Last week I spent 2 hours on the phone with a ~$500m multi-product financial services and insurance company who were at the end of a 6 month Salesforce.com implementation and are now standing back to optimize their processes and platform as they enter the crucial ”benefits realization” phase of the project.
The result of the call was a “top 20 questions list” that the client needs to answer (and execute on) in order to deliver value from their implementation investment. They are listed at the bottom of this article and thinking through them may help with your project whatever industry you are in.
The 3 year project budget including licenses, implementation and customization services, environmental management staff and infrastructure improvements is ~$3m (or ~$1m a year) and the business case for this expenditure is to support an increase of $20m in annual revenues (or 4% of current production) with no increase in employees through better targeting of offers to customers including a newly emerging social media strategy being developed to help the independent agents that process 70% of their business become closer to their customers. There are 80 of these independent agents owning businesses that range from $2m in annual revenues to over $20m.
A key element of the strategy is to increase their movement from a policy focused company to a customer focused company.
The company is already in the top tier of market performers we talk to since they were smart enough to start their project plan with the assumption that they could not handle the business and process change opportunities associated with the new applications and platforms at the same time as implementing the platform. They decided to focus on business improvement after the new platform implementation was complete. It also made the selection of the SFDC implementation partner much easier (and cheaper) since their focus was on platform installation (which they preferred because the demand for their SFDC services is so high). Following the completion of the phase 2 SFDC implementation they are now looking for a program management and process optimization partner to execute phase 3, which is why they called us. The overall project plan is as follows:
Phase 1 – Planning, awareness and enterprise alignment – complete (although enterprise communication continues)
Phase 2 – SFDC implementation including:
- Sales Cloud for 125 sales agents 25% of which are in enterprise buildings and 75% of which, the independent agents, are mobile / remote (including the using a mixture of dell laptops, blackberry torch Smartphone, phones and an increasing number of iPads. (this organizational distribution is what drove the need for a cloud solution and SFDC in the first place)
- Service Cloud for 40 service and support agents in 2 primary contact center locations (including 10 agents who work from home). One of these centers is on a TDM Avaya PBX and the other (outsourced) is on Avaya VOIP, both running Aspect as the overlaid ACD.
- A trial implementation of Radian6 to experiment with how social awareness can help them optimize their social engagement and customer experience
Phase 3 – Delivering the value – through Integration with the other major enterprise components and long term process alignment to deliver value involving:
- Oracle ATG as the eCommerce platform
- Oracle Documaker for content publishing
- Automated Insurance underwriting systems – internally developed
- Mortgage systems – internally developed leveraging industry standard back end platforms
- Product Management and Billing Systems – industry standard leveraging back end and external platforms
- Process optimization for independent agents and internal sales and service staff
Questions The Team Took Away To Answer
- With SFDC as the new master customer data repository how do the customer’s lifestyle profiles the independent agents build in the ecommerce platform and the customer’s own personal profiles modified online influence the offers that are presented both online and in printed collateral?
- What is the key data that needs to be fed from the eCommerce engine into the master data repository in order to effectively align the product offers with the customers?
- How will the company monitor and optimize offer effectiveness by customer segment and who will be responsible for tuning those offers?
- How will the company share these learnings with the independent agents?
- What other enterprise data from the back end underwriting and policy systems needs to be included in the customer data repository?
- What additional customer visibility, analytics and segmentation tools are required in addition to those provided by SFDC to maximize customer intelligence and investment return?
- How will the new social communities being built for each independent agent drive intelligence back into the corporate platform?
- What is the opportunity to leverage the improved service and support organization and platform to drive a better customer experience (including better alignment of customer and product to service agent)?
- How will the competitive intelligence available from social monitoring through Radian6 allow the company to better align sales strategies with weaknesses of their competitors?
- When in the customer conversation and lifecycle should conversations pass between the independent agents and the support agents ?
- Should support agents be empowered to make offers to customers when the relationship is owned by the independent agent and how will permission be identified and granted?
- Should the company consider a web chat capability with shared conversations where the local agent staff can be engaged in the conversation?
- What are the key customer events, triggers or behaviors which can initiate specific offers?
- What other technologies could deliver value in maximizing the knowledge of the customer especially in maximizing customer retention, including call recording, speech analytics and text analytics?
- What are the business events which are specifically encouraging mobile device usage (e.g. an increasing demand for annual insurance product reviews during onsite family visits in retirement homes)?
- What other predictive and marketing analytics tools should be considered to improve customer profitability?
- Are there customers who are not profitable enough or even agents who have concentrations of unprofitability or concentrations of risk that should be integrated into the overall customer strategy?
- Are there customers who cross agents and advantage they can take (for example they have identified a series of franchisees of a well known Donut company who are customers and believe they can create a community and a packaged offer to target 1000 or so others in the same demographic).
- Who should be the community and strategic customer data owner and how should the customer council / optimization team operate?
- What is the benefits tracking process, who will manage the ongoing optimization process and do the resources exist to deliver on the business case internally or should an external resource be retained?
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