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How Alchemista Went From Losing Their Biggest Customer to 100% Retention

Blog by Ian Luck
November 16, 2022

When it comes to your business, what is your biggest fear?

As a CEO, having a client churn that accounts for 20% of your revenue is certainly up there. But worse, it would probably hurt even more if it was completely preventable. Well, that's what happened to Christine Marcus, CEO and Founder of Alchemista in 2019 and what eventually drove her to partner with CustomerGauge.

Before we tell you how Alchemista went from losing their biggest client to 100% retention, let's set the stage. Picture a large tech company like Google. They use their culture in order to recruit the best new talent. Part of their model is providing catered meals for their employees on a daily basis—that's where Alchemista comes in.

Now, imagine that you landed the biggest client you've ever had–By far. You're providing service, you think everything is going great and then 6 months into the program you get an email: "Thank you very much, your service stinks, our employees hate it, YOU'RE FIRED!!!"

No opportunity to make it right, no notice, just "don't come back". Imagine that sinking feeling. The crushing weight of knowing you're going to have to lay people off.

If your first reaction would be to pick up the phone and call the client to see what's going on, you'd be in the same boat as Christine Marcus, CEO at Alchemista. And this is what you would have found out:

  • Meals were consistently delivered late.
  • The CEO, who was vegan, regularly received the wrong meal.
  • Not enough food was provided for all employees several times.

Now, in the catering business, these issues are not uncommon. However, Christine was unaware of the frequency at which they were happening and the detrimental impact they were having on the relationship. They had no experience program in place, which means there was not a continuous flow of feedback from her account to alert her of any potential problems.

This was the biggest mistake I've ever made as a CEO...If we had CustomerGauge this would have never happened.

Christine Marcus
Alchemista

CustomerGauge was onboarded soon after, allowing Alchemista to get instant, unfiltered, direct feedback from their accounts. This is important because it wasn't one major miss that led to them losing their biggest customer, it was a series of small mishaps that would've been caught in a transactional survey.

Onboarding CustomerGauge has had the highest ROI of anything I've ever done at my company.

Christine Marcus
Alchemista

It's also important to know that Alchemista doesn't work on yearly or even monthly contracts. They rely on their service quality to keep customers retained every day. Since they brought on CustomerGauge, Alchemista has retained 100% of their customers because they can take immediate action anytime a small hiccup occurs.

Want to learn more about how CustomerGauge's Account Experience software can help you retain 100% of your accounts? Check out the video below or click here for a demo of Account Experience today.

About the Author

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Ian Luck
Ian has been in the CX market for over a decade evangelizing best-practices and strategies for increasing the ROI of customer programs. He loves a loud guitar, a thick non-fiction book, and a beach day with his family. You can catch him around the north shore of Boston, MA.
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