In this series of reports, we offer
a set of roles and responsibilities that we have found to be essential to transform
companies from being inward facing to being customer adaptive. If you want
your company to be easy to do business with, it’s time to rethink the
way you have organized for success. Don’t assume that these roles equate
to “positions” in your organization. It is certainly possible (and
often desirable) to combine roles into a single position.
We realize that few companies have a clean slate with which to start an entirely
new organizational structure. Yet we are often asked by clients to paint
a picture of the “ideal” organizational structure to deliver
a great cross-channel end-to-end customer experience, while at the same time
increasing revenues and profits.
We’re assuming that you already have a strong, senior customer experience
leader.1 Now the question is: Whom does that customer
experience leader serve? She serves your customers, of course, but she also
ideally serves a set of
customer (and partner) advocates within your organization.
Your segment advocates should be responsible for the following:
•
Being the “buck stops here” representative for their constituency.
Advocates resolve complaints that aren’t handled well by other mechanisms.
They organize and run customer and partner councils. They gather requirements
and advocate them to the rest of the organization.
•
Understanding customers’ contexts, needs and issues. Advocates identify
the key scenarios for their constituents and map out (preferably with the customers’ and
partners’ help) how customers would ideally like to accomplish those
scenarios.
•
Determining the requirements needed to support those scenarios, and prioritizing
those requirements based on their relative importance to the customers, how
easy/costly they are to implement, and their impact on your firm’s bottom
line.
•
Monitoring the results of these customer experience improvement efforts and
correlating those results with increased sales, increased loyalty, and lower
costs-to-serve.
We recommend that you combine customer and partner advocates into a single
organizational group. You’ll benefit by having your customers’ and
partners’ requirements aligned. You’ll gain efficiencies by reusing
the information, tools, and services you deliver to one segment across other
segments.
This report is a PSGroup Classic -- originally published on September 9, 2004.
WHY YOU NEED CUSTOMER SEGMENT ADVOCATES
Someone Needs to Understand Each Customer Segment’s Critical
Scenarios
The best way to deliver good end-to-end customer experiences is to have people
in your organization whose job it is to understand, to champion, and to continuously
improve the experience for the particular customer segments that are vital
to the success and profitability of your business.