In a traditional business model, customer service, sales, marketing, development and other business units work separately. Sometimes those who work with the clients directly have no actual interaction with those who create and market products or services. The result is that a company cannot provide the value that customers expect and is much more vulnerable to ever-changing market conditions. 

Let's take customer service as an example. It should not be only about solving immediate client problems; instead, service units should collaborate with other business units and provide them with valuable business insights. This idea was tested with the customer service department of some European banks, and I'd like to share the steps to implement it. 

1. Map Your Strategy

The first requisite is to have a properly designed strategy map for high-level goals and specific maps for the most important business processes. If you have your processes described in a text document, then I would strongly recommend visualizing them on a map with flow charts or similar techniques. This would make further interaction between stakeholders much easier.

 2. Define the Value Proposition

In the next step, it is important to understand what customer service can do for other business units and how together they help customer service. That is traditionally described in SLA, but I'm not talking about a 20-page formal document with all the details. What is needed is to formalize top-level ideas for the interaction between business units.

For example, customer service might give marketing some valuable information about why clients stopped using the service; formalize feedback received in the form of ideas for the development; and prepare a report to sales about techniques that work and those that don't. Answers to simple questions like, "Was it easy to do that in the client area of the website?" could give developers a lot of ideas for their improvement. Sales could discover that people don't buy something just because nobody in the customer service ever mentioned that the company actually does that.

3. Measure and Test

You'll see that people are interested in working in new ways. On this stage it is critical to implement some indicators to monitor the interaction process. You'll need leading indicators to measure input and lagging indicators to measure output. Don't try to find some KPIs on the Internet; instead start with some basic indicators, like "The number of questions asked to a customer" and "The number of ideas sent to a business unit." Obviously, these are not the best indicators as they don't say anything about the quality of the questions asked and the quality of the ideas generated, but soon you'll see what kind of interactions you are looking for and what indicators you need to use.

During the first month, business units will exchange many ideas. Use the same tools (maps and indicators) to tweak an interaction between business units. Plan a quarterly review and actualization of this interaction system with new questions and better indicators.

Feel free to share in the comments your experience about using this approach, the problems that you faced, and the results that were achieved.

About the Author

Aleksey Savkin is a founder of AKS-Labs, vendor of BSC Designer software and tools for software engineers. His areas of expertise are remote team management, Balanced Scorecard, KPIs, business performance management, general info-business development and marketing. Aleksey is the author of a number of articles and books on Balanced Scorecard. He runs Balanced Scorecard seminars in the Moscow Business School (MBS).

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