How does an airline keep pace with increasing customer expectations?

Opportunity

In-the-moment data—and the real-time analytics derived from it—are essential to both meeting the expectations of today’s customers, and enabling advanced machine learning to make the best operational decisions possible. But with operations rooted in decades of analog processes, the path to a real-time data “nervous system” seemed overwhelming. Which data to start with, and how to build a data capability for the future without having to change everything at once, were daunting questions.

Capabilities Developed

Elicit’s approach was to help build a true enterprise data strategy grounded in the strategic business needs of the company. Core to this was starting with data consumers, not data sources. This is due to the fact that data is not all created equally: some is used far more often by far more systems. Elicit used this insight to:

Review all current major systems plus stated business requirements for new capabilities asking: what kinds of data are needed for each? Customer profile? Current flight status? Loyalty points balance?
Build a quantitative of consumption needs: current flight schedule is referenced most, followed by customer bookings, etc.
Assemble a business-oriented view of the data products that would meet consumption needs, prioritized by demand, and make those the foundation of an enterprise data capability.

Results

This data strategy, which included a cloud “data factory” architecture, has been implemented and initial data products are in production. The Elicit process demonstrated how a handful of data products will replace hundreds of current and future data integrations, establish a near-real-time data backbone, expedite implementation of new customer experiences and operational system changes by months or years, and save over $10M in IT costs. Even more valuable is the cross-functional shared understanding and use of data at the core of the airline: flight, customer, employee, aircraft, and their intersection points.

How does a luxury retailer digitize their differentiated service?

Opportunity

A storied department store was hyper-focused on personalization opportunities that would bridge their digital and in-store shopping experiences. They knew that speed-to-market and evidence-based decision-making were critical to personalization at scale, but the prospect of breaking down silos to enable experimentation was daunting. Elicit stepped in to help the company build a sustainable, agile test-and-learn program that would strengthen customer engagement, deepen omni-channel capabilities, and grow revenue.

Capabilities Developed

Elicit partnered with the company to set up, train and launch a cross-functional new test-and-learn team, comprised of both Elicit team members and company team members from Marketing, Creative, Product/IT, and Analytics. Operationalizing this team included:

Analyzing the customer portfolio to identify target cohorts, ideate personalization testing opportunities, and designtests
Creating a sustaining operating model to identify and prioritize tests, manage test build, and monitor test execution progress
Developing a measurement strategy to assess test performance and revenue contribution, and partnering with leadership to deploy successful personalization experiences at scale

Results

Elicit’s application of agile processes and a data-backed, collaborative approach enabled the company to quickly identify the most valuable concepts and improve speed-to-market. Within five months of launch, the test-and-learn team had proven $6.3M in incremental revenue from executed tests. Scaling those tests, coupled with a backlog containing dozens of potential tests, resulted in over $60M in estimated incremental revenue.

How does an antivirus software company convert their captive audience?

Opportunity

Subscription-based models are a common business practice, and often rely on free trial periods to convince customers that their product is worth paying for on an ongoing basis. After decades of success with this model, a leading anti-virus software company was struggling to convert free-trial customers and retain existing customers at a profitable price point. They hadstudied their customer data and implemented some experience design changes, but nothing seemed to be working.

Capabilities Developed

Elicit deployed a blended Geek, Nerd, and Suit to the problem. This included:

Tracing the various possible customer journeys, supplemented with customer research, to ground the company in their customers’ real experience and set a foundation for identifying potential enhancements.
Creating a strategy for capturing, integrating, and storing customer, machine, and product data to enable rapid testing and support machine learning customer insight development.
Building a customer insights foundation to identify unique customer cohorts grounded in key stages of acquisition and retention, quantify revenue opportunities for each cohort, and determine behaviors predictive of growth and churn.

Only through a unified approach to strategy, analytics, and technology could the company identify exactly where in the experience they were losing customers and unecessarily giving away discounts, understand the “why” behind what they were observing in the data, and design and deploy a series of changes to the experience personalized to unique customer cohorts.

Results

Elicit approached the company’s challenge in a unique way – through a holistic approach that ensured that the company not only had answers to their questions, but also the capabilities to implement change, and measure the results of those changes on an ongoing basis. The company more than doubled their trial-to-subscription rate, generating over $500M per year in incremental revenue. Even better? The company was able to use the capabilities we co-developed to continue to find and capture revenue opportunities for years to come, leading to a successful IPO in 2020 and 25% growth in share price.

How can a $3B global skincare company empower their salesforce?

Opportunity

After investing in integrated data solutions and advanced analytics, the company was challenged with delivering that rich information into the hands of their vast and geographically diverse sales team. Sales associates had never before adopted a uniform approach to leveraging customer data, lamenting that previous attempts were clunky, hard-to-access, and lacked real-time data.

Capabilities Developed

Elicit took a phased approach, starting with a close partnership with a small set of pilot users to design a solution that would supplement instead of replacing their ways of working. The final mobile-optimized dashboard included:

Predictive, machine learning models to identify the biggest opportunities and risks in each sales rep’s customer portfolio
Early warning indicators to quickly detect meaningful changes in their customers’ most important behaviors
Dynamic, interactive trends and facts that made it easy for sales reps to locate and digest the most important customer data all in one place

Results

By working closely with members of the sales team, Elicit was able to effectively design tools that sales team members actually wanted to use. The consistently high usage rates resulted in an incremental $26M in annual revenue, as well as improved sales associate efficiency and reduced onboarding horizons.