Client
engagements

A Birmingham boutique retailer had built a loyal in-store customer base but was struggling to translate that loyalty into a growing social media presence. Engagement rates were inconsistent, content output was high-effort but low-return, and competitors were steadily gaining ground online.

We audited the client's social media performance across 90 days: post types, timing, engagement rates, and audience growth trends. We benchmarked performance against five direct local competitors and three analogous national brands. Simultaneously, we analyzed the client's highest-performing content to identify the attributes that drove outsized engagement.

The client's best-performing content had a consistent pattern: it featured specific products in context (styled, in use, or behind-the-scenes), rather than polished product photography. Audience interaction spiked on conversational captions and dropped on promotional ones. Competitors were posting more frequently but with lower engagement per post, indicating an opportunity to compete on quality rather than volume.

We delivered a content strategy framework prioritizing three post formats with documented performance advantages, a revised posting cadence based on the client's own audience activity data, and a competitive differentiation brief identifying two content whitespace opportunities that no local competitor was occupying.

Following implementation of the recommendations, the client gained over 200 new social media followers, representing a meaningful step in building an owned audience and reducing dependence on paid reach.

A Bloomfield Hills service business had seen stagnating sales despite a strong reputation and consistent customer traffic. Leadership had theories: pricing, service mix, seasonality. But no systematic way to evaluate them. Decision-making was based on intuition rather than evidence.

We designed a structured interview protocol and conducted in-depth conversations with both active and lapsed customers. Interviews explored purchase drivers, friction in the service experience, unmet needs, and how customers compared the business to alternatives. In parallel, we reviewed available sales and transaction data to identify patterns in customer frequency and spend.

Customer interview findings consistently surfaced two themes that sales data alone had obscured: a perceived gap in service transparency at the point of decision, and an undercommunicated value proposition that existing customers highly valued but new customers rarely discovered on their own. The business's strongest differentiator was effectively invisible to prospective customers.

We delivered an executive presentation to the leadership team laying out the interview findings, the core insight, and three prioritized recommendations: a specific change to the point-of-inquiry experience, a messaging update for the client's primary customer touchpoints, and a follow-up outreach strategy for lapsed customers based on the stated reasons for disengagement.

Following implementation, the client experienced a 15% increase in sales, an outcome the owner attributed in part to acting on the interview-sourced recommendations. The engagement established a model for ongoing customer feedback that the business has since incorporated into its operations.

A Bloomfield Hills consumer business was navigating a competitive market without a clear picture of where it stood relative to the field. Leadership had general awareness of key competitors but lacked a structured analysis of how they compared on the dimensions that mattered most to their shared customers.

We identified six direct competitors and mapped each across five dimensions: pricing range, product breadth, customer experience signals, digital presence quality, and observed positioning strategy. Data was gathered through primary observation, customer-facing materials, and digital footprint analysis. We also conducted interviews with the client's own customers to understand which competitive factors were most salient in their decision-making.

The analysis revealed a meaningful gap in the mid-to-premium segment: two competitors had effectively claimed the high-end positioning while the majority crowded the value tier. The client occupied a middle position that was neither clearly differentiated from the value segment nor credibly premium, a positioning vulnerability that customer interviews confirmed was causing hesitation at the point of consideration.

We delivered a competitive brief and strategic positioning recommendation to the leadership team, identifying three specific moves to strengthen differentiation: a pricing architecture adjustment, targeted messaging changes for the client's primary customer-facing channels, and a set of experience improvements that would reinforce a more distinct market position.

The competitive brief became a reference document for the client's planning process. Leadership used the positioning analysis to guide decisions on service development, pricing, and communications for the following quarter.

A West Bloomfield business had grown organically over several years and accumulated process complexity that was beginning to affect customer experience. Leadership sensed friction in the customer journey but lacked a systematic view of where it was occurring, how significant it was, and which fixes would have the most impact.

We conducted structured interviews with both customers and internal stakeholders (frontline staff, operations leads, and the owner) to build a multi-perspective view of the customer journey. Across the interviews, we mapped each stage from initial discovery through repeat purchase and tracked where experiences diverged from expectations, where internal processes introduced customer-facing delays, and where staff observations pointed to recurring issues.

A clear pattern emerged across interviews: a single handoff point in the customer journey, specifically between initial inquiry and service delivery, was generating disproportionate friction. Customers experienced it as uncertainty; staff experienced it as unclear ownership. The issue was systemic and organizational, not a product or pricing problem as leadership had initially suspected.

We delivered a visual customer journey map covering eight distinct stages, each annotated with customer expectations, current experience, and gap severity, and a prioritized CX improvement brief identifying three operational changes with high impact and low implementation cost. Recommendations were explicitly sequenced by feasibility.

The journey map served as a planning artifact for the client's next quarter, giving leadership a shared language for discussing customer experience and a framework for evaluating future operational decisions. The owner described it as the clearest picture of their business they'd had in years.