One of the main benefits of working at the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) – CCC’s parent company – is that Iget to learn what is going on in other corporate functions and keep pace with changing priorities and new challenges.

Because, everything is inter-connected after all – right?

So, I read with great interest our latest Executive Guidance for 2012 on Assessing Global Readiness: Adapting the Corporate Core to New Markets.

We have increasingly heard about service organization globalization – especially as customers become more global and companies extend their reach – whether it’s questions about how to serve local markets, setting up new contact centers, working with third-party partners, or otherwise operate globally.

Serving global customers in their local markets is on the rise – but it isn’t especially anything brand new to us in the service organization.  We’ve seen our organizations become more global as our customers are become more global – requiring service and support in their local markets, not just in a few centralized locations.

But, what our colleagues at CEB found was that while most companies focus on market-level investments to grow globally – they do not also work to align corporate center functions (like Finance, HR, Research, Legal, and IT) with these global goals.  So, while service organizations may be trying to serve customers globally – we may feel like our internal processes are holding us up.

So, what’s happening?  Well, CEB found five big barriers to successful globalization and six things leading companies do to overcome these barriers and have an effective corporate core that will successfully grow globally. Read More »

A flurry of articles have been published on organizational design of late, highlighting the importance of it today and recommending related best practices.

Senior executives in the service and support organization must be heeding the messages from these articles, as we are seeing renewed interest in our research and benchmarking related to organizational design.

This is particularly true for B2B support organizations that we work with, many of which are now reassessing the way their function has operated and organized for years.

A number of reasons for the renewed interest exist, but the most frequently verbalized is this: Faced with the realization that the days of basic order entry by humans are nearing a close as more and more customers prefer to self-serve and operating budgets shrink, more B2B organizations are seeking to innovate and optimize the service and order management function.

Interesting to note, however is that B2B organizations aren’t merely considering role and title changes, but in some cases actually shaking up the entire order management function and reorganizing to align differently to the business.

Read More »

Note: This post is the third in a four-part series based on CCC’s research, “Pillars of a Customer-Driven Collections Strategy”. In this series, we’ll discuss the research findings and best practices that can help your organization adopt a more effective approach to debt collections—moving away from a pure quantity focus and toward a quality, customer-oriented collections strategy.

Building strong cross-functional collaboration is one of those ever true key tenets of management literature.

In the past I have addressed how improved collaboration can help drive better customer insights and help organizations make better use of CRM investments, not to mention elevate the role of the service and support organization.  I want to continue the dialogue here by focusing on another, critical cross-functional collaboration opportunity whose impact is often underestimated: collections.

While it may seem that collaboration with collections is a lower priority, managing the collections process more closely can actually result in a win-win-win—better revenues, greater efficiency, and a better customer experience.  In fact, companies that do not make partnering with collections a priority risk operational inefficiencies, increasing delinquent account volume, and mitigating collections success.  In today’s hopefully recovering economic climate, that can translate to big revenue. Read More »

One of the most common assertions on the topic of loyalty is a happy employee begets a happy customer begets a happy investor.

Fred Reichheld is among the more well-known researchers and consultants who have posited and proven this, but even if data did not exist to back it, I have no doubt that companies would still believe it.

CCC has conducted much research on loyalty, and while we know that the drivers of loyalty in a service and support environment are very different and more limited than those in other parts of the business, we also know that service and support is always trying to find more opportunities to contribute to loyalty.

One of the latest trends we are seeing is service and support’s role in driving product usage and retention.  Realizing that the product itself may be fine but the user experience poor, many companies are looking to service and support (or the organization is volunteering) to drive improved product “stickiness.”

Read More »

Sometimes we have to tell people the last thing they want to hear: “No.”

Just think about your reaction when someone tells you no.  You get defensive immediately, right?  No one likes to be told they can’t do something – and your likely response is to start an argument to prove you’re right (and the person who told you no is wrong).

In your world, there are lots of reasons your frontline reps have to say no to customers. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. Sometimes it seems outside your reps’ control.  But, what if you could actually eliminate the negative reaction your customers have when they are told no – just by making a few tweaks to your current approach? Read More »

They say that strong communication is the key to any healthy relationship.  The principle holds true, of course, for both home and work.

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And while the role of the service and support organization is primarily to be a communicator—and in fact many organizations we work with have upskilled staff on all sorts of tactics for improved interpersonal communication with customers—we’re apparently doing a poor job when it comes to communicating with cross-functional colleagues, particularly as it relates to cascading voice of the customer data.

Here are the facts from this CCC  research on sharing Voice of the Customer (VOC) with internal business partners: Read More »