Case study

Going omnichannel to expand market reach

E-commerce
Digital Transformation

Location:

Germany, Cologne

Industry:

E-commerce

Partnership period:

April 2018 - present

Business challenge

Cleverbridge needed to redesign their solution to increase customer outreach and improve customer experience. The process was time-consuming and lacked the precision needed to engage subscribers and prevent potential churn effectively.

Client background

Based in Germany, Cleverbridge provides full-fledged ecommerce and subscription management solutions for monetizing digital goods, online services, and SaaS across a variety of industries. The company offers a cloud-based ecommerce platform that simplifies recurring billing, optimizes the customer experience, and offers comprehensive global compliance and payment capabilities. Leveraging its expertise, technology and services, B2C and B2B clients acquire more customers, improve retention, and grow their revenue in international markets.

Business challenge

N-iX approach

N-iX has helped the client migrate the desktop solution to the web, build brand-new UX design, and enhance their value proposition to customers by designing lucid BI reports. N-iX developed an AWS-based solution using machine learning and generative AI to automate personalized email campaigns based on churn probabilities. This solution increased customer retention rates, automated marketing interventions, reduced maintenance costs through AWS development, and enabled tailored content delivery.

Value delivered

With a new web-based application available across different operating systems, browsers, and mobile devices and improved UX design, Cleverbridge is able to expand market reach and improve customer retention. By integrating machine learning models and generative AI, we achieved automation in email campaigns, significantly reducing manual effort. We helped Cleverbridge’s clients by reducing the subscribers’ churn rate.

Business challenge: meeting customer needs

Cleverbridge had a desktop app, which was available only on Windows. Consequently, users of other OS (i.e. macOS, Linux) were not able to install and use it. Moreover, the app was unavailable to the increasing number of mobile devices users. Therefore, there was a strong need in reviewing the set of app features so that they stand in line with customers’ needs. To solve these issues, the client decided to update the app features and migrate it to the web. Another challenge our client faced was the quality of the analytics reports, which are included in the company’s product offering. To be more precise, the reports on the client’s subscription (i.e. revenue, number of new customers) lacked visually-informative data.

Cleverbridge’s clients manually created and distributed marketing campaigns to their end-users. This process was time-consuming and lacked the precision needed to engage subscribers and prevent potential churn effectively. The existing system also lacked the scalability and flexibility to adapt to the evolving customer needs. Without addressing this challenge, Cleverbridge’s clients would have continued to spend significant resources on manually managing their marketing efforts. This led to generic email campaigns that were not tailored to individual user needs or their likelihood of canceling their subscriptions.

N-iX approach: from a legacy app to omnichannel

We created the full UX design scope of work, from concept to product. Focusing on end-user needs, we applied the lean UX approach and iterative prototyping methodology and developed interactive prototypes, UI, and design libraries. Also, we performed complex user testing while developing modules and validated final products. For this testing, we split the whole platform into small parts to deliver constantly small increments. Taking a customer-centric approach, we identified the key company’s stakeholders and customers to contribute to all stages of the UX process through workshops. The workshops intended to validate a set of features to be released, validate designs, and perform beta testing with seven clients before modules were released to the customers. We supported the frontend implementation of the new application module by module as well as the backend integration of the web-based application.

AWS Bedrock was chosen for its generative AI capabilities in text and image generation. AWS Bedrock provides access to a variety of powerful foundation models, allowing us to integrate the automatic generation of personalized text for emails tailored to users with high churn probabilities. AWS Bedrock's scalable infrastructure supports varying AI model workloads. We used AWS SageMaker ML Lineage Tracking to enhance the observability of LLM applications, allowing us to monitor, evaluate, and optimize their performance.

The main goal was to enhance the e-commerce platform’s ability to predict subscribers’ churn and send personalized email campaigns to over 300 software companies’ subscribers. Initially, we developed a prototype and designed an architecture for an automated subscribers’ retention and uplift solution. We decided to adopt a cloud-native approach with serverless best practices, which reduced maintenance costs and improved platform flexibility. We developed a multi-tenant machine learning-based solution within the customer’s e-commerce platform. Our software engineers gathered data on end-user behavior during email workflows and then analyzed AI Engineers this data to calculate churn probabilities. Using the churn probability data and generative AI, the system sent customized emails automatically.

Value delivered by N-iX: increased client outreach and satisfaction

The main benefit for the company is the increase in the potential client outreach as a result of:

A web-based application that is now available across different operating systems, browsers, and mobile devices.
New UX design, which improved the user experience thanks to the lean UX approach and involvement of our client’s customers in various stages of the new design.
Achieved 80% automation in email campaigns, significantly reducing manual effort.Reduced the subscribers’ churn rate by 15%, which means that fewer subscribers stopped using the customer’s services.