LEADING CPG BRAND DRIVES ONBOARDING ENGAGEMENT
The Challenge
A major producer of consumer packaged goods (CPG) in the Japanese market needed a new way to onboard their existing customers to a better, lower-risk, electronic line of products. They had a large and loyal customer base, but most customer interactions were one-way through ads or at the point of sale. They sell their products primarily through retail outlets across Japan with great success, becoming one of the largest players in their vertical. Recently, the CPG brand shifted focus from their legacy, one-time-use product to a new reusable product with replacement cartridges. But as they began to sunset their traditional product offering, they faced a challenge. They had to make customers aware of this change, and to do that they needed a way to reach their existing customers on the channel that their customers preferred. The CPG brand needed customers to switch to their new product line and remain loyal, rather than change brands as they changed products. This required them to connect more channels than ever before and add decisioning capabilities to their customer journey.
First, the CPG brand had needed to engage and retain current customers, but also intelligently acquire them as users of their new product. Once they convinced customers to switch to their product or start using it, the company also needed to them people complete onboarding activities to make sure they got the most out of their reusable product. This required sending out relevant messages to their existing and new customers through email, Line (a Japanese social media and messaging app), or suppress them from communications based on their online activity. The goal was to ensure that customers were engaged on their preferred channels and that each customer completed onboarding actions, and did not receive messages about activities they’d already completed. The CPG brand needed this process to be scalable and in the right sequence, so that future loyalty, friend referrals and other programs could run successfully.
The CPG brand sought a solution that would allow them to onboard new customers and drive engagement with their existing customers. To make the communications as relevant as possible, The CPG brand wanted to prevent customers from receiving messages about activities they’d already completed. They had to manage this communication in sequence, intelligently suppressing and sending messages based on what the customer had done in the past.
The Solution
Deploying CSG Xponent, the CPG brand was able to trigger were tasked with triggering a sequence of messages and then use the solution’s advanced decisioning capabilities to determine if customers should get an email, a Line message, both or neither. Then, Xponent pushed this decision to the CPG brand’s communication systems to send the correct message at the correct time for the specific customer. This entailed three key tasks:
Persona management
A/B testing
Token tracking
A customer joined the CPG brand’s managed membership in one of two ways—with a customer either signing up, or receiving an “abandoned cart” notification if they were considering a purchase but left the page. Xponent systems then listened to the customer’s activity—both their expressed interest and their behaviors across devices.
BY INGESTING THE CUSTOMER’S PREVIOUS ACTIVITY AND THEIR RESPONSES OR INTERACTIONS WITH PREVIOUS MESSAGES, WE WERE ABLE TO SWITCH CUSTOMERS TO RECEIVE COMMUNICATIONS ON THE CHANNEL THEY INTERACTED ACROSS THE MOST
Once Xponent ingested the customer data, the CPG brand could use the decisioning capabilities built into the solution to understand that behavior.
For example, if the customer had received communications on both email and Line, but only engaged with the email content, then they would be intelligently weighted to receive more email communications in the future.
After the data had been ingested, processed and analyzed, Xponent also used advanced logic to determine if a message needed to be sent at all.
For example, if a customer had already completed step two of onboarding, they would not receive the now-unnecessary request to complete step two. Instead, they would be pushed to complete step three, speeding up their onboarding and increasing satisfaction.
By ingesting the customer’s previous activity and their responses or interactions with previous messages, the CPG brand could switch customers to receive communications on the channel they used the most. With this intelligent decisioning system built out over the company’s existing outreach program, they could make an already successful messaging sequence more contextually relevant to each individual customer.
The Results
The CPG brand used CSG Xponent to create a more engaged and managed onboarding experience that was unique to the Japanese market. They were able to use a local Japanese instance of the platform that powered the intelligent membership that millions of customers now experience. Every day, Journey Orchestration triggers new messages on Line and email using the most up-to-date customer data and the solution’s powerful decisioning capabilities.
The CPG brand can now engage customers on the customer-preferred channel. They can suppress, prioritize and optimize messages, as well as choose the time and delivery method, resulting in an average of 14 million intelligently orchestrated interactions each week. Over the time the CPG brand has deployed Xponent, their market share for their new renewable product increased from 15.5 to 17 percent.
This project was a highly successful example of how Xponent can be deployed around the world, and also quickly scaled up. The CPG brand trusts the solution to the extent that they are expanding their current membership program into a full loyalty journey.
For many technologies and techniques, the Asian market can prove different than that in North America and Europe. But that a better customer experience, delivered on customer’s preferred channels, resonates just as well in Japan as in New York City, London or Helsinki.
OVER 1 BILLION
CONTEXTUALLY RELEVANT CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIONS
CART ABANDONMENTS FOLLOWED-UP
31 MILLION DEVICES REGISTERED
1.5 MILLION