In tough times such as these, businesses must often cut costs to stay healthy. Business leaders frequently cut back overhead functions such as customer care, without first considering how cuts will impact their relationships with customers, or how cuts will affect their ability to grow once the economy recovers.

However, companies can view a recession as an opportunity to improve both operational efficiency and their relationships with customers. By carefully examining their customer strategy and eliminating only those functions that do not add value to the customer relationship; then viewing all remaining staff as new hires, companies can amass the optimal staff and operations to create a brand identity of service excellence and poise themselves to be the first to grow in the next economic growth cycle.

Place the Best People in the Right Jobs...For Crucial Activities

When optimizing your staff size, first review your customer relations strategy to determine which activities and by extension, staff positions are crucial to your company's success. A strong strategy states your goals and objectives. Your goals and objectives, in turn, dictate the most important activities. The staff positions responsible for these activities are, therefore, the positions that are crucial for the success of your customer strategy.

In business-to-business markets, the key element of the customer relationship can be defined as how much strategic value your products and services add to a client's business. Yet "strategic-value-added" is one of the most difficult things to measure and nearly impossible to gauge using third-party customer surveys. The best way to understand how clients perceive value you provide, and identify opportunities to improve your business, is to skip the customer satisfaction surveys and opt, instead, for collaborative conversations with decision-makers at key accounts.

Our client, A Washington, D.C., technology services firm—"Washco"—wanted to grow existing strategic customers and attract new ones. Washco was seeking profitable long-term relationships in which it could concretely contribute to its customers' success.

With this goal, Washco's executives sought to understand what would or would not motivate customers to buy. They identified four key questions:

1. What are we doing that works well, and how can we do more of it?
2. What are we doing that is not working, and how can we improve those activities?
3. What should we stop doing because it provides no value to our customers?
4. How much strategic value do our customers think we are providing, and how can further contribute to their success?

Companies can't seem to get out of their own way. Declaring themselves customer-centric, they turn right around and design business processes along departmental boundaries, creating stovepipe operations that frustrate customers. Upon review, management discovers the company is accomplishing its internally generated goals. Yet the customers aren't happy. People are "doing things right," but they aren't doing the right things to create outstanding customer experiences.

Why? Because too many companies fail to obtain meaningful customer input before designing business processes. They fail to understand which behaviors their customers value and which behaviors create frustration in the customer experience. Ultimately, senior managers must ask themselves a single question before including any given activity in their business processes: "What is the value of this activity to my customer?"

I recently asked the president of a midsize subsidiary of a large, highly visible company, what his sales agents would say prevented them from selling more. He laughed and replied, "They would say 'us.'" When I asked what he meant, he gave me several examples; this one is very typical.

Integrated Order Fulfillment Will Make Your Employees Happy, Increase Customer Loyalty and Reduce Costs

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Posted on Mar 17, 2008