Within Customer Operations we include Customer Experience Design and Operational Effectiveness & Efficiency

Customer Experience Design

Never have customer expectations been so high – customers expect fantastic service, they expect 24/7 any time anywhere multi-channel access. And with the advent of social media, they are increasingly comfortable sharing their view of what they experience with the world. Get it right and good service is a differentiator; get it wrong and get it wrong often enough and it is all too easy to erode brand value.

The first step to getting the experience right is to take a proactive and robust approach to designing what as an organisation you want the experience to be. This has to start with an understanding of the customer, their needs and how these change based on time of day, location and what else they are doing – within the context of the brand values and promise. Against this backdrop, defining the key journeys that customers, both consumers and corporate clients, will go through with you across the lifetime of the relationship by channel will allow you to determine the business capabilities you need to deliver. For us capabilities are defined as the processes, people, information and technology needed to deliver.

We take a customer-centric, future-back approach to defining the target customer experience drawing on our proprietary World of 2020 research which considers holistic customer needs in the context of the changing world.    We then draw on our systems thinking approach which addresses all of the capability levers at once to design business capabilities which start and finish with the customer – and enable people at the front line to deliver the experience intended.  We have many years of experience doing just that for many of the leading consumer brands, such as Tesco, which have been instrumental in raising the bar of customer expectations across the board.

Operational Effectiveness & Efficiency

At the heart of the customer service agenda is how to deliver a set of business capabilities which deliver a joined-up experience for the customers across functional silos and across multiple channels – and to do this as cost-efficiently as possible while maximising the value-add for the customer and delivering the target brand experience.

So whether it be about providing fast and efficient customer support such as handling customer enquiries, making administrative up-dates or dealing with complaints, or sector-specific service delivery, such as claims management, counter transactions or deal reconciliations to name but a few, there is a need to consider the key journeys from the customer perspective. We help organisations to categorise journeys/interactions into three groups as follows:

1. Those journeys which can be resolved in a single interaction the  vast majority of the time with a general level of skill;
2. Those journeys which require specialist expertise to resolve – and we believe these should be minimised; and
3. Those journeys which are transaction-based, require no human intervention and can be automated and potentially off-shored and/or outsourced

We then work with clients to define the underlying operating model underpinned by a multi-channel front-end architecture. Typically, this might incorporate:

• Lean principle-based process standardisation and simplification, organisational simplification and consolidation, and increased automation both in the front-office (eg greater use of on-line self-serve) and the back-office (eg work flow) to achieve scale efficiencies and support future growth
• A systematic and robust approach to the engagement, enabling and motivating of the organisation’s people, underpinned by balanced scorecard KPI’s cascaded from the Board to the operational front line to enable them to deliver the brand promise and vision at every interaction with the customer
• Recognition of the requirement for flexibility to enable customisation and proposition differentiation where market return justifies this
• Focus on core competence, with non-core competence considered as potential candidates for outsourcing and/or off-shoring

We are able to draw on a variety of approaches, tools and techniques to help organisations deliver operational change whether this be incremental evolution or transformational overhaul – including organisation ‘fit test’ diagnostic tools, accelerated solution development techniques, hothousing (a ring-fenced team approach to concept roll-out and people engagement), strategy implementation planning,  and communications and change management.  When combined with our small teams of seasoned, expert practitioners, we are able to make powerful interventions to kick-start your initiatives and drive them to successful completion, while transferring knowledge and building sustainable internal capability along the way.