Saturday, December 12, 2009

Services Account Management & Reporting

Leading manufacturing and capital equipment service organizations are now playing offense and engaging with their customers in a truly interactive fashion. Customer dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs), and reports have long been available to internal account teams. Now, however, leading edge organizations are making these same tools and data available to their suppliers and customers through business portals with aggregated information from multiple enterprise and transactional data systems. Both internal service, and customer personnel, can now see the same view of service performance and activity. This is really the next frontier, which can generate not only internal efficiency but can also create opportunities for real customer stickiness and business growth.

As indicated by Jonathan Byrnes, a prominent customer service thought leader and author, service innovation and growth requires proactive account management and intimate customer understanding.

Today, leading companies are redefining customer service . Phrases like building a relationship with the customer, and understanding the customer better than the customer understands herself underscore this new objective.
Jonathan Byrnes
HBSWK, Jul7, 2003, Out-of-the-Box Customer Service

Exhibit 1 portrays the respective characteristics relating to account management and reporting across the various stages. Generally speaking, as organizations move from customer support to the growth stage their account management reporting tends to:

* Include customer profitability & productivity metrics in addition to classic internal measures
* Have more cross-functional account ownership and input
* Leverage and aggregate data that is housed in multiple departments and sources
* Provide more sharing and easier access to data for strategic suppliers and customers
* Require a much deeper understanding and segmentation of the customer base to drive priorities and assure resources are optimized for strategic customers

Customer Support Profitability Growth
Break-Fix Delivery Metrics
Internal Metrics
Typically No Account Owner
Limited X-Department Data
No Data Aggregation
Internal Data Access Only
Limited Customer Segmentation
Account Profitability Metrics
Service Partner Metrics
Account Owner
Additional Data Sources
Functional Data Aggregation
Supplier Data Access
Large Account Focus
Customer Total Cost Metrics
Customer Productivity Metrics
Cross-Functional Team
Multiple Data Systems
X-Function Data Aggregation
Customer Data Access
Customer Experience Map

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