Case Studies
Real mandates. Measurable outcomes. The following case studies document the commercial results of selected Experience Transformation engagements across sectors, geographies, and programme scales.
Additional case studies available on request · All client relationships subject to confidentiality obligations
BellSouth Corporation, a Fortune 100 multi-state telecommunications company, had experienced two consecutive failed marketing-led campaigns that significantly underperformed on ROI and eroded confidence in their existing consulting partners. A new engagement was commissioned — initially budgeted at $800K — to relaunch a business and consumer product line across a range of bundled services.
What followed was a complete reimagining of the brief: rather than delivering another isolated campaign, the Experience Transformation team identified the need for a fundamentally different approach — and expanded the engagement into a comprehensive enterprise-wide digital and operational transformation that became one of the most commercially impactful programmes in BellSouth's history.
This was BellSouth's third attempt at driving meaningful digital acquisition and retention. The previous two campaigns had failed to meet ROI expectations, and the organisation's confidence in external partners was at a low point. The initial brief was narrow: a four-month, $800K consumer marketing campaign targeting new and existing customers aged 18–49 across bundled product services.
The real challenge was deeper. BellSouth's customer engagement model was structurally inefficient — over-reliant on call centre agents, lacking a coherent digital channel strategy, and without the CRM infrastructure needed to understand or act on customer behaviour at scale.
The team anchored the strategy on three interdependent pillars, each designed to deliver measurable business value while building long-term competitive advantage:
Given past failures, demonstrating projected ROI ahead of project commencement was non-negotiable. Robust financial modelling and performance benchmarks were developed — a step no previous partner had properly executed.
Shift the primary customer interaction from call centre agents to digital channels — redesigning the end-to-end customer lifecycle from discovery through sales, account management, and service resolution to operate digitally on a 24/7 basis.
Introduce a robust interactive CRM programme to build richer customer profiles detailed enough to act on — enabling precise segmentation, personalised marketing, and a stronger long-term relationship between BellSouth and its customer base.
The team also benchmarked BellSouth against six key customer touchpoints across leading companies outside the telecom vertical — deliberately sourcing comparators from industries leading in those particular areas of customer-led outcomes, bringing cross-sector insight that BellSouth's previous partners had not offered.
The original pitch was re-engineered into a two-tiered programme structure. Securing approval required a 75-minute presentation to both the global consulting firm and the BellSouth leadership team — and both signed off following the pitch. The expanded budget represented a 300% increase over the original proposal.
The programme delivered results that materially exceeded every target set at the outset — and in several cases exceeded them by multiples rather than increments.
| Performance Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Call centre operational savings (Year 1) | $150M+ |
| Monthly call centre cost reduction | $12M+ per month |
| Banner ad impressions per day | 80 million+ views |
| Banner click-through rate improvement | +46% year-on-year |
| Traditional print response rate growth | +63% year-on-year |
| Transactional direct mail response growth | +26% year-on-year |
| Enterprise CRM vs. objective goal | 205% of target |
| Online revenue growth (sustained) | 12 consecutive quarters, +150% |
"You guys were totally on the right track in the development of this project … it addressed the problem from an 'all segments' perspective. You have recommendations grounded in best practices and based on where our site / advertising programme / budget is currently with actionable recommendations. I think that the objective, as laid out in the deck, was a great starting point … since no one internally has done this to my knowledge — it's actually quite superior to anything I have seen before! You provided an overall experience that is reflective of the BellSouth brand and built to meet the varying needs of our diverse customer base, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction and maximising return."
Volkswagen Group's Asia-Pacific operation spans five distinct brands — VW, Audi, Porsche, Škoda, and SEAT — each with its own commercial priorities, dealer networks, and customer expectations. The group needed to place the customer at the centre of decision-making across the entire dealer ecosystem, but the complexity of aligning five competing business units made this a structural challenge, not simply a strategic one.
The dealer ecosystem across Asia-Pacific was product-led rather than customer-led. Each brand operated its own engagement model with minimal cross-brand coordination. Pre-sales and post-sales processes for both B2C and fleet channels had evolved independently, creating inconsistency in how customers experienced the group. Competing priorities across five brand leadership teams made consensus difficult and structural alignment harder still.
The programme was designed around three objectives: repositioning the customer as the primary driver of commercial decision-making across the dealer ecosystem; redesigning the full pre- and post-sales engagement model for both B2C and fleet channels; and aligning the five brand leadership teams behind a unified, customer-led operating model that each brand could execute against without losing its identity.
This required working directly at C-suite level across all five brands — not presenting recommendations, but building consensus across competing interests and staying present through implementation to ensure the model held.
The programme delivered a unified operating model across all five brands, improved customer retention and commercial performance across both B2C and fleet channels, and — critically — the outcomes were sustained after the engagement concluded. The model remains in place, which in a multi-brand automotive group with five sets of competing incentives is the real test of whether a transformation has worked.
Nortel Networks was a global telecommunications infrastructure company operating across the US, Canada, Europe, India, and China. The organisation needed a complete redesign of how it engaged customers across its global operations — not an incremental improvement, but a ground-up rebuild of capabilities and governance that in many areas simply did not exist.
Customer engagement at Nortel was fragmented across geographies and business units. There was no consistent engagement model, no shared governance structure, and no unified view of the customer across the organisation's global footprint. The cost base reflected this: marketing and operational spend was structurally inefficient, with duplication across regions and no mechanism to identify or eliminate it.
The programme redesigned customer engagement from first principles across all four continents. This meant building engagement capabilities and governance structures where none had previously existed — not layering new processes onto old ones, but creating the organisational infrastructure required to operate as a single entity in how it faced the customer. Simultaneously, the programme targeted the cost base: eliminating structural inefficiency in global marketing and operations while identifying and opening new revenue opportunities.
| Performance Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Customer satisfaction uplift | >12% within 12 months |
| Global marketing & operational costs | Significant reduction achieved |
| New revenue opportunities | Identified and activated during engagement |
| Governance & engagement capabilities | Built from scratch across four continents |
SAP, a $30B+ global enterprise software company, needed to fundamentally rethink how the organisation approached its customers — not at the programme level, but as an enterprise-wide strategic priority driven from the CEO's office. The mandate was to develop and lead the optimisation of customer transformation across the entire organisation.
SAP's scale and complexity meant that customer-led thinking existed in pockets but lacked structural coherence. With thousands of enterprise clients across dozens of markets, the organisation had no unified mechanism for aligning senior leadership around a common customer strategy — and no external perspective embedded at the level required to drive that alignment.
The engagement was structured as a direct CEO advisory mandate. The first deliverable was the creation of SAP's inaugural Global Customer Experience Council — a cross-functional senior leadership body designed to align strategy, share intelligence, and drive accountability for customer outcomes. As the only external member of this Council, the role required the credibility to operate at peer level with 20+ senior SAP executives while bringing the outside-in perspective the organisation lacked.
Beyond the Council, the programme introduced customer-led planning and measurement frameworks designed to embed permanently in SAP's core operations — not as a parallel initiative, but as part of how the organisation runs.
The programme delivered lasting structural and cultural change. The planning and measurement frameworks introduced during the engagement are embedded in SAP's core operations today. The Council model created a precedent for how the organisation brings external strategic perspective into its most senior decision-making forums. The outcomes were not transient — they remain active years after the engagement concluded, which in an organisation of SAP's scale and pace of change is the clearest measure of impact.
Whether you are navigating a multi-brand transformation, a global operating model redesign, or an enterprise-wide strategic realignment — we have delivered results in exactly these situations before. Let's talk.