How AI unlocked $100M+ in customer engagement opportunities for a food and beverage titan

Our Impact

With existing technology, our client has been able to generate incremental improvements in the business value, productivity, and customer experience of its customer service and field service functions. But a digital world demands bold change. When generative AI emerged, executives had questions: What’s possible, now? How should we go about it? And does it fundamentally alter how they use business process outsourcing (BPO) services? 

This client has trusted West Monroe over the years for advice on its customer experience strategy. Executives knew we could find the answers, even for a new and fast-evolving discipline such as generative AI. Why? Because of our expertise in guiding the journey to be digital and our laser focus on capturing value. 

The Full Story 

The Challenge

Like many companies, this organization has found it challenging to continuously evolve customer experience and create the kind of stellar experiences that drive loyalty and engagement. Ultimately, this could limit growth potential.  

With the emergence of generative AI, executives wondered about the potential to transform the way customer service and field service teams interact with their customers. Could generative AI improve team productivity and effectiveness? And could that lower churn, increase revenue realization per customer, and drive revenue growth? 

There was another question: With a significant outsourcing footprint in its customer service function, could and should the client incentivize the service provider to improve efficiency, boost productivity and increase sales per customer using generative AI? 

An Undeniably Different Approach

Working closely with our client, we created a strategy for using generative AI in one business unit – targeting key business metrics such as revenue growth, customer satisfaction, resource productivity and cost efficiencies.  

Instead of leading with the technology and forcing it to fit, we asked: What does the business need, and how can the technology help us achieve that? To answer those questions, we facilitated brainstorming workshops that generated more than 85 viable ideas. We quantified the financial impact and return on investment, and used “baseball cards” to prioritize the eight highest-potential applications (“use cases”) for generative AI. 

Then, we studied these further to pick three opportunities with the greatest potential ROI:

1. Sentiment analysis of customer interactions recorded in calls, chats, emails, and surveys. 
2. A chatbot “assistant” for customer service representatives that provides information to callers (customers or internal sales teams) to improve first-call resolution. Such generative AI-enabled assistants can deliver 12% to 15% productivity improvements within contact centers. 
3. Contract creation and summarization for generating customer contracts based on customer specifications, saving the client’s field sales teams time when onboarding a new customers. 

Our strategic sourcing experts analyzed the company’s customer service outsourcing contract for opportunities to increase value through use of generative AI. What we found: the contract structure can be altered, introducing a new productivity and incentive model that would ensure improved collaboration with the service provider to drive labor efficiency and productivity using generative AI solutions, and lowering the contract spend over time.  This effort would yield hard dollar savings and mitigate the impact of the inflationary labor market.

This is how we were able to deliver action-ready insight – in just weeks:

• Collaborating with client stakeholders every step of the way – encouraging internal ownership of the results 
• Using business metrics that company leaders understand and use to guide operations 
• Reviewing data and system architecture to make sure the company is able to support these generative AI capabilities – before it begins building them

Real Results

Our work delivered the answers our client wanted. Once implemented, the eight most promising generative AI use cases could collectively produce $130 million in annualized value over 3 years. The three top uses, alone, could generate over $100 million in value over 3 years – $70 million in revenue growth and $30 million in productivity improvements. By enabling customer and field service teams to focus on sales rather than administrative work, generative AI can help reduce customer churn, produce higher value per order, and improve productivity. 

The value of our work didn’t stop there. Our approach fostered critical internal consensus around the AI vision, goals and priorities – key for to moving from idea to execution and, ultimately, value.  

Finally, with a framework it can use to develop generative AI strategies for other business units, this company is ready to begin multiplying the potential. We are now helping them execute on the identified ideas.