Stating your case: highlighting the return on customer strategy

By Rob Lewis, staff writer If you’re a customer relations professional, you might notice there are a few people in your organisation who aren’t quite so passionate about creating a positive customer experience. Most important of all, perhaps, is the financial director, who often might as well be speaking a different language. Unfortunately, he’s the one with his hands on the purse strings. The truth is, if you want to win the hearts and minds of you customers, you’re going to have to win over your business colleagues first, and that means stating your case. Patrick James is vice president of sales and service transformation at CapGemini, and regularly consults on the implementation of customer strategy. He knows that different people take different views on the subject – typically a CEO will spend his time trying to find faults with it, marketing will be working hard to promote it, and while the customer relations manager (or equivalent) will be working out how to deliver it, the FD will simply want to know how much it all costs. And that’s where the problems begin. Translating the quality of your company’s customer experience or customer strategy into terms of cold hard cash is a tricky business. “It’s an incredibly broad brushstroke to say no FD understands customer experience, but one could say that it is an intangible in a world where most FD’s want tangibility. The goal of CapGemini and a lot of other consultancies is just to put a price on a relationship aspect that can be hard to define.”

Accurately costing and forecasting an entire customer strategy programme may actually be impossible. James himself isn’t sure there is a concrete business case for customer strategy - not, at least, in clear accounting terms. If you can do it, however, you’ve already scored a big plus. Businesses without a strategy in place end up taking a scattergun approach to consumer relations: a miscellany of departments and personnel end up dealing with the issue. There are two things wrong with this. Firstly, it doesn’t exactly make for happier clients – “more time with the customer doesn’t translate to a better customer experience”, as James puts it – and neither is it particularly efficient. Secondly, and this will be of far more importance from an FD’s perspective, it means customer relations can’t be costed at all. Having a customer strategy provides what the accountants call a cost centre, and gives your financial decision makers better figures to work off – an attractive proposition for any bean counter. Accentuate the positive Aside from that, the thing to bear in mind, as lyricist Johnny Mercer once wrote, is that you’ve got to accentuate the positive. That’s what worked for Rob Phillips, who manages the Perfect Delivery customer programme for construction out-fitters Overbury. When Overbury wanted to implement their own customer strategy Philips went to a meeting with Morgan Sindell plc, which owned the company, and told them it was going to knock a million of their profit in its first year. “That lead to a few interesting discussions, as you might imagine,” he says, “but they backed it.” By resisting the urge to overstate his case, Philips had avoided a common pitfall in customer relations advocates. Arguably, he was lucky to have such a responsive board, but despite his pessimism, or perhaps because of it, it was plain-sailing from there on in. In terms of overheads, Overbury’s customer strategy involved two salaries, for Philips and a colleague, and a degree of lost labour time as the workforce were brought up to speed with the new culture. After all, while customer strategy needs someone to co-ordinate it, it isn’t the responsibility of a single department. “Every director we have, every senior manager we have, every employee we have, knows that it’s their task to achieve Perfect Delivery,” Philips says. Rolling out a gradual implementation reduced the time taken-off site to a minimum, however. But asked to outline the elements of his customer strategy according to expense, Philips refutes the question. “I think if you approach it in that way you’ve got it wrong. If you say something is too expensive to do for your client then you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. You do the right thing for your client at the appropriate time. If that costs you a bit of money, in terms of training or development, then that costs you a bit of money. The goal is to delight the client, and make them come back.” One way in which Overbury’s customer strategy could demonstrate an immediate return lay in its superiority to the conventional quality control process. Asking your customers if you’ve got it right gives a far clearer picture than asking yourself. Prior to stating the case for Perfect Delivery, Overbury examined the projects it had got wrong, and found that they had wiped a million off their bottom line. Looked at from that perspective, getting it wrong is a lot more expensive than getting it right. Despite all this, Philips still describes the board’s decision as “a blind leap of faith.” Happily, their conviction was rewarded. By the end of its first year, Perfect Delivery saw Overbury making more money than ever – worth bearing in mind, if you’re going to argue by example. Read more features, practical case studies and white papers about the customer business case.