Fortune 50 Technology Company Saves $500M in Operational Costs Over Three Years While Maintaining 25% Customer Growth

The Challenge: Fragmented Operations and Rising Costs Threaten Customer and Employee Satisfaction.

The leadership of this Fortune 50 technology company saw trouble on the horizon: its retail business was adding tens of thousands of new customers daily, driving up customer service costs at a rapid pace. Meanwhile, the company’s wireless customer care division remained a set of fragmented, regionally siloed operations cobbled together via multiple mergers and acquisitions. The problem soon reached a tipping point, leaving exhausted service leaders frustrated and the company now facing alarming declines in both customer and employee satisfaction.

Everyone knew what was needed: a streamlined integration of the service operations that could be implemented without damaging the customer experience or further overwhelming service staff. An internal team of Six Sigma black belts and an outside management consulting firm had been tasked to assess the problem and help develop a detailed plan. But when months passed with little progress on how to effectively manage the needed change, the division VP decided to take a chance on the Achieve System™.

The Application: Shifting to a Future-Focused Mindset to Transform Customer Service.

Performance experts from the Achieve Institute™ quickly applied a key concept called “Create, Don’t Fix” to unlock new thinking and drive innovation.

“For the first time, we looked at everything from a future-oriented mindset: how we perform and behave, how we feel about our customers, how we present information, how we analyze customer feedback, how we recognize our team members’ accomplishments, how we use customer service desktop technologies, and more,” explained the Customer Care Vice President. “Many things we would have never given a second thought in our old mindset.”

In the first transformation wave, about a thousand key employees learned to apply the Achieve System. Instead of gradually fixing their past process with incremental goals and steps, the team pivoted and began applying more Achieve System concepts like “Connect To Possibility” and “Point B” to redefine what a new process could look like across all aspects of customer service.

Once the initial team understood how to create new solutions rather than fix old problems, they quickly rolled out new processes to the rest of the customer service division. As evidence of success mounted, changes were expanded across the entire company.

The Results: Achieved $500M in Savings, Improved Customer Experience, and Enhanced Employee Engagement.

Over the following three years, the Customer Care team continued to apply and scale the Achieve System, ultimately introducing over 25,000 employees to a new way of working. This transformation successfully reduced service costs by 20% annually across the entire company (adding up to $500M in savings by the third year) even as the customer base continued to grow by 25%, from 80 million to 100 million customers.

As a bonus, both customer and employee experiences dramatically improved. The net outcome: increased savings, an enhanced customer experience, and greater employee engagement and job satisfaction.