New Zealand Post: Optimising Customer Retention with Advanced Analytics

The simple truth is this: churn rate optimisation — reducing the number of customers who abandon your product or service — is far more essential to your profitability and long-term success than conversion rate optimisation.

NZ Post had concerns with the level of churn within their commercial customer base. It was difficult knowing which customers were leaving and why they were leaving. Each person in the telecommunications team can look after up to a few hundred customers each, they didn’t know which customers to focus on.

When Fusion5 met with NZ Post, they were in the process of putting in place a new customer retention strategy. It became apparent that the need to better understand their customers was critical to this objective. This was vital as the only way to reach and connect with a customer, the only way to influence a customer’s buying decision and keep them coming back is to understand their buying behaviour and satisfaction with NZ Post.

After really listening to NZ Post and finding out as much as we could, we began collaborating and evaluated several solutions. It was decided that a Fusion5 predictive churn model was the answer.

First things first, both parties had to understand and agree on what exactly constitutes ‘churn’ as NZ Post sees it. Next, a predictive model was implemented providing a view of the customers who were most likely to churn. This provided a view of the most high-risk customers and gave telecommunication managers an area of focus. The telecommunications team is now able to achieve much more in less time.  

So, what does this all mean? NZ Post are now able to truly understand the key drivers of customer churn, they understand what they do well and what they don’t do so well. This kind of information is a nugget of gold that can be used organisation wide. Not only that, they have the visibility of those customers who are likely to churn in the next period. This means being able to implement an effective churn mitigation strategy allowing NZ Post to increase customer retention and ultimately deliver better service to New Zealanders.

“Right along the process they have been accommodating. They listened to what we wanted and came back with good, practical solutions to get to the right outcome.”

By really listening to NZ Post, assessing all possible solutions and developing a Fusion5 solution tailored to suit, Fusion5 was able to empower NZ Post to take a proactive focused approach in implementing their customer retention strategy. “The way they operated with our business was quite seamless. Their developers are not sitting in a dark room somewhere – these guys were onsite with us, interacting with us.”