Customer 360 Program Management

Transforming Shell's Lubricants Business: A Strategic Approach to Customer Retention

In the competitive landscape of the lubricants industry, Shell's North America business stands out as the largest contributor to the company's overall performance, serving over 20,000 customers on a continuous basis. However, the leadership team faced significant challenges in monitoring customer churn and retention due to fragmented legacy systems and inconsistent definitions of customer metrics across various functions. This disarray resulted in conflicting reports, a lack of a unified source of truth, and hindered the ability of leaders to conduct thorough performance reviews or make informed interventions.

A Three-Step Turnaround Strategy

To address these challenges, I spearheaded a comprehensive three-step turnaround initiative:

1. Standardizing Definitions: I initiated collaborative engagements with key representatives from Sales, Marketing, and Finance to establish standardized definitions of churn that were aligned across all functions. This effort created a single source of truth for leadership reviews, ensuring consistency and clarity in our metrics.

2. Creating Tactical Prototypes: Next, I translated these standardized definitions into tactical prototypes designed to baseline performance and demonstrate value to business metric owners. This step was crucial in illustrating the impact of our efforts on overall business performance.

3. Industrializing the Solution: Finally, I led the delivery team in developing an automated, enterprise-grade application that minimized manual touchpoints and included robust data-quality controls. In parallel, I collaborated with the Process Excellence team to integrate this platform into the existing monthly operating cadence, known as MILOs, ensuring that adoption and value delivery became integral to our business rhythm.

Results and Impact

The outcome of this strategic initiative was remarkable. Over the course of two years, the program generated an incremental margin of $15 million and achieved a sustained target adoption rate of 95% for more than six months into 2025. This successful integration of the platform into the North America Sales operating model not only enhanced our ability to manage customer retention effectively but also solidified our commitment to continuous improvement within the organization.