The Challenge

Our client, a $4.3 billion business and home services provider, derived most of its revenue from subscription-type solutions.  For this reason, customer retention was a huge driver behind the firm’s financial performance – but that metric wasn’t nearly as strong as the company thought it could be.

The Solution

We advised the internal team that was tasked with exploring approaches to reduce attrition and build loyalty.  We brought an external perspective to the table, to help the company see its operations through a customer lens and better understand how to guard against customer defections.

Among the services provided by Watermark were:

• Brand Development to reveal tangible ways in which the company’s brand could be brought to life in daily operations.
• Experience Engineering to pinpoint (and revise) business practices that were potentially driving customers away.
• Communications Simplification to help the firm articulate its sales pitch more crisply and concisely.
• Operations Improvement to help the company pinpoint process changes that would enhance the customer experience.
• Employee Experience Improvement by identifying “backstage” issues that hampered the staff’s best efforts to serve customers.

The Results

Our work helped to confirm many suspicions that the company had regarding attrition drivers, as well as reveal new issues that weren’t on the firm’s radar.  Benefits realized included:

• Sharper Focus.  A workshop for the team involved helped highlight the primary retention issues and orient everyone around a handful of key improvement initiatives.
• Deeper Insight.  Our perspective revealed practices that were hurting customer loyalty (and required remedy) as well as those that were strengthening loyalty (and deserved to be mimicked).
• Improved Retention.  Within a year of the project kick-off, customer retention improved 150 basis points, generating over $100 million in free cash flow.

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