E-commerce Business Model Development

Centric build an e-commerce business model and customer acquisition channel to expand business and reach new customers.

The Business Need

A $300 million provider of short-term loans operates more than 1,000 retail locations across 35 states. Because of the company’s success, management saw an opportunity to expand its business and reach new customers via an online business.

The company sought to establish and quickly grow market share in the online lending market. Management set forth several key objectives:

• Develop a vision for the online business model to guide investment over a three-year period while minimizing capital investment risk
• Design, build and deploy a scalable operating model to support future growth in the online business
• Enable the convergence of retail operations, telephone operations and the new online business to enhance customer service

Centric’s High-Impact Approach

Company management partnered with Centric to develop the online business model from the planning stages to full deployment. This approach included several key steps including:

• Conducting competitive analysis of the online lending market
• Developing the strategy and vision for the new business model
• Designing and building an operating model which defined the organizational structure and outlined customer service and other business processes, performance management metrics and the supporting IT architecture
• Development of both short-term and long-term strategies to deploy the operating model
• Launching the pilot business model
• Assisting with overall deployment of the new online business

Results

The Centric team helped the company launch the new online business in less than four months. After the successful launch of the pilot online business model, the company moved to full deployment and achieved tenfold growth in online revenues within the first year of operation.