“This project streamlined efficiency, provided the foundation for updated processes for new customers and ultimately led to the successful capture of new customers that doubled revenue post-acquisition.”

Situation

Large-scale mergers and acquisitions bring with them a wealth of challenges. Marrying systems and transitioning clients between developed organizations has the potential to create serious issues for the acquirer, should the process not be delicately and precisely handled.

In almost all cases these challenges are mitigated by the fact that the acquirer is far larger than the seller. But for one loyalty marketing solutions provider, this convention was flipped on its head.

An acquisition which results in an instant doubling of revenue and 10x more clients to serve? This is the challenge that faced this loyalty marketing leader. And this is how we at CSG helped the organization handle such an instant and radical transformation.

As a $400+ million company, our client was already one of the major players in the space. It sought to increase its presence and determined that acquiring a major competitor was the best way to do so.

The Problem? This competitor boasted a similar revenue to our client, and carried on their books no less than 10x the clients – called ‘participants’ in the space. In an industry that relies so heavily on maintaining a genuine and meaningful relationship with its participants, anything less than a seamless acquisition would be unacceptable.

The challenges facing our client were great. They had to gain a deep understanding of how their acquisition dealt with its participants in order to ensure that these participants felt no discernible change in experience throughout the acquisition process, and that existing performance expectations continued to be met.

Added to these challenges were the inevitable time pressures of such a process. With investors and board members holding high expectations that the acquisition would be completed efficiently and effectively, the organization was obliged to keep one eye firmly on the clock.

Solution

Stepping in to assist in the transition of tech operations, at CSG we realized we were facing a unique challenge. We began by analyzing the selling company’s existing business processes – manual and automated, common and customized – across every one of their customer programs. Reviewing all customers’ contracted performance obligations gave us a complete picture of the seller’s business operations.

Aligning these findings with the current systems and processes of our client, we outlined new operational processes and the associated requirements of the system. In helping the client to grasp the intimidating prospect of increasing overall participant volume by no less than 1000%, we provided an invaluable ‘go/no-go’ perspective on operational viability. New processes corrected a host of errors generated using the existing processes, bringing significant efficiency improvements.

Based on these outlines the CSG team architected and designed the new operational system, which aggregated transactional, fulfillment and financial information from a variety of customer, participant, and supplier-facing systems. It was designed to validate fulfilled goods and services, generate accurate invoicing, and bring a much-needed update to our client’s internal financial systems – one that would better cope with the greater processing burden that the acquisition was soon to impart.

Finally, we offered valuable assistance to the development team in building the systems that met all of the initially outlined requirements, and conducting extensive validation and testing prior to the launch of post-acquisition operations.

Thrive Amidst Change with the Help of CSG’s Deep Knowledge and Experience