and increase visibility.

Below, we have ten diverse case study examples that embody these principles. 

B2B Case Study Template from Our Team

We will share great and proven B2B case study examples that you can get inspired by in the following section, but before that, let’s take a look at an easy and effective template from our team.

10 Best B2B Case Study Examples To Take Inspiration From

Plaid is a fintech company specializing in equipping users with a secure platform to connect their bank details to online applications. Addressing the pressing concern of financial security, Plaid leverages compelling case studies to showcase the remarkable transformations their clients experience.

Take Plaid’s case study of Betterment, for example. 

The study begins by stating the goal that the customer is trying to achieve, which is to “onboard new users and drive engagement.” Right next to the goal is company details, and followed below is a singular problem and its solution.

The case study continues by keeping the business’ desired result front and center and offers a generous outlook on the SaaS business.

The core process of how Plaid helps Betterment is cleanly laid out, which is a brief version of a ten-page white paper. 

What follows are several benefits that Plaid offered to Betterment. 

Plaid’s subtle yet effective product integration and clear, well-organized process make it simple for customers facing similar challenges to envision the solution.

2. SalesHandy

SalesHandy is an email automation software that personalizes high-volume cold emails. The company heroes client success stories for its case studies and opens the heading with their wins. 

Check out this B2B case study example from Sedin’s case study published by SalesHandy.

Readers need context, and case studies should always begin by outlining the exact problems their product or platform aims to solve. 

Here, SalesHandy expertly introduces us to Sedin’s use case and the challenges that the business is facing.

After a lengthy context, the case study highlights Sedin’s core challenge in the words of its personnel. 

This personable approach ropes readers in and lets them empathize with Sedin’s challenges. 

With a single scroll in, SalesHandy lays out the solutions to Sedin’s core challenges and integrates its product. 

This highly detailed case study covers all corners and includes the exceptional results achieved in record time. SalesHandy closes the study with a word from the character already introduced to the readers. 

SalesHandy doesn’t shy away from giving a detailed account of its process, which is crucial for highly technical products and enterprise packages that involve multiple decision-makers. 

B2B Case studies, first and foremost, should be written in a language that your ICP understands. 

Playvox is a customer service platform that helps businesses streamline business operations. 

This industry-specific case study of Sweaty Betty by Playvox addresses unique challenges within a niche industry, such as account assessment times for retail and online shops. 

The case study starts with the results it achieved for Sweaty Betty. 

The case study follows a straightforward, albeit impactful, challenges-solution-results format as we scroll down. 

But instead of listing out solutions in bullet points, Playvox uses customer voice to present the transformation that Sweaty Betty went through. 

With this formatting, Playvox doesn’t have to tout the platform’s usefulness. Sweaty Betty is doing it for them. 

4. Base Search Marketing

We promised diverse case studies, and here is a stellar B2B case study example of a single deck case study of Shine Cosmetics by Base Search Marketing.  

Base Search Marketing is a boutique link-building and SEO agency that works with startups and mid-level businesses. 

This case study, which can be reviewed as a brochure, gives you an overview of the customer and lays out the challenges that the business is facing. 

You’ll notice how the study uses the CEO’s quote to mention a pretty universal problem that most startups face: “limited resources.”

By highlighting the results in the left tab and laying out the process on the right side, this case study does a masterful job of covering all corners and telling a desirable customer success story.

Another approachable form of case study is slide decks, which you can present in boardrooms and meetings and act as a sales pitch. 

Loganix nails it with its case study deck for rankings.io. 

If you have a complicated product or service requiring an in-depth explanation, then using this format would be a great option. 

The solution, stated in simple bullet points, drives the message home.

Fewer words. Cleaner decks.

Using this methodology lets the audience walk through the case study with visuals, bullet points, and concise text. 

6. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a SaaS leader in the social media space, and this Outcome-led Case Study proves just why it is so good at capturing the markets.

The study kicks off with a result-forward headline, piquing the interest of readers who are interested in getting similar outcomes. 

There’s much to appreciate in this succinctly written case study, but the headlines get our attention and hold it.

With every scroll, results are presented to you in the form of graphs, quotes, and visuals. 

The study ends with a quote from the customer, which repeats the outcome stated in the headline. 

Leading remote teams is a challenge that numerous teams will face moving forward. CoSchedule makes operations easy for these teams, and it doesn’t shy away from stating just how through its case study. 

7. Wizehire

Case studies have evolved from lengthy blocks of text confined to PDFs to a new digital era emphasizing impact over verbosity.

Wizehire’s succinct case study is a prime example of this shift. It uses fewer words to create a powerful impression.

From the very first page, the case study introduces us to Kris, the customer and central figure of the story. Without the need for extensive scrolling, we quickly grasp vital details about Kris: his role, employee turnover, location, and industry. 

In the second slide, we are immediately taken to the solution that Kris got by working with Wizehire. 

The case study ends with a passionate testimonial from Kris, who deeply believes in Wizehire. 

The case study has less than 300 words, enough for local entrepreneurs like Kris Morales, who want to hire talent but don’t have the resources for proper vetting and training. Until, of course, Wizehire comes along. 

8. FreshBooks

When a reader can see themselves in a case study, it takes them one step closer to wanting to try the product.

This case study by Freshbooks uses a beautiful personal story of an emerging entrepreneur. 

Using a deeply personal story, the study appeals to people who are just starting and aren’t accountants but suddenly have to deal with employee invoices and a dozen other bills. 

The text progresses in an interview-style study, with the customer taking the mic and illustrating the challenges that startups and small businesses face. 

This style works because readers crave insights directly from customers. Getting authentic testimonials is becoming increasingly challenging. Well-crafted case studies can be valuable substitutes, provided they seem realistic and from the heart. 

Featuring quotes or testimonials from satisfied customers throughout the case study adds to its credibility and authenticity. Just like this testimonial Case Study by Slack .

Slack is a giant in the realm of digital communication, with more than 20 million active users worldwide. However, it is tough to break into the market of group communications. After all, Slack competes with both WhatsApp and Microsoft Team regarding market share. 

To level the playing field, Slack features case studies from top entrepreneurs and market players who have been served well by it. 

Its case studies are laden with personal stories about how the platform boosts productivity. 

At the same time, the software also plugs in the “try for free” banner to make sure that customers are aware of the inexpensive nature of the software.

It’s not easy to get such detailed testimonies from the C-suite, but when you’re Slack, businesses tend to make an exception. 

Some case studies are based on highly niche subjects, where nothing is at the top of the funnel. Kosli nails it with this highly technical case study of Firi.

Technical case studies are designed for niche audiences who are already aware of the problems that the software can solve. Case studies like these are clean and smart and come with solutions that have a counterpart solution. 

There is absolutely no fluff and nothing that can be a reason for C-suite executives to bounce from. 

It’s full of information-packed pages designed to hook the reader in and present the tool as a formidable solution to their problem. 

You’ll notice how they weave Kosli through the entire case study, and the first-person report comes from the customer. 

B2B Case Study Examples In Short

In the B2B SaaS industry, converting new leads and securing new business has become increasingly challenging. In this landscape, impactful content assets such as case studies and customer stories are sometimes the only things moving the needle. 

Crafting a compelling customer story empowers brands to enable potential customers to engage directly .

🚀 Customer stories evoke empathy from buyers

🤝 Customer stories help build up your relationships with vocal brand advocates

⬇️ Customer stories lower your prospects’ information cost

Once you’ve determined the most effective way to convey information that resonates with your leads, you can collaborate with your content and design teams to create impactful case studies to generate new business and prove your expertise and experience in the market. 

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Nestlé S.A.: Achieving a global cloud transformation

Explore nestlé’s journey with sap.

With sales of more than one billion products a day, Nestlé S.A. is one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies. And with over 2,000 brands in 188 countries, the company’s operations are as large as they are complex. Nestlé’s journey with SAP began 20 years ago when it standardized its global ERP systems. Today, cloud solutions from SAP help support the digitization of everything from advanced analytics, customer experience, sustainability tracking to workforce and talent management. 

Employees worldwide have a single point-of-entry to all SAP applications.

Increased system availability with a simplified global it infrastructure., terabytes of data moved to the cloud., the challenge, strengthen the core: building an it infrastructure fit for global scale and complexity.

To stay in the hearts and minds of consumers for 156 years as Nestlé has, you need to embrace change. But when your company sells more than a billion products each day and employs more than 275,000 people who manage over 2,000 brands in 188 countries, that’s easier said than done. 

Nestlé’s business models and routes to market are changing as constantly as the world around us. Consumer expectations have shifted, and digital commerce is accelerating quickly. Supporting a future ready workforce with great employee experiences and efficiency at scale.  

Nestlé knew that at the core of every successful company is a solid IT infrastructure built to utilize data and provide the business insights that guide decision-making. And so it began its digital transformation journey.

The Solution

Transforming with a seamless journey to the cloud.

To ensure a smooth, disruption-free transition to a more dynamic, reliable, and scalable infrastructure, Nestlé selected the RISE with SAP solution—a complete offering of ERP software, industry practices and outcome-driven services designed to help companies take advantage of cloud computing in their mission-critical, core systems. With its global cloud transformation, Nestlé is now able to automate business processes across its operations, create innovative business models at global scale and achieve greater agility and resilience. 

All of Nestlé’s cloud solutions are integrated and feed into its analytics tools allowing 275,000 employees worldwide to have a single point-of-entry to all SAP applications. This is a major game-changer, reducing the time and effort to manage IT systems. 

With help from SAP Services and Support , including SAP MaxAttention services and the SAP Solution Delivery Center group, Nestlé shut down nine data centers and more than 10,000 servers. This enabled the company to migrate thousands of applications, 300 instances of SAP software, and a total of 1,200 terabytes of data to the cloud. Despite the size and complexity of the project, it was delivered on time, on budget, and without disruption to the business.  

“What we have between the Nestlé IT teams and the SAP Services and Support team is a true partnership that delivered on an ambitious transformation program—one that’s critical to Nestlé’s future success in the marketplace,” Chris Wright, CIO. 

Optimizing recruitment to retirement processes

One of the first areas of Nestlé’s digital transformation was the transformation of HR systems. The company used SAP SuccessFactors to standardize and automate HR processes that support everything from recruitment to retirement. Nestlé also uses SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to develop custom extensions of SAP SuccessFactors for situations such as high-volume hiring during seasonal surges.  

By creating a hiring application that allows for batch handling and validation of employment data, Nestlé sped up the hiring process and made it much less cumbersome. Additionally, Nestlé now has a chatbot that speaks over 20 languages and answers simple and common questions from thousands of candidates each week without input (interactions) from HR professionals, providing a more seamless experience to the candidates and allowing the Nestlé team to focus on other work.

Giancarlo Pala Head of IT HR / Nestlé S.A. 

Transforming Customer Experience with One-Stop Shop

Nestlé is enhancing the customer experience for its business customers by streamlining the ordering, tracking, and invoicing processes. The existing approach relied on frequent telephone contact, resulting in time-consuming processes and potential errors. To overcome these challenges and adapt to the "Consumerization of Commerce," Nestlé implemented a global platform based on SAP Commerce Cloud. This platform eliminates the need for telephone contact by providing real-time insights into orders, invoices, and delivery information.

By offering a digital self-service portal, Nestlé improves the ordering and payment process, making it easier, quicker, and more efficient for retailers, wholesalers, supermarkets, and distributors. The unified one-stop shop built on SAP Commerce Cloud has revolutionized the previous customer service approach, reducing waiting times, enhancing flexibility, and ensuring transparency. This transition aligns with Nestlé's recognition of the importance of offering a seamless digital customer experience to stay competitive and meet evolving consumer expectations. The implementation of the platform not only benefits customers but also optimizes internal processes, increases flexibility, and supports Nestlé's sustainability efforts through paperless invoicing and better insights into orders, deliveries, and transportation.

Pablo Nill  Sr. Product Group Manager Customer Service Information Technology / Nestlé S.A. 

Better IT infrastructure means better business efficiency and agility

Nestlé has seen a range of benefits from its implementation of RISE with SAP, which has enabled a rapid and cost-effective cloud transformation, reducing costs, and improving the security and compliance of its applications. In simplifying its global IT infrastructure, the company has increased systems availability to 99.97% with outage times reduced from six hours to seven minutes. With SAP BTP, the company can now deploy digital assets 10 times faster than before, increasing business agility and reducing time spent managing IT. 

Business units such as human resources have seen improvements in their operations, too. Not only do they benefit from innovative applications like the multilingual chatbot, but increased automation has helped streamline and automate processes. Nestlé has also standardized the annual bonus and salary review processes across the company. Instead of taking a different approach in each country, 15,000 managers in more than 100 countries now use one common solution that has automated 95% of review processes.  

The transition to a customer-oriented approach and improved customer experience has yielded significant benefits. The reliance on the internal ERP system has diminished with the implementation of SAP Commerce Cloud, enabling easier connections and freeing the company from IT system constraints. This enhanced flexibility has led to smoother processes and better visibility of ongoing activities. Customers can now manage orders and inquiries independently, allowing the customer service team to focus on more complex customer questions or provide additional support to the sales force teams. 

Nestlé has strong commitments when it comes to sustainability and is using the information architecture of SAP to understand how its processes, supply chain, and manufacturing practices can be optimized to achieve these. 

Future Plans

Improving the consumer experience.

With Nestlé’s direct-to-consumer business increasing by more than 14% in the last year, the company is piloting SAP Commerce Cloud-based applications and portals to ensure that the customer has the same shopping experience buying directly from Nestlé as they do from a retailer.  

Nestlé plans to continue its journey to migrate its entire business operations to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition , with finance and procurement already live. 

Nestlé’s digital transformation with SAP is helping to achieve their mission to unlock the power of food to enhance quality of life for everyone. And with SAP cloud solutions at the core, there is nothing stopping the company from fulfilling its purpose to be a force for good. 

SAP helps Nestlé S.A. run better

Key business outcomes and benefits.

• Reduced time spent on IT, allowing the company to quickly adjust business models and enter new markets
• Increased reliability, resilience, and performance of the platform
• Enhanced visibility and transparency
• 70% of hiring tasks now automated, improving data quality and cutting processing time by up to 90% in some markets

Featured solutions and services

• RISE with SAP can transition your current ERP data and processes to the cloud with less risk and without compromise. The bundle of tailor-made ERP software, transformation services, business analytics, and partner expertise guides you along a personalized path to the cloud. 
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition is a ready-to-run cloud ERP that delivers the latest industry best practices and continuous innovation. 
• SAP Business Technology Platform is a unified, business-centric platform that helps companies decide confidently, act with integrity, connect processes, data, and experiences, and achieve continued business innovation
• SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite offers individualized experiences and strategic solutions – with mobile self-services available anytime, anywhere that empower employees to reach their full potential. 
• SAP MaxAttention can help you realize the full potential of your intelligent enterprise vision with on-site, premium access to trusted SAP experts, tools, and methodologies that can help deliver your expected outcomes successfully with SAP solutions.
• SAP Commerce Cloud solution provides a trusted e-commerce platform to help you innovate at scale and tap enterprise-wide data to boost profits and customer satisfaction.  

About Nestlé S.A.

Nestlé S.A. is a Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation. It is the largest publicly held food company in the world, measured by revenue and other metrics, since 2014. 

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New data shows consumers think customer experience is getting worse, not better

Customer experience should be getting better. Companies are increasingly claiming to be customer-centric and appointing Chief Experience Officers to focus on improving CX. They are investing in AI and other technologies to provide a faster, more seamless experience.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working.

Despite pouring money into artificial intelligence and automation to upgrade customer service, a new study reveals these technology investments are backfiring. Shockingly, the research indicates consumer satisfaction has plummeted over the past year rather customers reporting better experiences.

The market study by CCW Digital and Customer Management Practice asked 530 adult American consumers about their sentiments, preferences and purchasing habits. It revealed an alarming trend — a mere 7% of customers believe their service interactions improved recently, while 55% say experiences worsened.

These findings, which follow last year’s troubling results , are a wake-up call: Relying too heavily on chatbots and first-generation AI solutions risks alienating customers by diminishing human connection and empathy.

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Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024, customer frustrations boiling over.

The survey data reveals just how unhappy consumers have become with the service they're receiving. Beyond the tiny 7% who felt experiences improved, a startling 48% said they attempted to switch providers due to frustrations. Nearly 40% said they left negative reviews publicly shaming the companies.

A key driver of this frustration is the inability to resolve issues through channels that were supposed to enhance convenience. Only 26% of consumers expect to reach a successful resolution using messaging, while a paltry 17% have any faith in the value of chatbot or web self-service interactions. Chatbots in particular often seem more like a roadblock to reaching a human than a helpful tool to solve problems quickly.

Over a third of consumers take their complaints directly to the contact center, subjecting agents to inefficient and hostile conversations. And when they do reach an agent, just one in four customers believe that employee seems happy, engaged and knowledgeable.

Nearly 60% of disgruntled consumers share details of their bad experiences by ranting on social media or venting directly to friends and family. This is an obvious problem for companies trying to preserve and improve their brand reputation and loyalty.

The Absence Of Human Touch

A key element in consumers' growing dissatisfaction is an inability to quickly reach an empathetic human agent. The study found only 19% feel they can immediately access help from a live person. And even when they do connect with a human agent, consumers overwhelmingly find them to be disengaged and unhelpful.

This lack of human touch has emerged as a huge customer experience pain point in 2024. Fifty-two percent of respondents cite difficulty reaching a live agent as their top complaint.

Clearly, there's a disconnect between companies' investment in AI-powered automation and consumers' desire for genuine human interaction to solve problems.

When frustrated customers want a helpful conversation, they are often confronted with unhelpful chatbots and effortful self-service.

Is AI Adoption Backfiring?

As companies strive for efficiency in support, have they inadvertently made the customer experience worse? Spending on AI and automation would be justified if it actually solved issues more quickly and boosted customer satisfaction. Instead, the data suggests the move toward AI is actively repelling consumers.

Brian Cantor, Managing Director at CCW Digital, cautions against being seduced by AI's promise while neglecting human-centric strategies. "Technology should be deployed to enhance agents' capabilities, not replace their vital role in crafting positive experiences," says Cantor.

Companies may also be underestimating the unintended effects of rapid AI adoption internally. Heavy reliance on automation can damage agent morale, making them feel less valued. Their disengagement inevitably permeates their customer interactions, further increasing consumer frustration.

How To Improve CX and Customer Perceptions

To reverse these troubling trends, companies need to strike the right balance between humans and AI. Deploying ineffective AI as a barrier customers must cross to reach a human isn’t the answer.

Rather, AI can be used to enhance agents' knowledge and efficiency while still preserving their central role in delivering satisfying service.

Few customers are starved for human interaction. They want their problem solved or question answered with minimum time and effort expended. If there is an easy and effective self service option, they will use that option.

Take Amazon’s return process - customers can set up a return with a few clicks in a matter of seconds. That’s a fraction of the time it would take to interact with even the most friendly and helpful human.

How Should Companies Use AI In Customer Service?

AI has the potential to streamline self service by eliminating lengthy voice menus and rapidly offering solutions that exactly match the customer’s needs.

The key to improving customer experience is to deploy AI solutions only when the service they provide is faster and better than that offered by human reps. Viewing AI-driven self service options solely from a cost-reduction standpoint will continue to increase customer frustration and discontent.

Companies also need to invest in training their human agents to work with AI tools. Annoying and time consuming flow charts for customer interactions can be eliminated when AI can help diagnose problems and offer the most probable solutions.

AI is incredibly powerful when deployed strategically, but at the moment it isn’t a magic bullet for customer experience. To really move the needle on satisfaction, companies need to do two things:

• Deploy self-service solutions, AI-driven or not, only when they actually save the customer time and effort. Make reaching a human agent easy.
• Refocus on enabling authentic human connections, augmented by AI. A friendly, helpful human who can solve almost any problem in a minute or two is the Holy Grail of customer service.

Brands that structure interactions to be friendly and frictionless will be the brands that build customer love and long-term loyalty.

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Prediction: The future of CX

Companies of all stripes have invested heavily in tools and technologies to help them understand their customers more deeply and to gain the advantages of superior customer experience (CX). Yet as leaders strive to form a more complete picture of customer preferences and behaviors, they continue to rely on aging survey-based measurement systems that for decades have formed the backbone of CX efforts. Companies use these systems to track CX performance through brand or relationship surveys, “close the loop” on customer feedback via post-transaction surveys, and even plot strategic moves by attempting to mine the feedback from their regular surveys over time. Entire teams dedicate themselves to managing questionnaires and boosting response rates—and the resulting metrics can shape everything from employee bonuses and executive compensation to strategic investment decisions.

The trouble is, executives increasingly recognize that survey-based measurement systems fail to meet their companies’ CX needs—although surveys themselves are an important tool for conducting research. In fact, this article draws on our recent survey of more than 260 CX leaders from US-based companies of all sizes. 1 The online survey, conducted in collaboration with AlphaSights and Gerson Lehrman Group, was in the field from November 18, 2019, to January 15, 2020, and garnered responses from CX leaders at companies spanning more than a dozen industries including financial services, healthcare, high tech, logistics, retail, and travel. Ninety-three percent of these respondents reported using a survey-based metric (such as Customer Satisfaction Score or Customer Effort Score) as their primary means of measuring CX performance, but only 15 percent of leaders said they were fully satisfied with how their company was measuring CX—and only 6 percent expressed confidence that their measurement system enables both strategic and tactical decision making. Leaders pointed to low response rates, data lags, ambiguity about performance drivers, and the lack of a clear link to financial value as critical shortcomings.

A few leading companies are pioneering a better approach that takes full advantage of the wealth of data now available. Today, companies can regularly, lawfully, and seamlessly collect smartphone and interaction data from across their customer, financial, and operations systems, yielding deep insights about their customers. Those with an eye toward the future are boosting their data and analytics capabilities and harnessing predictive insights to connect more closely with their customers, anticipate behaviors, and identify CX issues and opportunities in real time. These companies can better understand their interactions with customers and even preempt problems in customer journeys. Their customers are reaping benefits: think quick compensation for a flight delay, or outreach from an insurance company when a patient is having trouble resolving a problem. These benefits extend far beyond the people typically thought of as “customers”—to members, clients, patients, guests, and intermediaries. Early movers in the world of customer-experience analytics herald a fundamental shift in how companies evaluate and shape customer experiences.

In this article, we explore how data and analytics are beginning to transform the art and science of customer experience. We present new research that brings clarity and a fact base to the shortcomings of survey-based measurement systems. We then examine how a few leaders have implemented data-driven CX systems and in turn reduced churn, boosted revenue, and lowered cost to serve. We end with insight on how to get started, including four key steps for CX leaders as they transition toward data-driven insight and action.

The benefits are not automatic. Those just starting out will face stumbling blocks and organizational resistance. But with commitment, even companies with rudimentary CX systems, limited data, and a shortage of data scientists can begin laying the groundwork to transform their CX programs and their customers’ experiences.

The CX programs of the future will be holistic, predictive, precise, and clearly tied to business outcomes. Evidence suggests that the advantages will be substantial for companies that start building the capabilities, talent, and organizational structure needed for this transition. Those that stick with the traditional systems will be forced to play catch-up in the years to come.

‘Survey says’: The shortcomings of traditional CX measurement

While surveys themselves are a valid means of gathering customer insight, they fall short as a management tool for measuring CX performance and identifying and acting on CX opportunities. For organizations to lead from a customer-centric position, they increasingly need a comprehensive view of the full customer journey, as well as the ability to obtain deep, granular insight on what is driving customer experience. They need immediate and individual signals in order to take action “in the moment” and to create relevant experiences for each customer, and they need to demonstrate that the experience enhancements they would like to invest in will result in positive ROI. Survey-based systems have four major flaws that make those critical tasks nearly impossible (exhibit).

• Limited: The typical CX survey samples only 7 percent of a company’s customers, providing an extremely limited view of what customers experience and value. In fact, only 13 percent of the CX leaders we surveyed expressed full confidence that their CX measurement system provides a representative view of their customer base.
• Reactive: Surveys are a backward-looking tool in a world where customers expect their concerns to be resolved increasingly quickly. Nearly two-thirds of respondents ranked the ability to act on CX issues in near real time as among their top three priorities, but only 13 percent of leaders expressed certainty that their organizations could achieve this level of rapid insight through existing systems.
• Ambiguous: Surveys often fail to reveal the root causes of customer sentiment. In fact, scores can vary based on many outside factors, including geographical bias and industry shocks, making it difficult to perform reliable root-cause analysis using surveys alone. Only 16 percent of CX leaders said that surveys provide them with granular-enough data to address the root causes of CX performance.
• Unfocused: As one executive at a large financial-services company put it, “The association between survey-based scores and business outcomes is not well understood, and, as a result, many parts of the organization simply claim a business impact from their CX initiatives with no real evidence.” Several companies have recently come under fire for basing investment decisions on a survey-based score alone. Remarkably, of the CX leaders we surveyed, only 4 percent said that their system lets them calculate the ROI of CX decisions.

Predictive customer insight is the future

Since survey-based systems became ubiquitous, the world of insight generation has transformed through impressive advances in the ability to generate, aggregate, and analyze data. Companies now have access to a broad array of data sets: internal data on customer interactions (both digital and analog), transactions, and profiles; widely available third-party data sets that cover customer attitudes, purchase behaviors and preferences, and digital behaviors, including social-media activity; and new data sets on customer health, sentiment, and location (in stores, for example) generated by the Internet of Things (IoT). Other business disciplines, including marketing and revenue management, have already transformed through the aggregation and analysis of these vast data sets. The contrast is stark: Why use a survey to ask customers about their experiences when data about customer interactions can be used to predict both satisfaction and the likelihood that a customer will remain loyal, bolt, or even increase business?

Why use a survey to ask customers about their experiences when data about customer interactions can be used to predict satisfaction?

Some CX leaders have taken the plunge and have begun making use of the data on offer, drawing valuable insights that can prompt alerts and guide swift action to improve customer experiences. While the specifics may vary across companies and industries, this approach centers on a predictive customer-experience platform that consists of three key elements:

Customer-level data lake

First, the company gathers customer, financial, and operational data—both aggregate data and data on individual customers. 2 Financial data could include historical spending, prices, and loyalty-program-redemption behavior, for example. The company processes these data and stores them in a cloud-based platform. Comprehensive, connected, and dynamic customer-level data sets allow the organization to map and track customer behavior across interactions, transactions, and operations. Whereas surveys reflect the views of a subset of customers at a single point in the past, these rich data sets encompass the full customer base and span the customer journey, thereby shedding light on the root causes of performance.

The data lake serves as the foundation for developing a rigorous understanding of customer experiences. The platform should be reliable throughout the organization, with clear and consistent mapping across all data sources and unique identifiers for customers, product lines, and other critical business input.

Predictive customer scores

The company develops analytics—often using several types of machine-learning algorithms—to understand and track what is influencing customer satisfaction and business performance, and to detect specific events in customer journeys.

The algorithms generate predictive scores for each customer based on journey features. These scores allow the company to predict individual customer satisfaction and value outcomes such as revenue, loyalty, and cost to serve. More broadly, they allow CX leaders to assess the ROI for particular CX investments and directly tie CX initiatives to business outcomes.

Action and insight engine

Information, insights, and suggestions are shared with a broad set of employees (including frontline agents) and tools (such as customer-relationship-management platforms) through an application-programming-interface (API) layer. For example, agents can receive alerts and notifications about the actions they should take to personalize customer experiences and improve CX outcomes. The API layer serves as a single source of truth, fueling recommendation engines based on both the data lake and customer scores. Importantly, the predictive platform, unlike survey-based systems, delivers timely insights and spurs swift action, both by employees and through digital interfaces.

Predictive CX platforms allow companies to better measure and manage their CX performance; they also inform and improve strategic decision making. These systems make it possible for CX leaders to create an accurate and quantified view of the factors that are propelling customer experience and business performance, and they become the foundation to link CX to value and to build clear business cases for CX improvement . They also create a holistic view of the satisfaction and value potential of every customer that can be acted upon in near real time. Leaders who have built such systems are creating substantial value through a wide array of applications across performance management, strategic planning, and real-time customer engagement.

Predictive CX platforms become the foundation to link CX to value and to build clear business cases for CX im­provement.

One leading credit-card company wanted to adopt a more omnichannel strategy and boost its performance in digital channels. It focused on building a CX data and analytics stack to systematically identify, improve, and track the factors influencing customer satisfaction and business performance across 13 priority journeys. It started by gathering interaction, transaction, and customer-profile data with a journey analytics platform to identify drivers of satisfaction for each journey, as well as areas where it could improve. The platform included data on repeat interactions, lead times, and how often customers hopped from one channel to another. It also encompassed more subtle factors, such as whether the company effectively handled negative outcomes and what communications took place at various points in time.

This analytics-driven approach gave the company a quantified and systematic view into the problems, opportunity areas, and channel interactions across millions of customers, enabling the organization to support a systematic journey-improvement cycle. The team used the analytics platform to focus its investments and operational efforts on the journeys and specific moments that made a difference for customers, and it ultimately reduced its interaction and operational costs by 10 to 25 percent as a result of the CX and digital transformation.

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Prioritizing CX efforts through intentional strategic planning is another promising use case for data-driven systems that allow CX leaders to understand which operational, customer, and financial factors are creating systemic issues or opportunities over time. One US healthcare payer, for example, built a “journey lake” to determine how to improve its customer care. The journey lake syncs four billion records across nine systems, spanning marketing, operations, sales, digital, and IoT. The resulting holistic customer view enabled the organization to identify operational break points—thresholds where patients often ask to speak with a supervisor or move to another channel to resolve an issue—and proactively reach out to patients through the website, emails, and outbound calls to settle the problem. It also used the data to develop a smarter digital migration strategy, targeting customers who had minimal engagement on digital channels and coaching them to use more self-service functions. The organization substantially increased digital adoption by focusing on the most significant pain points, such as prescription renewals; it reduced its costs by decreasing (by more than a quarter) the frequency with which customers turned to other channels after starting with digital.

Finally, thanks to the near-real-time nature of analytical insights, these new systems create a platform for proactive daily customer engagement. One leading airline built a machine-learning system based on 1,500 customer, operations, and financial variables to measure both satisfaction and predicted revenue for its more than 100 million customers every day. The system allowed the airline to identify and prioritize those customers whose relationships were most at risk because of a delay or cancellation and offer them personalized compensation to save the relationship and reduce customer defection on high-priority routes. A combined team of about 12 to 15 data scientists, CX experts, and external partners worked together for about three months to build the system and lead this first application, which resulted in an 800 percent uplift in satisfaction and a 60 percent reduction in churn for priority customers.

How to turn data into insight and action

The transition to predictive insight will not take place overnight. As our research shows, most organizations still rely on surveys to gauge customer sentiment. Leaders now have the opportunity to take their CX programs to the next level—starting from where their organizations are now. Based on our research on organizations that have successfully made the transition, we have identified four key steps to jump-start such CX transformations.

1. Work on changing mindsets: The transition will inevitably involve challenges, not least of which will be a mindset shift for both teams and CX executives. Leaders may feel that predictive systems are outside their purview, the domain of the IT department or a data-science team. But times are changing, and today’s CX leaders need to focus on data as they once zeroed in on a single CX score. Some may point to the fact that their organization has already done regression analysis on a few key performance indicators. It’s time to think bigger and bolder, and to build a system—not dabble in data.

The role of the CX leader is evolving, which means that executives will need to reposition themselves within their organizations. When asked about the biggest challenge with the current system, one chief experience officer responded: “People associate CX with marketing, not technology.” That is changing as more and more companies take up predictive analytics, and it’s up to CX leaders to help encourage the change in perception.

The CX team should define direction and strategy, but ensuring buy-in and excitement among the affected stake­holders will be key to scaling impact.

2. Break down silos and build cross-functional teams: CX functions often fall into the trap of creating their own silos within a company. To begin the transition, CX leaders need to better integrate with the rest of the organization.

Data owners will inevitably span operations, marketing, finance, and technology functions, so convening across senior leadership will be vital to ensure efficient data access and management. (And, of course, data scientists—not CX professionals—will be the ones writing the algorithms.) The CX team should define direction and strategy, but ensuring buy-in and excitement among the affected stakeholders will be key to scaling impact.

One travel-industry client, for example, began its data-driven system with a focus on delivering real-time enhancements to its customer-service operation because the CX team had a strong partnership with the service organization and could prove value quickly. The initial effort involved close collaboration: CX acted as the business owner, the data-science team developed the product, and the customer-service organization acted as the first recipient of an initial minimum viable product. Outside the core team, an advisory board including the COO, CFO, and chief marketing officer stayed informed of the progress and advised on future use cases so that when the initial pilot was successful, the COO was already on board for an additional use case in his organization. Even in the case of smaller-scale initiatives—for example, where an organization hires contractors rather than standing up an in-house data-science team—these strong, cross-functional relationships at both the development and steering-committee level will be vital to creating and scaling the CX insight engines of the future.

3. Start with a core journey data set and build to improve accuracy: Most organizations face challenges with data quality and availability—and without data, this transition is a nonstarter. The good news is that organizations can get started with basic customer-level data, even if the data are not perfect. The first step is to collect individual customer-level operational and financial data. A combination of customer profiles, along with digital and analog interactions, is usually a solid jumping-off point.

Teams should create a detailed journey taxonomy, including all the potential drivers of satisfaction for their customer base. The taxonomy can be used for hypothesis generation, leading to new measurable attributes for inclusion in the predictive model. These attributes—called data features in machine learning—can range from numeric properties, such as a customer’s annual spend, to binary properties, such as whether the customer purchased a product online or in a store. Over time, understanding which features are significant in the machine-learning model—and comparing those with the team’s hypotheses—can help organizations to recognize where data may be inaccurate or incomplete and to adapt their data-acquisition strategy accordingly. If data for certain features do not exist, teams can explore options to acquire new data sets (for example, credit-agency data) or apply new instrumentation to generate required features (for example, IoT sensors to map customer interaction points in physical environments). As the machine-learning algorithm ingests more data and generates its own insights, the data sets will become more robust—proving useful across multiple enterprise applications.

Ultimately, companies can look to integrate data from sources across the customer journey, including chat, calls, emails, social media, apps, and IoT devices. Regardless of the source, all data collection, storage, and use should follow privacy and cybersecurity best practices . (Notably, our colleagues have found that customer-data protection can serve as a source of competitive advantage as consumers become more careful about sharing data and avoid or stop doing business with companies whose data-security practices they don’t trust.) Organizations should follow regional data regulations and remove any variables related to protected classes, such as race and religion. All identifying information should be encrypted and anonymized before it is analyzed. Finally, regular risk reviews can help detect algorithmic bias  in CX systems. CX leaders are responsible for knowing what their organizations are doing to protect customer data, mitigate bias, and promote fairness in their predictive systems.

In the early days, it is important to have a clear view for how the insights will be applied and to focus on a few specific use cases that will create immediate return.

4. Focus first on the use cases that can drive quick value: Data-driven, predictive systems offer CX organizations a unique opportunity to tie CX strategies to tangible business value. In the early days, it is important to have a clear view for how the insights will be applied and to focus on a few specific use cases that will create immediate return. As a simple framework, organizations can review major sources of opportunity, pain points, or both across existing customer journeys and think through how a predictive system might create new solutions or enhance existing ones that may have a direct impact on loyalty, cost to serve, cross-sell, and up-sell behaviors.

For example, one company applied its predictive system to its issue-resolution journey after realizing that its contingency funds—which had previously been allocated uniformly across customers—could be applied more strategically. The company developed an algorithm that could identify high-priority customers as measured by lifetime value and recent experiences (such as the extent of delayed service the customer had experienced in the past month), and it used the algorithm to allocate contingency funds toward dissatisfied, high-value customers. This first use case proved successful, saving the organization more than 25 percent of its planned budget and paving the way for future applications. Leaders should ask themselves what use cases present a clear opportunity to drive value through a proof of concept so they can build momentum and gain support.

After years of serving as the benchmark for defining and refining a company’s customer-experience performance, survey-based systems are heading toward their twilight. The future of superior customer-experience performance is moving to data-driven, predictive systems, and competitive advantages are in store for companies that can better understand what their customers want and need.

Rachel Diebner is a consultant in McKinsey’s Dallas office, where Mike Thompson is a partner; David Malfara is a senior expert in the Miami office; Kevin Neher is a senior partner in the Denver office; and Maxence Vancauwenberghe is a partner in the New York office.

The authors wish to thank Victoria Bough, Harald Fanderl, Abhishek Gupta, Oliver Jakubiec, Marc Levesque, Nicolas Maechler, Evelyn Milde, Iwan Tanuwidjaja, Kelly Ungerman, and Elsa Yan for their contributions to this article.

This article was edited by Julia Arnous, an editor in the Boston office.

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Announcing Dynamics 365 Contact Center – a Copilot-first cloud contact center to transform service experiences

Jun 4, 2024 | Jeff Comstock - Corporate Vice President, Dynamics 365 Customer Service

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Today we are thrilled to announce the latest milestone in our journey towards modernizing customer service: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center , a Copilot-first contact center solution that delivers generative AI to every customer engagement channel. With general availability on July 1, this standalone Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution enables customers to maximize their current investments by connecting to preferred customer relationship management systems (CRMs) or custom apps.

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Modernizing service experiences with generative AI

Customer service expectations are higher than ever. It’s not only frustrating for customers to deal with long wait times, being transferred to the wrong agent or having to repeat themselves multiple times — it’s detrimental to business. When people have poor customer service experiences, over half of them end up spending less or decide to take their business elsewhere ( Qualtrics ).

Generative AI is transforming customer service and revolutionizing the way contact centers operate — from delivering rich experiences across digital and voice channels that enable customers to resolve their own needs, to equipping agents with relevant context within the flow of work, and ultimately unifying operations to drive efficiency and reduce costs.

We have experienced the transformational impact of generative AI firsthand with Microsoft’s Customer Service and Support (CSS) team, one of the largest customer service organizations in the world. Before the support team migrated to Microsoft’s own tools, CSS was previously using 16 different systems and over 500 individual tools — slowing down service, hindering collaboration and producing inefficient workflows. With Copilot as part of the solution , the CSS team achieved a 12 percent decrease in average handle time for chat engagements and 13 percent decrease in agents requiring peer assistance to resolve an incident. And more broadly , CSS has seen a 31 percent increase in first call resolution and a 20 percent reduction in missed routes.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center

Applying learnings and insights from our own Copilot usage, coupled with multi-year investments in voice and digital channels, Dynamics 365 Contact Center infuses generative AI throughout the contact center workflow — spanning the channels of communication, self-service, intelligent routing, agent-assisted service and operations to help contact centers solve problems faster, empower agents and reduce costs.

Additionally, Dynamics 365 Contact Center is built natively on the Microsoft cloud to deliver extensive scalability and reliability across voice, digital channels and routing while at the same time allowing organizations to retain their existing investments in CRM or custom apps.

Key Dynamics 365 Contact Center capabilities include:

• Next-generation self-service : With sophisticated pre-integrated Copilots for digital and voice channels that drive context-aware, personalized conversations, contact centers can deploy rich self-service experiences. Combining the best of interactive voice response (IVR) technology from Nuance and Microsoft Copilot Studio’s no-code/low-code designer, contact centers can provide customers with engaging, individualized experiences powered by generative AI.
• Accelerated human-assisted service : Across every channel, intelligent unified routing steers incoming requests that require a human touch to the agent best suited to help, enhancing service quality and efficiency. When a customer reaches an agent, Dynamics 365 Contact Center gives the agent a 360-degree view of the customer with generative AI — for example, real-time conversation tools like sentiment analysis, translation, conversation summary, transcription and more are included to help improve service, along with others that automate repetitive tasks for agents such as case summary, draft an email, suggested response and the ability for Copilot to answer agent questions grounded on your trusted knowledge sources.
• Operational efficiency : Contact center efficiency depends just as much on what happens behind the scenes as it does on customer and agent experiences. We’ve built a solution that helps service teams detect issues early, improve critical KPIs and adapt quickly. With generative AI-based, real-time reporting, Dynamics 365 Contact Center allows service leaders to optimize contact center operations across all support channels, including their workforce.

Here’s what customers are saying:

• “At 1-800-Flowers.com, we pride ourselves on exceptional service and continually raising the bar. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, we’re creating a best-in-class solution that furthers our mission and helps inspire people to give more, connect more, and build more and better relationships.” — Arnie Leap, CIO, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc.
• “MSC has always been known for the personal service that we give to our customers; Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center helps us elevate that customer-centric approach.”— Fabio Catassi, CIO, Mediterranean Shipping Company
• “For our support teams, efficient problem-solving and smooth customer interactions are key to delivering exceptional service. With Dynamics 365 Contact Center and by leveraging its AI capabilities, we see a future where our support teams will deliver that level of service every day.”— Stephen Currie, Vice President Support Operations, Synoptek

If you’re attending Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas, join me for my main stage panel on Thursday, June 6. Be sure to also stop by the Microsoft booth (#151) during the event to see Dynamics 365 Contact Center in action.

Stay tuned for the general availability of Dynamics 365 Contact Center on July 1.

Tags: AI , Microsoft Copilot Studio , Microsoft Customer Service , Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center

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Lisa, Abby, and Stefanie know college. They also know students. With over 30 years combined experience mentoring young people, they’ll show you why understanding yourself is the key to finding the right college. Each episode, hear trends, case studies, and interviews with students who have gone through it all - giving you valuable insight to survive the college application process and beyond. Hosted by Lisa Bleich, Abby Power, and Stefanie Forman, Partners of College Bound Mentor.

College Bound Mentor College Bound Mentor

• 5.0 • 13 Ratings
• JUN 10, 2024

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Welcome to College Bound Mentor! Lisa, Abby, and Stefanie know college. They also know students. With over 30 years combined experience mentoring young people, they’ll show you why understanding yourself is the key to finding the right college. In this pilot episode, you’ll hear what to expect from this podcast going forward, the most surprising trends of the 2024 college admissions season, how the Co-Hosts will approach next year differently, their advice for students as they begin the college application process, and some of the most impressive resume boosters they’ve seen. Subscribe to College Bound Mentor on your favorite podcast platform and learn more at CollegeBoundMentor.com

• © 2024 College Bound Mentor

Customer Reviews

Awesome podcast.

These short, informative episodes offer an insider’s glimpse into admissions trends and processes, perfect for both students and parents. I’ve discovered that a little bit of understanding can go a long way in setting expectations and easing anxiety. This podcast does both. I look forward to learning more!

These podcasts provide invaluable insight into the college application process and issues important to incoming freshmen!

I’m a CBMer

Love this podcast! The CBM team is suuuuper helpful & entertaining in every episode. What a treat for students & parents. Can’t wait to hear what they release next

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