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Message from CCI President Craig Bailey
I invite you to join me at the upcoming 7th Annual Voice of the
Customer Conference, December 7-9th in San Francisco. This event, a
joint initiative between The Product Development & Management Association
(PDMA) and The Institute for International Research (IIR), will provide
guidance and lessons for gaining a clear and detailed understanding of
customer wants and needs. I will be presenting on the topic, "Leveraging
the Voice of the Customer to Maximize Business Results," where we will
share practical approaches for assimilating feedback from all customer
touch-points and learn how customer feedback is "most crucial" to
remaining competitive in this dynamic marketplace.
As a special offer, please mention the registration priority code:
SPKRM1639CB and receive a 15% discount off the standard conference fees.
To register, please call 888.670.8200, email
email@iirusa.com, or visit the
website
www.iirusa.com/voc.
Becoming Customer Centric - Voice of the
Customer
by Craig Bailey
In our first edition on
the series Becoming Customer Centric, we provided the definition of
Customer Centricity as having three main parts:
-
Aligning the resources of your organization
-
Effectively respond to the ever-changing needs of the
customer
-
Building mutually profitable relationships
In
this edition we will begin discussing an approach to "Effectively respond
to the ever-changing needs of the customer." To effectively respond to
your customers' needs, you first must know what they are. You need to ask
for and obtain this information by direct and indirect means, then you
must respond. To begin, we present a Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC) process,
a pragmatic approach to discovering and effectively responding to the
ever-changing needs of the customer.
A VoC process is a multi-faceted methodology to leverage customer input
(obtained directly or indirectly) to serve as a significant source of
input to your decision-making and continuous improvement (process/systems
improvement, product development, account management, etc.) efforts. These
efforts could be at the macro (organization-wide) level or micro (customer
specific) level. In fact, many attributes of the VoC process are practices
that firms typically have in place already. However, when taken in tandem
(as an overall VoC program), the results can have an exponentially
positive effect on your efforts to become customer centric.
Following are the key aspects of the VoC process we will outline:
o Obtain the Pulse of the Customer
o Involve the Customer
o Analyze Information
o Socialize Results
o Implement Customer-Focused Changes
o Respond to the Customer
This is meant to be an iterative and cyclical process. Additionally, a
firm will typically elect to implement those VoC attributes that make the
most sense at that particular point in time (biggest bang for the buck),
and subsequently implement additional attributes to evolve their VoC
program. Finally, performance of the VoC process requires operational
discipline as there are a set of tasks and activities to be performed on a
periodic (typically monthly or quarterly) basis.
This series will identify the typical sources of direct and indirect
customer input and examine how they interrelate and can be leveraged as
part of a formalized VoC program. As such, we will expand upon each area
and attribute outlined above in a logical progression, tying together the
integrated VoC program.
In closing, customer input/feedback is critical to support your
decision-making process. Companies typically review market trends to look
for opportunities to augment their product and service offerings with the
hope of capturing "new revenue" from "new customers." This is often done
without an understanding of what could be achieved for "new revenue" from
the existing customer base, or learning from the experience of existing
customers about ways to meet the needs of new customers that exist in the
market.
In our next edition we will discuss the first topic above: "Obtain the
Pulse of the Customer."
View previous articles in this series.
A Data-Driven Approach to IT Management
by
Joseph Prosser and David Osborn
Senior Consultants,
NOCManage
This is the first article in a series exploring an approach to managing
network operations. Having been building and managing network operations
for over 10 years, we have seen the same underlying challenges occurring
almost everywhere. In this series of articles, we will describe these
challenges, along with a repeatable methodology developed to overcome them
that we call Data-Driven Operations. These challenges can be broken
down into three main categories: application-based, informational, and
procedural.
The applications typically in use in network operations include one or
more network management systems (NMS), a ticketing system, DNS, and other
support systems. Many times, they are not integrated and cannot talk to
each other. Because of this, they do not share the same configuration
source. This means that people have to maintain multiple versions of the
same information, which can lead to error. One approach to addressing this
is to have a common data store that is used to populate all these
applications.
Keeping track of configuration data is critical to the effective
management of any size network. Network data management is more than just
asset tracking, as it also includes information about how devices are
connected, deployed, and maintained. This knowledge is worth far more than
the assets themselves, though the value is difficult to quantify. The
knowledge is what allows your business to function, so it's more easily
valued by looking at the cost of losing that information. Unfortunately if
this value is not realized and network data management is not a priority,
then the data, if stored at all, is outdated or inconsistent. An approach
to solving this is to have operation procedures in place that ensure this
information is stored when the related activity is performed.
Standard operating procedures are a requirement for effective operations
management. They are the only way to ensure that knowledge about a process
is available to the entire organization and that processes are executed
consistently over time. The reality is that operating procedures are
frequently ignored, stale, or unavailable. This may be because the
procedures themselves are onerous or are hard to maintain or that people
do not have an incentive to follow them exactly. Penalties for not
following procedures are one solution, but are usually not ideal. A better
solution is to increase the level of automation, leveraging a centralized
and easily accessible data store.
Disparate systems, bad data, and inefficient/inconsistent operating
procedures directly impact your customers – they experience elongated
outages and/or performance problems that may have been resolved more
quickly with accurate/integrated data and processes. The Data-Driven
Operations methodology is a framework for addressing this – stay tuned
for more details in the next edition.
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Contents
+ Becoming Customer Centric
+ A Data-Driven Approach to IT Management
+ Recommended Reading
+ Speaking Engagements
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Recommended Reading
This week's recommended reading, CRM Magazine article
Best Practices for Solving the Self-Service Paradox, by Allen Bonde,
discusses the customer self-service paradox. Companies must strike the
right balance of creating customer relationships and achieving operational
efficiencies. As products and services become more complex, self-service
tools must keep up with the complexity in order to keep customers
satisfied with service. There are many benefits to customer self-service,
even beyond operational efficiencies, but poor implementation will likely
decrease efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Speaking Engagements
CCI
President Craig Bailey
will be a speaker at PDMA's (Product Development and Management
Association) 7th Annual
"Voice of the
Customer" conference on December 7-10, 2004, in San Francisco CA.
Presentation materials will be available for download from CCI's website
closer to the conference date.
About Customer Centricity, Inc.
We strengthen overall company performance through
better service delivery and management.
We boost efficiencies in front-line customer service and technical support
teams, order processing, fulfillment, field service, logistics and other
key operations functions.
In short, we align the resources of your organization to exceed your
customers' expectations in the most effective and efficient manner
possible.
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