To increase the loyalty of its customers, a multi-billion dollar telecommunications company decided to launch a persona-centric customer loyalty program across all of its residential service offerings.

After spending several million dollars were spent on the program, the program stalled. Business needs, customer imperatives, and profitability targets were not met – leading to a much higher loss. As the program was not in place – customer retention targets were not met, and some of the customers were lost to competitors.

After diagnosing the situation, we uncovered several root causes that led to the program being at a standstill and why it could not proceed further. Along with the client, we revisited stakeholder engagement and established a more effective governance structure that ensured proper participation and much more optimal and timely decision making. We also looked and addressed specific reasons why the program failed. One of the key reasons was that while the delivery was in flight, operational expectations (business and technology) were not formalized, and the respective staffing was not acquired and on-boarded. When that roadblock was addressed, we identified business and technology owners and clarified their responsibilities. Executives representing all of the key impacted stakeholder groups were invited to participate in the governance structure to properly steer the course. As a result, the program was successfully recovered, and ongoing program operations were successfully taking place.