DECIDE WHAT TO DO FIRST IN CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT

Business led prioritisation to deliver benefits fast

There are always many alternative (and sometimes conflicting) things to do when one takes a hard look at where sales can be increased or costs reduced. You cannot do them all at once so an innovative but robust prioritisation method is required to compare projects.  Deciding what to do first is a critical step in the process, because the whole future of the programme may depend on your getting this right from a senior management perspective.

Although large companies usually have their own method for this, often clients use our method because of (1) the transparency of the prioritisation process and (2) the more unpredictable nature of customer management projects, where ‘having done it before’ matters.  Our model ranks activities using criteria such as: NPV (cost/benefit over time), Risk (market assumptions) and Probability of achieving (culture in your organisation).  Some of the tasks are ‘no brainers’ – quick wins that should be done straightaway to deliver benefit.  Others are harder to prioritise because they may have high net benefit (we normally use net present value as a way of comparing returns) but demand significant upfront investment, or the results so uncertain that the risk of failure is high. 

Some activities will demand changes to the way you work which may be counter-cultural – “we’ve never done it this way” – and therefore may incur organisational or channel resistance.  Understanding the cultural intervention required, and the impact on the ‘probability of achieving’ is fundamental to successful realisation of the business case.  The trajectory of benefits (e.g. for programmes such as customer experience; CM systems or share of wallet) can be difficult to predict and experience helps avoid unrealistic target setting.

Our prioritisation philosophy is to balance short and long term projects, provide a visible, confidence-building return on investment from customer management projects within 3 months, reflect the organisation’s culture in the prioritisation and use KPIs which management can understand and believe in.