The Challenge

Our client was a $2 billion insurance and financial services firm serving both individual and business customers.  

The company operated in an industry that was becoming increasingly commoditized. They knew they wanted to differentiate themselves through customer experience, but didn’t know where or how to start. 

As a result, their CX improvement efforts were largely stalled as executives debated which improvements to target and in what order.

The Solution

Using our proprietary “Customer Experience Reality Check” we dissected the company’s current customer experience, identifying all of the live, print and digital interactions that comprised it.  

Using a variety of techniques, we diagnosed the quality of those interactions, pinpointing the highs and lows in the experience.

We then developed a comprehensive Customer Experience Improvement Roadmap, detailing the actions that would enable the firm to achieve small, credibility-building wins while also investing in longer-term improvements.

Among the services provided by Watermark were:

• Journey Mapping to inventory and assess the current customer experience.
• Mystery Shopping to secure an unfiltered view of the experience, from the customer’s perspective.
• Experience Engineering to define the future state, enhanced customer experience.
• Simplification to make it more effortless for customers to interact with the company.
• Operations Improvement to develop detailed recommendations for process redesign.
• Brand Development to identify aspects of the company’s value proposition to accentuate.
• CX-Ray to address workplace obstacles that hindered employees’ best efforts to deliver a consistently great customer experience.

The Results

The Customer Experience Reality Check and CX-Ray yielded over 200 detailed, prioritized recommendations for improving the firm’s customer experience, approximately 40% of which were implemented within eighteen months of the assessment.  Benefits realized included:

• Clarity of direction.  The executive team and larger organization were now able to rally around a manageable set of short-term actions, as well as a longer-term playbook.
• Actionable recommendations.  The assessment provided very specific guidance on potential improvements, enabling the firm to pursue many of them without outside assistance.
• Quick wins.  By triggering some quick, low-cost improvements, the project built credibility for the firm’s customer experience strategy in the eyes of customers and employees alike.
• A boost in retention, revenue and shareholder value.  During Watermark’s time working with the company, customer retention rose by 500 basis points, revenue increased 43%, net income grew 700%, and the firm’s stock return outperformed its industry index and the broader market by double-digits.

Ready to build your company’s Customer Experience Roadmap?  Work With Us to get started.

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