How Olist Used the Voice of the Customer to Identify and Act on Early Signs of Churn

Company overview

Olist is a tech unicorn that provides an ecosystem of digital solutions designed to empower over 50,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to sell more across marketplaces.

The company, which processes over 30 million transactions annually through its platform, has become a key player in Latin America’s retail ecosystem.

Olist’s commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences has been pivotal to its growth. With its user base rapidly expanding through acquisitions and new product launches, managing the voice of the customer optimally, acting quickly to meet user needs, and preventing churn have become increasingly important.

Challenges with Churn Detection

Effective customer churn analysis became increasingly challenging as Olist scaled, and Olist’s Product, Customer Experience (CX), and Business teams realized they needed to be proactive in addressing churn signals to maintain the growth trajectory. While they had access to customer data, Olist wanted to transform its customer feedback analytics into a more sophisticated and scalable system, particularly when it came to cross-data analysis. The company wanted to:

• Optimize resources by automating data analysis without increasing headcount
• Accelerate the innovation process and launch of new features and products
• Improve its voice of the customer program with deeper, actionable insights, correlating them with business metrics such as churn and revenue

Solution: Proactive Churn and Revenue Insights by Segments and Cohorts

Birdie.ai helped Olist tackle these challenges by bringing together all of their sources of feedback – cancellation forms, support tickets, NPS surveys, and public data – and correlating that to customer profile and behavior to enable rapid and comprehensive analysis of churn causes and signals using AI-powered insights.

With this, Olist was able to correlate customer complaints across multiple touchpoints with cancellation data, allowing a deeper understanding of churn causes. Birdie also assisted Olist in:

• Customer Data Segmentation: Birdie’s customer churn analysis capabilities allowed Olist to segment data from active versus canceled users, enabling the identification of prevalent issues and questions in each of these groups.
• Accelerated Churn Detection: With Birdie, Olist analyzed feedback from customers who canceled in the last six months in just two hours.
• Automated Insights: Birdie’s platform automatically identified and quantified the main issues leading to churn, enabling quick, data-driven actions.

The results were presented to the executive team, with answers readily available for various questions, resulting in a clear action plan that included product improvements, communication changes, and process adjustments based on insights from customers who canceled.

Key Findings

• Complaint Gaps: The top complaint of churned customers ranked #7 among active customers, highlighting a disconnect in addressing key issues.
• Unknown Issues: Seven out of ten of the top complaints from churned customers were not included in the top ten overall complaints and did not appear on churn forms, demonstrating how signs of churn were being missed.

Results & Metrics

By using Birdie.ai’s platform, Olist achieved significant results:

• 90% Faster Churn Analysis: Olist reduced churn data analysis time from three days with four team members to two hours with one team member.
• 35% Expected Churn Reduction: This is the percentage of customers with similar recurring issues as previous churn customers whose churn could be mitigated.
• Prioritization of actionable Insights: The analysis allowed Olist to prioritize key product improvements, CS process changes, and communication strategies based on churn-related feedback.
• Data-Driven Decisions: Olist can now quantify the impact of customer churn signals, with evidence-based insights guiding product feature changes and communication updates
• Better Leadership Alignment: The leadership team had a clearer business view through Birdie’s unified insights, enabling effective collaboration between cross-functional teams and faster, more informed decisions.

In addition, Birdie helped Olist implement new initiatives across the organization:

• Product Feature Reprioritization: Olist’s product roadmap was adjusted to address the most common complaints from churning customers.
• CX and CS Process Improvements: The team restructured its processes to prioritize customers with early signs of churn, such as downgrade requests and technical issues.
• Plan and Pricing Review: Olist initiated a review of its pricing and upgrade communication strategy to prevent automatic upgrades from driving churn.

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Way Forward

With Birdie.ai’s platform integrated into Olist’s CX processes, the team now has a more agile and effective way to identify signs of churn and respond proactively. The insights gained are helping Olist to refine its customer communication strategy, reprioritize product features, and improve CX processes, ensuring a more customer-centric approach.

The next step is to continue working with Birdie to further optimize churn detection.

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