Guest Author: Deb Miller
Global 360 Inc.

Companies need to stop talking to customers? Yes! That is, stop wasting your time and your customers’ time talking about items like credit disputes or missing approval documents. Instead, you can automate and streamline key processes like dispute resolution using business process management (BPM) and SharePoint.  You’ll have more quality time then to listen to your customers, and to apply your people and technology resources to engage in meaningful dialogs that explore consumer demands, product interests and service priorities.   

Meet customer expectations.  Customer satisfaction isn’t everything, it’s the only thing! That means that a service mindset is critical. Close to 80% of the U.S. economy is services-based, and even for product-based companies, services are quite often the fastest growing part of the business*. Further, services are increasingly being used by companies to differentiate and gain advantage over the competition.  If you’re in the  Insurance industry, that might mean a focus on better approaches to managing customers through multiple channels – brokers, agents, online and more. In Banking, efficient customer on-boarding, new account opening and servicing are considered critical to success. And, in the supply chain sector, meeting customer SLAs (service level agreements) can be the singular difference to surviving in the current challenging economy.

Address “white space” challenges.  A major challenge for manufacturing companies is that they typically don’t capture enough granular data in their Order-to-Cash systems to make headway against processing accurate deductions.  They can’t easily and effectively access the data in context to do dispute resolution when exceptions occur.  Many companies either lack the requisite operations staff to address the situation or they simply don’t know what steps to take to attack a problem that involves multiple applications and organizational units.

This is so much more than just a simple workflow problem.  To improve performance in the “white space” – the touch points between your application systems and organization silos – you’ll need to go beyond basic workflow.  This is a perfect scenario where process-enabling SharePoint with BPM can help you devise the right solution and achieve the desired results.

Deliver visibility and consistency.  Well known brand companies like Revlon, Kraft and adidas use business process management to set and meet KPIs (key performance indicators) and cut the time required to turn around customer disputes and claims processing. By using a content-aware BPM solution they prevent unnecessary losses on claims simply because documents cannot be found for verification and claims substantiation. With BPM, they organize the work, automate the aggregation of records, and simplify inter-departmental process hand-offs.  All related documents—regardless of where they are stored—are consolidated into a single view, and work distribution and flow is optimized between the analysts, researchers, and other departments involved throughout the entire claims management process—from the time the claim is opened, through any exceptions to the resolution process, and all the way to record archiving. Manual intervention in the hand-off has been all but eliminated, and customer SLAs are now automatically tracked and managed. The result is not only improved consistency of customer response, but close control of decisions that can affect profits. Revlon for example saw a break even ROI on their solution in 18 months.

The successful companies I work with all have a laser focus on their customers.  They are continually looking for ways to control spending and cut costs, all while keeping pace with their peers to meet customer expectations.  From a process improvement perspective, I think that SharePoint and BPM can deliver for your customers.  What do you think?  How about asking your customers what they think.

*U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis

Guest Author: Deb Miller
Global 360 Inc.

Deb Miller is Director of Market Development for Global 360. Her work focuses on industry strategies for business process improvement. You can read more of Deb’s writings at http://DebsG360.wordpress.com/ and at @DebsG360 on Twitter.