Customer Experience + Engagement

• Customer Experience Strategy + Design
• Marketing Strategy + Operations
• Customer Analytics + Segmentation
• Sales + Contact Center Effectiveness
• Multichannel Brand Execution

Customer Experience Strategy + Design

Differentiation today goes beyond product features and service offerings; it requires providing a positive and unique "experience" across every interaction with a brand. To address this idea, North Highland's approach starts with a deep understanding of your target audience to identify their needs across their entire interaction lifecycle. This insight drives the development of a strategy that ensures needs are addressed and touchpoints are designed to achieve the right level of engagement.

To improve customer retention for a global technology client, North Highland led the analysis and development of personas and designed all their touchpoints to account for the unique needs of each persona. Development of a future state persona also guided the new product development group in defining their next generation product. For a global consumer products company, monitoring the social networking behavior of their consumers led to the development of a social media strategy and the execution of award-winning tactics that have allowed social media to become a key component of their brand experience.

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Marketing Strategy + Operations

Rapid changes in how humans interact create a challenging environment for marketing, not only because of the tools used but because individuals' relationships with brands are evolving to be more of a dialog and more participatory. North Highland's objective, analytical approach to marketing strategy begins with understanding goals and audiences, which then allows for matching to the right channel, identifying required capabilities and defining the appropriate messages. Our experience in improving the operational efficiency of marketing organizations acknowledges the pressure marketing has been under to do more with less, and utilizes our broad execution skills and functional knowledge.

A consumer products client desired to improve speed-to-market for packaging innovations; our expertise with process improvement and technology helped them determine which issues could be solved by technology and which were process or organizational. Ultimately, launch speed was improved through a new application and processes. A telecommunications company needed a revised strategy related to its legacy products because of the emergence of newer technologies; our market analysis and revised positioning led to a strategy that focused on core customers and unique product attributes to reduce the impact of alternative products.

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Customer Analytics + Segmentation

Our digital, hyper-connected world creates the promise of one-to-one interactions with highly engaged customers. However, that promise is separated from reality by a mountain of data, which needs to be analyzed and converted into operational capabilities before mass customized communications, products and services become commonplace. North Highland utilizes methods for creating customer insights that range from the most complex quantitative techniques to qualitative analysis to develop specific, actionable recommendations. The combination of our analytical capabilities and operational execution skills ensures that insights are put into practice.

For a cable company that needed to reduce churn, we developed predictive models that identified those most likely to churn and designed proactive tactics to mitigate issues that led to churn. We then supported the operational execution of those tactics to ensure the benefits of the analytics were realized. We helped a hospitality company identify segments of its business customer base that have the highest propensity to return as leisure customers, to improve the business/leisure mix. The segmentation process allowed for new marketing activities that were more cost-effective and targeted only those segments with the highest propensity to buy.

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Sales + Contact Center Effectiveness

Top line revenue growth and superior customer interactions are the product of clear strategies executed well. Sales effectiveness begins with aligning marketing and sales around common goals, which leads to selling the right product or service to the right customer through the right sales channel. Our approach to contact centers combines looking at traditional measures and new techniques – such as our widely recognized and adopted Support Center Opportunity and Risk Evaluation (SCORE™) method – to create greater value and improved interactions. Across these areas, our execution techniques address all of the people, processes and technology components required to successfully execute the strategy.

We implemented an improved sales call planning and routing approach that contributed to a 66% increase in sales, based on a 44% increase in sales interactions, for the fastest-growing accounts of one of our clients. For a large, national non-profit organization, we developed a future state vision and a five-year sales strategy roadmap to help transition them to a more customer-focused organization and increase donations. We worked with a major telecommunications company, greatly reducing the number of centers in its network while increasing effectiveness and reducing costs. In the public sector, we helped take one state's Driver's License Operations from a customer service nightmare to a first-rate example of how customers should be served.

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Multichannel Brand Execution

The speed at which market needs must be known, translated into innovations, launched, and monitored to gauge success is constantly increasing.  Similarly, the ability to execute requires increasing integration across the organization and with third parties, and the importance is heightened by social media, which gives everyone a megaphone to publicize when there's a gap between a brand promise and operational realities.  At North Highland, our breadth of capabilities across all operational functions allows us to assist organizations in driving brand execution across multiple channels.

A global beverage company created a consumer loyalty program that met with initial success. Continued success, however, required restructuring the cost model of the program and engaging the brand teams to more fully utilize the program as part of their brand strategies.  The result was a simplified program structure – for both consumers and operations – that reduced operating costs even as the program grew, and a program strategy that better integrated with brand plans. A retailer's product line review resulted in major fixture and assortment changes that needed to be implemented in over 2,000 locations in three months. North Highland worked with the primary supplier to plan and execute this national reset to regionalize assortments, improve inventory management and consumer pricing, and establish a sustainable category management capability. The new processes have reduced data errors and stock-outs and have had a positive impact on sales, as well as built a repeatable category reset process.

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