Overview
With increased churn and rising customer expectations, Cox Communications needed a new approach to centering the customer experience. Rather than tackling challenges in fragmented efforts, the organization focused on one high-impact journey: moving. Partnering with Harmonic, the team reimagined this journey end-to-end and front-to-back, returning significant and sustainable ROI. The effort also demonstrated the value of service design and journey management for the enterprise. By building internal capabilities and aligning cross-functional teams, Cox laid the groundwork for consistent and measurable improvements in customer experience across many more journeys.
Challenge
Cox Communications was navigating a crowded market, legacy systems, and operational silos, making it difficult to scale customer-centered change. Although the CX team had mapped journeys before, past efforts had struggled to gain traction. There was executive support and urgency, but no unifying framework or process to make journey transformation a reality. To make progress, Harmonic helped inform the organization’s decision to reimagine one journey—moving—addressing customer churn and cost-to-serve challenges while serving as a proof of concept for broader adoption of service design and journey management.
Approach
Harmonic guided a cross-functional team’s effort to transform the moving journey—an experience known to create churn, but also an opportunity. We started with generative research to close significant knowledge gaps, sending teams into homes, retail stores, and call centers to capture stories firsthand. This not only informed the journey but also built empathy and shared understanding across teams.
Workshops translated research into experience maps and service blueprints, turning insights into opportunities and new solutions for near-term improvement into action. In parallel, we built a validated new value proposition and concepts, designed an omnichannel strategy, and a multi-stage evolution map to transform the journey.. This two-pronged approach ensured Cox could improve movers’ journeys in the same fiscal year while setting the stage for longer-term change.
Following initial success, we helped the organization transition from isolated efforts to a scalable journey management model. We bridged gaps between journey, product, and operations teams by using shared frameworks—such as moment architectures and service blueprints—that demonstrated how future-state experiences could be built upon current capabilities. Training and coaching ensured that journey thinking could live beyond any single initiative.
“Through the moving journey work, we saw hundreds of basis points increase in mover flow share, significant reductions in 90-day post-move churn, and the highest NPS scores for that transaction type in the company. That combination of share, retention, and promoter score proved the work wasn’t just good ideas on paper—it delivered real results for Cox and for our customers.”
Jason Axsom
Former VP Of Marketing/East Region, Cox Communications
Outcome
The redesigned moving journey delivered measurable gains in customer experience and retention. Cox saw a significant increase in mover flow share and a reduction in 90-day post-move churn. The two channels redesigned as part of this work—digital and the transfer center—also became the top-performing channels in terms of NPS.
These outcomes proved the value of journey-led transformation and sparked the expansion of journey management across the business. Product, marketing, and operations now collaborate with a shared view of the customer experience, using consistent tools and language to prioritize initiatives and design more innovative services.