A Managed Services business within a North American division for ATM and Retail Point of Sale (POS) systems and support delivers life cycle management services, including on-site installation, maintenance, and call management of the served equipment base and third-party products.
Previous work that PIMS carried out with this company identified strategies for increased profitability and growth. One of these strategies was to focus the business on delivering better value to customers.
The Business Development Director had already started to champion a “customer scorecard” within the company and was looking externally for a consistent framework. The Director shares the experience:
“We needed to understand our customers’ key priorities in terms of our offer to make changes that are beneficial to them and to us. Market research alone did not give us the answers to our questions; knowing what is important to customers is not enough, we also wanted to clarify how we performed versus our competitors.
In my experience, many companies spend a fortune on market research but are unable to use the findings to take actions that will deliver real value to the organisation.
Together with PIMS, we decided to target a few selected customers in each of our market segments to confirm what the key purchasing criteria are. This enabled us to focus on the elements that were most important to our customers and strive to improve in those key areas. It was this initial view that helped us, together with PIMS, to create a customer value survey for each of the customer groups that we serve. We could then map our performance versus the competition and communicate the changes needed throughout the organisation.
The PIMS Customer Value Framework identified the business processes we needed to focus on in order to generate true value for our customers. We trained our service delivery managers, who are the first point of contact to our customers, to use this as a framework for day-to-day business. Customers’ needs and desires will change over time; the dynamic aspect of this framework allows us to change with them; this dynamic dimension was something ‘normal’ market research couldn’t provide.
We set up improvement projects in all areas of the business, from logistics to field operations to focus on Customer Value. To supplement the customer satisfaction scores, we needed something that would give a better handle on our position on a leading basis. Together we derived a number of indicators and targets that will drive our improvements, we call this our “Dashboard”. In this way, we can monitor both the qualitative and quantitative position of the business, its performance, and progress made.
Although the implementation of our Customer Value Framework is still in the early stages, we use it to prioritise and define the improvement plans. Customer Value Management has given us the tool to focus the business on the most important business function of all – delivering better value to our customers.”
