Aligning Business Processes to Transform Customer Service

21. Mai 2008   Presentation at G-Force EMEA Berlin. 

Abstract. 

Over the last decade customer oriented companies have developed their call center into a professional contact center. Facing severe competition they have made customer satisfaction one of their main priorities. Consequently the contact center has become the cornerstone of the customer relations strategy.

But many companies exploit only a fraction of the potential of their customer services organization. The main point of the management agenda is not so much the further improvement of this unit as rather to implement a conclusive concept of an integrated execution of customer processes. Like the setup of contact centers and their systematic further development this is not an end in itself but imperative. The main drivers for this next “evolutionary” step will be both cost and quality pressure.

In order to exploit the full potential of customer service companies have to address and solve principal business issues. In many cases they

• have only little understanding about the total cost of their customer service,
• are facing severe restrictions restructuring their work force,
• have only a poor customer segmentation based on substantial customer value analysis,
• have their customer service organizations split in silos with inconsistent principles,
• have their operational and organizational structure based on media instead of process and business value per transaction and
• maintain contact centers that are insufficiently integrated into the rest of the organization.

Based on these ‘business pain points’ the main target is to realize contact center levels of efficiency and consistency of customer processes in the ‘back office’. Transferring these high levels of efficiency and consistency will translate into exceptional overall improvements in terms of quality and cost savings.

In order to transfer the contact center concept the management should focus on the development and implementation of a comprehensive integrated business process design, the break up of silos (‘customer-belongs-to –me’-attitude), the adjustment of the operational and organizational structure based on integrated business processes and the implementation of a standardized layer to distribute business transactions based on business value, activity, priority, availability and skill in real-time. Transferring the contact center concept corporation-wide implies

• the establishment of a clear vision of what integrated customer service will look like, or - in different words – of a „finish line image“,
• the development of an overall concept for the integration between the front office and the rest of the organization and
• the experience sharing between the contact center management and senior management. They have to push their story.

The approach to align business processes to transform customer service needs first and foremost top management attention and direction.

Thomas Wind, TellSell Consulting
G-Force EMEA Berlin, 21.05.2008