Typical Engagements

Our real world experience has been put to work to solve business issues across a variety of industries. Typical engagements include:

Merger and Acquisition Due Diligence and Integration

• Performing operations and service management audits to determine effectiveness of current processes, procedures, staffing levels and value to the acquiring organization.

• Analysis of customer-base stability including a due diligence customer interview / survey process to assist an acquirer to validate the stability of the customer-base and quality of products and services of a company that it was considering acquiring.

• Integration planning to ensure that aggressive yet realistic timelines are set to realize the anticipated benefits and outcomes of the acquisition.

• Defining the operational integration plan covering people, facilities, process, product and systems to achieve the anticipated benefits and outcomes of the acquisition, including:

  • Achieving integrated financials for external reporting

  • Enabling the combined sales force to move a broader product set (increase revenue)

  • Achieving the operational synergies (cost reductions)

  • Ensuring that customer expectations are met or exceeded through the transition (customer retention)

Customer Relationship Management Deployment

• Review strategies and processes for selected areas of focus (Sales, Marketing, and/or Service) to determine gaps, identify cross-functional dependencies, and recommended approaches for addressing gaps.

• Development of process, system, and training requirements for each phase of the project

• Assist in and/or drive the selection of specialized service providers (system integrator, application hosting, outsourced help desk, training, mobile technology provider, CRM software provider).

• Ongoing program management over deployment initiative, including regular reviews with Senior Management and project sponsors.

Telemarketing (Inbound & Outbound) and Service Center

• Stabilization and rebuilding of team to improve the prospect / customer experience and the quality of the prospective lead profiling that is done

• Ensuring effective routing to the proper team to qualify the lead and drive sales cycle to close, while institutionalizing metrics for better lead management

• Specific projects include assessing and streamlining the telemarketing process for a large multinational software company resulting in increased efficiency in processing leads and qualifying opportunities, enhanced visibility over the activity and disposition of leads.

Program Management Office (PMO)

• Establishing a Program Management Office (PMO) to coordinate the design and implementation of a major enterprise system, providing focused cross-functional oversight into the constituent departments to maintain momentum over the life of the project and bring it to fruition.

• Overseeing and coordinating the downstream activities for rolling out an enterprise system, such as a CRM system, including the gathering and scrubbing of customer, account, and enterprise data to populate the system and ensuring policies, procedures, and practices are implemented to ensure the use and success of the system. 

IT Project Management

• Planning and managing high-visibility, business-critical IT projects, including internal project analysis, vendor management, status reporting, and team leadership.

• Performing systems/applications assessments to help an organization's IT leader determine if the firm's investment strategy in customer service technology was sound. This involved meeting with key constituents to identify the original goals and objectives, what had been accomplished to date, the gap between where the firm was and where it wanted to be, examining vendor contracts and functional requirements to determine any leverage the firm may have, and delivering recommendations to get the investment strategy back on track.

• Specific projects include upgrading and merging ERP systems, implementing a CRM system, developing sales reporting (including moving critical reports from desktop applications to leveraging the corporate data warehouse), and developing a comprehensive, global chart of accounts. 

Vendor Management

• Implementing practices to ensure that a firm effectively leverages its 3rd party vendors to services its customer base.  By leveraging proven process model templates to expedite the definition and implementation of the practices, customers have achieved significant benefits quickly.

• Specific projects include helping a firm more methodically manage its vendors to ensure cross-functional organizational needs were taken into consideration and evolving the mind-set from that of dealing with their critical service deliver vendors at arms-length to considering these vendors as accountable partners.  These vendors turned partners were eventually brought further into the inner-circle to better assist the firm in meeting its goals and objectives.

Customer Service Interim Management

• Temporary management of customer service teams in lieu of the firm filling an open management-level position, especially when vacated unexpectedly or when the organization is going through transformation.

• Managing the screening through hiring process for critical positions, such as Customer Care Director, CIO, Manager and Representative levels.  Includes all aspects of screening candidates from resume triage, phone screens, interviewing, recommendation, and new hire orientation.

• Establishing a call center, including analysis of customer and product needs, forecasting volumes of inquiries and staffing needs, design and implementation of processes and procedures, and coordinating staffing.

• Specific projects include benchmarking the contact center staffing plan and performance against customer inquiry volumes/trends and industry best practices, performing an in-depth analysis of the root-causes for the customer inquiries to identify areas to promote self-service and other means to reduce call volume and improve call handling times.  Also, developed a customer service guide which consolidated disparate practices, previously spread across a number of groups and locations, into a single guide from which all teams could operate. The reduction of time spent on non-value items allowed the team to focus on more proactive customer support activities. 

Customer Service and Operations Continuous Improvement

• Performing operations assessments for Customer Service and Technical Support teams, including auditing a company’s continuous improvement plans to provide an assessment of the effectiveness of these plans to close the gap between where a company is and where it wants to be.

• Identification of critical skills, development of skills matrices for existing staff, and the design and delivery of customer service skills training to support required capabilities.

• Process design

  • Defining the process by which a company receives customer inquiries for support, performs triage, engages necessary resources to resolve the issue, escalates for management attention, performs root-cause analysis and management reporting.

  • Redefining the process by which a company accepts a lead, converts the lead into an order, fulfills the order and renders an accurate invoice.

• Leveraging a company’s customer satisfaction survey results to implement programs to drive improvements in customer satisfaction and increase customer retention rates.

• Performing customer perception polling exercises to help companies get a “quick read” on the satisfaction level of their customers and what can be done to improve.

• Helping a company align its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product strategy to meet the needs of its customer-base and market.

• Outsourcing analysis and implementation including working with firms to determine if outsourcing aspects of their customer support and service delivery function is a viable option to increase customer retention and operational efficiencies. And, when it does make sense, lead the efforts to migrate to an outsourced model.