Three Cost Reduction Success Stories Powered by Experience Programs
Customers have more complex expectations than ever before. They want seamless, memorable, and down-right enjoyable experiences every time. But to experience professionals, empowering these kinds of interactions is anything but easy, and it often means investing even more money. However, better experiences don’t have to mean higher costs. In fact, effective and efficient experience programs can power serious cost reduction for brands.
In the second episode of Pearl-Plaza’s “XI Expert Take” series, Senior Director of Strategic Insights Radi Hindawi sits down to discuss how brands can utilize their experience ecosystem to improve costs (and ultimately boost their bottom line). Radi works one-on-one with brands to leverage data from their customers, employees, and more to detect areas of friction and inefficiency that are causing revenue drain. Once these areas are identified, he helps brands take action, make changes, and delight their customers.
It’s safe to say that Radi has many success stories to tell, so we’re going to highlight three in our post today. Let’s get started!
Leading Financial Services Brand Focuses in to Save Costs
Radi recently worked with a prominent financial services brand to clearly define its vision, set objectives, and then create a focused action plan to develop its digital experience.
Before the pandemic, most financial services companies had a digital experience roadmap. However, COVID-19 kicked those initiatives into high gear. This financial services brand even experienced quadruple the amount of digital interactions practically overnight! The team was frantic to reduce friction, continue driving value, and to keep costs down. At first, they were willing to take any and every possible action, but by leveraging the intelligence from their CX ecosystem, Radi and the team were able to pinpoint exactly which levers to pull to achieve the best outcome.
And the results speak for themselves. By reducing friction and removing inefficient processes, the brand was able to reduce spending by 22%, which ultimately enabled it to invest in further digital innovation.
Major Retailer Reveals Savings with Data from Everywhere
Our next use case comes from a retail client Radi has recently consulted with. Like many businesses in its industry, the retailer was hit hard by COVID-19 quarantine protocols. As a result, it was looking to cut business costs as much as possible.
The Pearl-Plaza Strategic Insights Team was brought in to work with the brand’s executive team to run linkage and cost analysis with data—solicited and unsolicited—from anywhere and everywhere. Over the course of their work, the team realized that a surprising amount of the business’s costs were due to one element: employee churn. In fact, employee churn had been steadily increasing year over year. The team had found their focus!
Over the next few months, the brand was able to rethink the employee experience to identify why employees were leaving and then take action to alleviate those pain points. And, as employees stay longer, costs are getting steadily lower, meaning this process was a win for the business and employees. (Check out this video to see why it’s a win for customers too!)
Food Services Brand Scales Back Ineffective Programs
We already discussed this earlier, but with the global pandemic came increased digital experience spending for brands. This is especially true for food service brands that needed to adapt quickly to start takeout, curbside pick up, and delivery initiatives.
For one Pearl-Plaza client, the costs associated with these initiatives practically skyrocketed. It wanted to cut costs, but at the expense of losing valued employees. The brand consulted with Radi and his team and were able to find an alternative solution: the brand reviewed promotional deals to see which were popular and which were underutilized, then eliminated the dead weight from there. By scaling back on ineffective processes, the brand was able to reallocate resources into new, necessary initiatives that kept its business thriving.
Experience Improvement Leads to Cost Reduction (and Business Success)
The bottom line here is that when you put the right experience program in place, it can be the final push that gets your business across the finish line with goals and KPIs. You might be asking yourself, “how do I know if I have the right experience program?” Well, the answer comes down to whether your initiatives, priorities, and greater strategy are geared toward measuring and managing your experience, or if they are designed in a way that inspires action, transformation, and ultimately improving your experiences. Between those two, you want to aim for the latter.
The stories in this article are proof that an Experience Improvement (XI) approach can directly impact your bottom line and boost cost reduction (and if you ask us, we think they’re pretty incredible). If you want to learn more about how you can imitate this success with your own program, watch the full XI Take video, “How to Use Your CX Ecosystem to Improve Costs & Experiences,” here!
