Accenture began the engagement to help the company achieve high performance by identifying an exhaustive list of highly visible symptoms of customer disloyalty through a comprehensive set of diagnostic activities, including key stakeholder interviews, end-to-end process mapping, executive working sessions and analysis of customer verbatim comments. Based on this analysis, the team developed a set of hypotheses on the customer experiences and corresponding processes that had greatest frequency and impact on loyalty.
The team then tested the hypotheses through robust data analysis, which involved working with the company’s analytical team to build analytical models that helped distinguish customer “moments of truth” that either contribute to or erode loyalty. Customer “moments of truth” were defined as events that have a significant impact on the customer’s feelings about a company, and hence loyalty, and met a strict set of criteria related to timing, level of emotion or commitment and perception of fairness, among others.
Another key aspect of Accenture’s work involved the design and rollout of the Accenture Collaborative Innovation Solution—often referred to as the “innovation grapevine.” This patent-pending innovation sourcing process allowed Accenture to engage the company’s employees in generating additional insight around the envisioned customer experiences and supporting processes.
During the active pilot phase, the innovation grapevine generated a pipeline of more than 40 unique ideas that highlighted specific product and process issues, as well as broader ideas for improvement in the end-to-end customer experience. Many of those ideas corroborated analytical findings, and were selected for implementation planning as part of the recommended list of go-forward initiatives.
In addition to generating ideas for the program, the innovation grapevine fostered real-time collaboration and employee engagement and broader awareness for the company’s enterprise-wide customer loyalty program.