AI NLP text analytics helped a B2C company lower customer churn by 30%

A global leader in the B2C services industry was suffering a quite high rate of customer churn. To understand what drove customers away, the company conducted traditional market research, specifically running focus groups. The results of this type of market research had multiple limitations. Firstly, the sample that the company managed to gather was not heterogeneous. Their inability to involve young clients in their research harmed the generalizability of the results. Secondly, many different issues were mentioned in the conducted focus groups, however, the causes of the high levels of attrition were still unclear to the company.

 

Terence, a product manager with an interest in data and customer experience, realized that traditional market research was not offering the insights he needed to reduce customer churn. He also realized that the company had an abundance of customer feedback, but it was not taken into account while developing its strategies. Clients engaged and communicated with the provider through emails, text, social media, and app. For this reason, he decided to present the case to Wonderflow. The initial scope involved the analysis of the app reviews for five countries in the EMEA region.

 

The data was cleansed, anonymized, and translated through the Wonderboard. The Natural Language Processing analysis showed the range of topics that impacted the customer experience, positively or negatively, and which were the most relevant. The analysis demonstrated that the general sentiment of app reviews was negative towards the speed (67%) and the design of the app (53%). Additionally, the data revealed the importance that clients give to having an efficient (70%) and reliable (59%) app. By combining information about the topics discussed in the customer feedback and their relevance, the Wonderboard offers actionable insights, allowing teams to rethink their strategy and optimize their products.

After identifying the range of topics that positively or negatively affected people’s loyalty, the relevance and impact of each topic on churn were determined. Terence: “Through the insights the Wonderboard delivered, we were not only able to understand the aspects which drove churn but also we see the potential impact of improving these aspects on the customer satisfaction rating.” The company found one of the most important drivers of churn: customer dissatisfaction with the app.

By including public reviews about competitors’ apps in the analysis, the service provider also obtained a complete overview of the market. This allowed the company’s design team to understand how their app ranked compared to the competition while also comprehending the reasons why so many customers were moving towards more digitized providers. Furthermore, by taking into account what the most valued aspects of the other apps in the market were, they were able to start developing a strategy that aimed at the optimization of the customer experience in their app. After evaluating the results, Wonderflow’s experts worked together with Terence’s team to develop a strategy to decrease churn.

As a result of the procedure, a pilot project was executed. The experiment involved the presentation of an optimized app to a segment of the population of 3 of the 5 countries in which the analyses were conducted for a time frame of six months. The general design and usability were improved. The new app featured an enhanced user interface, a higher performance, and a well-structured FAQ section which aimed to reduce the number of customer support chats as customers found the solution earlier.

To understand whether the improved app was significantly more effective compared to the earlier version, a segment of the population that still had access to the earlier version of the app was studied. For the optimized app, in-app engagement and customer churn rate for that segment were measured. The improved app performed significantly better than its earlier version. For this reason, the changes to the app were rolled out to the entire EMEA market. Additionally, a major marketing campaign was launched to promote the optimized app.

In six months, the service company experienced a drastic reduction in customer churn by 12% on average, with spikes in the younger market segments to up to 30%. Based on the results of the collaboration, the company decided to increase the markets covered with the Wonderboard. Terence was recently promoted to Director-level, to a role focusing on the optimization of the customer experience. He and his colleague leverage the Wonderboard to analyze feedback on all the customer-facing aspects of the company and its local branches.