Using Customer Feedback to Drive Business Performance

Progressive, forward-thinking companies across a wide range of industries and markets are increasingly listening to the "voice of the customer" to drive better business performance. Convergys, a global leader in relationship management, notes that customer feedback offers value that goes well beyond the improvement of service delivery and support. In fact, when companies listen to their customers, they gain insight and intelligence that can reach across a wide range of operational areas and make the entire organization more responsive and agile.

In an informational white paper, Convergys discusses what companies can learn by listening to their customers and offers strategies for profiting from their advice. Here are some industry specific examples offered in the white paper:

Financial Services

• Customer questions about account applications could lead to improvements in the application process or forms
• Concerns or disputes about service fees may indicate glitches in operations or IT

Pharmaceutical

• Customer inquiries regarding product availability, safety, pricing or side effects may indicate there is a lack of information in the marketplace

Technology

• Customer inquiries may point to a gap in software features prompting improvements in the product development process
• Complaints regarding technical difficulties could be traced back to a problematic supplier

1. Raise Your Expectations
   
   Most companies use customer feedback to focus on process improvements within their contact center – improving agent skills, and/or or reducing wait time for example. But customer data, combined with operational data, can improve efficiency throughout your business.
   
   
2. Lay the Groundwork throughout the Enterprise
   
   Managers throughout the enterprise must understand the context of the customer intelligence effort within the overall business strategy and view it a chance for a company to listen to its customers.
   
   
3. Improve Data Collection
   
   Rather than just tallying a complaint, your customer-facing professionals should record details regarding the problem and map it to a corresponding business function within the enterprise.
   
   
4. Analyze and Correlate the Data
   
   IT tools used to collect and store customer data should have strong data management, analysis, display and reporting tools. This will better enable managers to pull out key trends that point to underlying process and operational issues.
   
   
5. Make the Business Case for Change
   
   A well-designed customer intelligence program channels anecdotal data about a customer's experience into statistically valid data. The data can then be used to build and defend a business case for process improvements.

Additional information is available at www.convergys.com.

Source: Information is copyright of Convergys Corporation

Outsourcing Best Practices: Smart Decision Making for Your Enterprise

Outsourcing investments can be a significant component of an enterprise's cost structure and an equally significant driver of revenue. Today's business managers are continually challenged to find ways to establish a consistent and complete framework for determining which outsourcing projects fit their organization's desire for return, tolerance for risk, and business goals. Making the situation even more volatile, according to global outsourcing advisory firm Glomark-Governan, is the fact that outsourcing cost and capabilities are ever changing. New technologies arrive almost continually and existing technologies quickly mature.

In a best practices white paper, Glomark-Governan offers managers insight and advice on smart outsourcing decision making in this turbulent business environment. The firm's perspectives fall into the following areas:

Establish Business Cases
Maintaining an optimal balance of risk, return, and strategic direction in the acquisition and management of outsourcing initiatives requires organizations to adhere to a consistent process for assessing individual projects and the complete portfolio of projects. Business cases for each outsourcing project are the foundation of this process, providing a forecast of possible economic and financial returns.

Identify Risk Factors
The organization's internal risk factors should be identified and applied to derive a range of probable outcomes and to identify certain influential variables in those outcomes.

Measuring Risk vs. Return
Next, potential outsourcing initiatives must be reviewed as a whole to rank the projects by return, risk, and strategic alignment. This ranked list is then laid against resource constraints to identify a range of possible projects. Finally these projects should be plotted by risk and return to find the optimum set of projects for a given level of risk or rate of return.

Additional information on this topic and access to the complete Glomark-Governan white paper is publicly available at www.glomark.com.

Source: Information is copyright of Glomark-Governan