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Jason McDannold
Partner & Managing Director, Americas Co-Lead, Private Equity
Chicago
How we helped
As the pandemic disrupted Hollywood production and screenings around the U.S., an accounting software provider to film and TV industry suffered: along with flow-on effects from halted production, it was buffeted by rising costs, digital transformation, labor shortages, and changing customer tastes.
As the entertainment industry came back online, this client realized that declining customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores could prevent it from capitalizing on a growing market opportunity as it emerged. AlixPartners worked with the company to solve two big questions: What was the problem, and how could it be fixed?
Our team helped identify and address issues and increase CSAT performance. Three major challenges needed addressing: the inability of clients to complete simple technical tasks in the interface, the inadequacy of customer support, and siloing between account managers and account support.
Finding solutions started with defining key problems and identifying root causes, which were all over the map. They included a lack of clear roles and responsibilities, unclear and uncompelling product messaging to clients, unclear lines between sales, support, and product management work, insufficient internal or client training, and product perception problems.
In this case, an entirely new customer success organization allowed account managers to acutely focus on the most important clients. Roles and responsibilities needed to be clarified so that a functioning customer success team could emerge and account managers could thrive. Training, hiring, and the prioritization of digital tools needed to be overhauled.
AlixPartners recommended a tiered service model to match high priority customers with premium, tenured agents. We also prioritized training to drive client value and the net promoter score, ultimately increasing customer satisfaction by 15-20%. Lastly, we established a new "client services manager" role to alleviate account management capacity. That capacity was deployed to drive long-term customer relationships.
