To: Tom who wrote (83 ) 1/30/2000 3:25:00 PM From: ztect Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 177
(def/essay) "Relationship Redesign." FAST LANE + HOW TO ACHIEVE BREAKTHROUGH CHANGE IN THE CRM SPACE By Donald Mick, Vice President, eLoyalty and Michael Ashe, Senior Vice President, eLoyalty For the past several years, we have worked with world class companies on projects intended to fundamentally change the customer experience. These projects require an enormous expenditure of time, money, resources and energy, but sometimes fall short of delivering revolutionary new processes. Even though the project may be delivered on time and within budget, it sometimes fails to bring about "breakthrough" economic benefits. Why is this? What can we learn from these lessons? The answer we put forth is "Relationship Redesign." That is, understanding how relationships among four key constituencies can and will change in process redesign initiative. The four constituencies are: - The customer - The company - Company shareholders and the - Staff The successful companies start the "process" aspect of the business redesign by asking: "What is important, in this context, to each of these four constituencies?" The key, the "breakthrough" solution, is found in uncovering the right balance of value exchange that will sustain these relationships over time. This type of analysis involves six steps: 1. Understanding what each party wants, from their point of view. 2. Developing (imagining) an outcome that provides high value to all constituencies. 3. Designing a process that will deliver that outcome. 4. Identifying the measures that will assess the value to all parties, from their point of view. 5. Testing the solution against the economic model that must support the business. 6. Running test situations against the process design to affirm that the process will work as intended. The first two steps are what makes this approach "relationship redesign" rather than just process redesign. Creative and practical ideas coalesce at this stage: Imagine a company that sells contact lenses to optometrists. They were struggling under the costs of providing phone support for each pair of contact lenses to be custom ordered and then dealing with the follow-up calls that inevitably would come from the optometrist's staff to determine when each pair would arrive (so they could schedule follow-ups with their patients). By understanding what each participant valued, they arrived at an Internet solution that allowed an optometrist to order over the web, track delivery over the web, and GIVE THE END CONSUMER ACCESS TO DELIVERY INFORMATION. This final step added the necessary extra value to incent the optometrists to use the web rather than the phone. Another client was originally skeptical about asking the staff what was important to them. Rather than obtaining useful process design information, they were afraid they would hear grumbling about compensation and benefits. When we conducted the interviews and workshops, however, the staff generated a long and rich list of ideas. Some examples: - Allow "quick path" shortcuts for the most common system navigation - Give some of us e-mail to correspond with customers - Empower us to override billing errors up to a certain dollar amount without supervisor approval and the supervisors can review these later. Several of those ideas were relatively easy to integrate into the new process designs and added significantly to the value of the system. They had the added benefit of getting buy-in from the staff, since they could see their ideas being listened to and acted upon. Try the first two steps of Relationship Redesign. Look at the situation from each point of view, then imagine a breakthrough solution that adds value to all parties. The outcome can be the difference between a good project and breakthrough project!