APQC recently held a webinar to discuss how companies reimage their order management processes to increase revenue, brand visibility, and customer satisfaction. Genpact’s Dipanjan Das and Rana Saha collectively responded to the follow-up questions from the webinar:
How do we improve the customer experience through the order management process?
Genpact believes that most organizations have a way to maintain and measure customer experience, but the matter is subjective. Usually customer experience is measured through voice-of-the-customer or sales feedback, which is subjective. Genpact feels that given the amount of data available within organizations they should move from subjective measures of satisfaction to objective measures found in their data (e.g., customer service measures).
Can you provide some tips on how to prepare for a potential order management transformation? What should the company focus on first?
First you should review where your company stands by reviewing your efficiency (cost) and effectiveness (perfect order or customer satisfaction), benchmarks and best practices within your industry and across others. This allows you to identify the key areas of focus and a roadmap for improvement.
To create the right target operating model you need a combination of digital technologies, analytics, and processes which enable intelligent operations that can sense, act, and learn from the outcome of their actions.
Technology in particular is a big area of focus for order management functions, whether through order automation or enabling a control tower view of an order across the supply chain. Improving the customer experience is another important area although priorities vary based on the maturity of the company and what it hopes to achieve.
What is the value of segmenting customers to develop a good operating model?
Segmenting customers allows you to weigh both the complexity and risk of a customer to determine the best operating model with the least risk to your business. For example, errors on an order from a high-revenue customer are likely to have a significantly negative impact on your business. As such, this customer falls into a high-risk category. If the same customer has orders that require a lot of manipulation such as ‘tie withs’/‘ship withs’, or heavy customer interaction due to special handling requirements, it falls into a high-complexity category. You would therefore consider this customer high risk/high complexity and should segment accordingly.
Once you have segmented the entire customer base, you can decide on the operating model on where to house the process for the segmented customers. For example, less complex and risky customers could be serviced from a captive center whereas high risk customers could be serviced out of the market.
For more information on the intersection of process, customer analytics, and order management check out:
- Full question and answer summary from the webinar.
- Recording of the webinar.
- Case study on improving customer experience through order management.