3
Across the customer lifecycle: fulfilment, assurance, and billing and payments.
Case study · Consulting · Customer excellence
We fixed the pain points. We built the department that prevents them.
A mobile and fibre operator in the Gulf asked us to fix the operational problems its customers kept hitting. Two years on, the transformation programme we ran has become its permanent customer-excellence function — with a CX strategy, a measurement framework of 33 KPIs, and an initiative portfolio approved by every function in the company.
The arc
Programme, then department, then strategy.The legacy is not the pain points it fixed. It is a function with a mandate, a strategy, 33 numbers and a playbook — staffed by the operator's own people.
6×
Customers in their first three days were calling six times more often than the rest of the base — found, and fixed.
33
KPIs across four quadrants, from customer experience to return on experience.
10
Strategic initiatives approved across three horizons, each traceable to a corporate target.
The brief
Every department managed its own performance. Nobody owned the customer's.
The operator was growing fast on mobile and fibre, and running with an internal, functional focus. The symptoms were measurable: customers were calling close to once a year each — two to three times the regional benchmark for a comparable operator — and the company had no consolidated source of the customer's own perspective. We were asked to set up a transformation programme under the strategy and transformation office: find the main pain points across the customer lifecycle, fix them, and put in place the KPIs to prove it.
Phase one · The programme
data first, then the fixWe read the data. Then we bought a SIM.
The programme opened with discovery sessions across every commercial, technology and support function — and with the data: calls and tickets per customer, call reasons, work orders, digital drop-off. Then we walked the journey ourselves. Buying a visitor line as a mystery shopper surfaced more than twenty gaps in one afternoon, from a welcome message whose link did not work to network settings that never arrived.
What the data said
- Customers in their first three days called six times more often than the rest of the base — nearly a third for network settings that should have been pushed automatically
- Around 15% of digital-channel subscriptions were never activated after payment; roughly 2,000 refunds in one quarter for failed plan changes
- Nearly half of abandoned online purchases stopped at the payment step
- A fifth of all calls asked for account information self-service should have answered
The initiatives were scoped to cover around 70% of contact reasons and 85% of tickets.
How the fix was organised
Three workstreams — service fulfilment, service assurance, and billing, payments and collections — each with a lead from our team and a customer-excellence advocate seconded from every function it touched, sharing ownership of the KPIs. A steering committee chaired by the chief executive met fortnightly, with an independent business-intelligence view of performance, so nobody marked their own homework.
Billing went first: nineteen initiatives closed in the first phase, from the dunning cycle to every notification a customer receives. Billing work orders fell by more than half, and billing tickets by more than a third, by the end of the programme's first quarter.
Phase two · The department
A programme fixes symptoms. The client wanted a function.
A year in, the programme had done what a programme does: fixed validated pain points — bottom-up, tactically, collaboratively. The leadership wanted what a programme cannot give: strategic direction, consistency of experience, and root causes addressed rather than symptoms. We proposed converting the programme into a permanent customer-excellence department and ran the transition: five deliverables over two quarters — the CX strategy, a measurement framework evolving the programme's KPIs into strategic, operational and quality-of-service metrics, customer-journey principles and level-1 journeys for mobile and fibre, a transfer roadmap for the key initiatives, and the department's operating model, from organisation and job descriptions to governance and processes. The commercial function's own team worked with us daily, reviewed every deliverable before it went to the sponsor, and took ownership as the transition completed.
Phase three · The strategy
top-down and bottom-up at onceBuilt from the corporate strategy above and the programme's scar tissue below.
We assessed the operator's CX maturity on an industry-standard model, mapped where every in-flight and planned initiative would land in three years, and identified what was needed to close the gap. What the committee approved:
Direction
A vision, mission and set of CX values guiding both how experiences are designed and how they are operated, with governance through a standing customer-excellence committee.
Measurement
33 KPIs across four quadrants — customer experience, focus on experience, return on experience and employee experience — phased so the basic set is live before the advanced set is built.
Portfolio
Three strategic pillars — loyalty, brand and productivity — each with three programme streams, and ten initiatives across three horizons, every one traceable to a corporate-strategy target.
Blueprints
Aspirational customer journeys as the template for future touchpoint design.
The method itself
A team playbook and six how-to guides, from interviewing stakeholders to assessing journeys against minimum standards — so the department can run the method without us.
Why it was adopted
Each initiative went to its owning function first: consumer, business, IT and HR reviewed and approved theirs before the strategy went to the committee — which is why it was adopted rather than shelved.
What the client gets
Pain points found by data, fixed across functions
The main operational problems across the customer lifecycle — selected by volume and impact, fixed by cross-functional teams, and measured.
A permanent function with a mandate
A customer-excellence department with backing from the top and ownership shared across every business unit — staffed by the operator's own people.
A strategy with a line of sight
From each initiative to a corporate-strategy target, and a measurement framework that links experience to churn, revenue and cost to serve — so the function can defend its budget with its own numbers.
The method, in its own hands
Playbook, guides, journeys and governance — written down and handed over, not walked out of the building when the consultants left.
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