Customer Operational Excellence

In pursuing Customer Operational Excellence objectives, businesses now face a crucial challenge in a market, like telco & media, where being able to stand out from the competition is an essential lever. Indeed, there is a growing dichotomy between customer bases that seek basic services with a keen eye on price and ones that want providers offering innovative, comprehensive, high-quality services and are willing to pay more for them or that view these aspects as the main driver for a loyal long-term relationship.

To provide a holistic response to these different behaviours and expectations within the customer base, a company must consolidate how it positions itself on the market. It needs to make quality a key distinctive and competitive factor and to leverage operational efficiency to achieve higher margins and greater value for shareholders. Two efforts are essential: to ruthlessly spotlight the current limitations in the processes and systems; and to devise an incremental but unstoppable programme of continual improvement, of enforcing correct use of the operational processes and the supporting technology platforms, and of standardising and improving efficiency in interactions with customers in a cross-channel, one-to-one approach.

In this sense, Customer Operational Excellence equates to competing on quality. It means providing customers with the best services, the swiftest response times, and an overall ability to manage processes flexibly and with continuity.

People, processes and technology components remain the vital ingredients of an excellent service. Successfully amalgamating these elements means generating added value and releasing new energy for the organisation to focus investment and resources on its core business. Processes that are highly sensitive to customer needs demand varied data, knowledge management, and sophisticated rules and advanced business systems that “conceal” the complexity in the real world and ensure reliability as the changes come on stream.

Reply devises and implements innovative approaches and solutions to facilitate internal users’ work by eliminating a whole series of manual and procedural steps that are common in complex businesses like telco-&-media enterprises. Reply’s solutions provide greater and more advanced control over procedures, suitable reporting and analysis functionality, new workload-management tools, and better integration with the contact channels for more effective and timely company–customer/consumer communication. In this context, information management is an increasingly fundamental asset for creating real value and extracting “intelligence” from data while supporting agile continual-improvement procedures and processes.

The approach and the methods for implementing these programmes are driven by the need to gradually introduce new customer-operations tools to generate real business enablement and reduce time to market.

The road to operational excellence has been mapped…