How This Senior Program Manager Turned Customer Insights into a Game-Changing Tech Solution

Yeah, definitely, and, and one example that, that comes out uh from my resume is, you know, in in this industry, we, we're really moving towards using technology to boost our our customer experience um rather than just providing hardware and chemicals, providing a better customer experience overall. And uh one way that that uh we looked ahead and wanted to do this was um. Modernizing some of the tech capabilities that we offered, so, um, our company had had brought in, uh, essentially, uh, these IBM consultants to do quote unquote a digital transformation of our, of our team. Um, no, I had for a long time pushed for a system where our customers, if they had supply chain issues, field service requests, uh, technical consulting needs, um. Instead of, you know, emailing that via Outlook, that getting lost, we're not really tracking response times, etc. Could we do this, uh, the most simple way that I thought of was using, using an app that we would be able to roll out to our customers that would, uh, really help them see what resources we offered and what businesses that we were operating in, um. Ahead of time, so, uh, you know, when the IBM consultants came in and they started doing their storyboarding, customer experience journey, etc. uh, you know, I, I really helped push this idea. Uh, what this, uh, what, what this tool would look like, and, and luckily for, for, for me pushing that idea, I was placed as basically help the our, our lead, uh, company representative to work with them on that piece of applications and. We conducted 30+ customer interviews highlighting what their key user needs would be on this product with them, um, and you know, IBM built out like an MVP and, uh, you know, me being in sales, obviously, I helped pitch this idea to them, and, and they were excited. This would have put us leagues ahead of our competition, um, that we're still focused on providing essentially just the hardware and chemical solution. To where we are now, you know, providing them a resource and a tool to help them visualize what everything we offer to them in one place is and uh help them manage, um, you know, their systems a lot more effectively.

Yeah, the agitation piece was a bit, uh, one of the key issues that I faced in sales and I constantly pushed for was, hey, you know, we always talk about our performance in um in terms of chemicals we sell and our performance in terms of hardware we sell. But our customers. Catch, sorry, our competitors were catching up in both these aspects, uh, pretty consistently, and we were always having to come down on price in our sales negotiations to essentially uh rerun these contracts, etc. and, We had several major accounts that were coming up for renewal, and coming down on price would have significantly hurt our, our margins more, so, uh, one of the ways we helped pitch this change was, OK, you know. Quantifying once again, not just on the reliability and and hardware piece that our business was so used to looking at, but saying that, hey, a better customer relationship can mean that hey, we can convert our contracts and renew them without having to come down on price as much, but to do that, we really need a competitive edge that, that, that we're lacking. Um, so we, we kind of helped scope out a business case to, to, to implement that, um, first, you know, with IBM we looked at what the cost of this program was, and yes, there was like a sticker shock, uh, to our, to, to our company, um, but from our customers' interviews, we were able to, you know, quantify in terms of service, what the enthusiasm level for this product would be, and, um. Uh, you know, we use some conjoint analysis to determine the willingness to pay for, for this that we, that we, um. That that we use to build our business case as well.

Yeah, the one specific metric that we used was, OK, hey, uh, these are, um. What our customers are currently facing an issue with, and essentially what their level of satisfaction was with our current service offering, um, 2, what the cost of this project would be. And then 3, the main part was, you know, how we could what the incremental increase in customer satisfaction that, that we could um expect to see after implementing this new service, and for that, we did have to use a little bit of assumptions, but that came grounded based on customer news we did, and the initial MPV that we rolled out to customers to uh to help them see what the benefits they would be getting would be.

Yeah, uh, the hard number that we would, that we would look at would be what, what is our renewal rate in terms of the account that we have, um, so, uh, you know, we're, we're an enterprise business, we, we have 10 accounts, and in each of these accounts we might have 50 or so applications, um. Our customers are always looking to cut, cut down on costs, and, uh, each time. You know, and are we able to boost that renewal rate to where our customers stick with, with us as their key supplier from year to year, um, so, so that is essentially what we ended up scoping out was what is the impact to our renewal rate, and from that renewal rate, we could get into, OK, this is the, uh, this is the dollar amount that this customer experience brings, bring, brings to us.

Right, uh, in, in this procedure, um, one thing that we saw with for our biggest accounts we were the most successful, uh, in our biggest accounts typically we would,

Yeah, yeah, um, so in, in, in our biggest accounts, typically, what we would end up renewing was about 70% of our key applications a year over year, um, once we were able to roll this out into our biggest accounts where we were targeting, uh, for, for growth, uh, we saw that jump up to about 80% of uh of uh applications that, that we were renewing. Now what that means on a, on a dollar term for our biggest account that bring in about 20 to $30 million in revenue a piece, um, you know, you're looking at 2 to $3 million of incremental gains, um. By rolling out uh this better customer experience journey. OK.