customer oriented

SSON is delighted to welcome a new member to its Advisory Board: Jesus Michel

Shared Services and support functions are often perceived as a pain point for Sales and customers. Companies that have embarked on Shared Services to date have been quite successful in delivering savings and process standardization. However, Client and Sales perception remains the Achilles heel. Getting the right client experience built into the DNA of your SSC processes, people and technology will trigger great insights.

Based on my experience, the 5 points below will reveal what your clients really need from the SSC, and help you to bridge gaps and act as a more solid foundation in support of your long term shared services goals.

1. Lead the process discussion There is a common practice to lift and shift processes when setting up a new Shared Services Center. The rationale is simple: The migration to a remote location itself is a big change. Therefore, in order to avoid disruption, the decision is to keep the process to be migrated it AS IS. This is not a client centric approach. Our clients don’t want to go through multiple changes in short periods. So: gather your top process pain points around client experience, pick the ones that are not related to huge IT changes, and model WHAT IF with different process changes. Doing process reengineering at the time of transition may be the right answer for your project and most likely will add value for your client.

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2. Leverage analytics The shared services dashboard is a key vehicle for tracking performance, but too often scorecards are not client centric. Many KPIs are designed only by referencing internal aspects of the business. There is nothing wrong with keeping the right metrics in place to track financial and operations performance, but using analytics to constantly check on what customers are saying is a great vehicle for grouping around a client issue and solving pervasive situations. We often think that measuring the outcome of an SSC client survey is a waste of time. This idea stems from the fact that surveys are subject to many intangible aspects. However, using advanced algorithms to create new models that correlate the voice of the customer with transactional data and with Social Media can make a difference in the way your SSC is seen. Moreover, the use of these advanced models can easily become a great source of productivity and savings.

3. Multiple hand-offs When workflows are not optimized prior to centralization, most likely, cycle times will be impacted in the new remote location. A typical shared services process normally has many scenarios for rejections and approvals. That means that many transactions will be stuck in the middle of internal clarifications. The question that we need to ask ourselves constantly is: what is adding value to the client experience? When using advanced analytics, you can find the number of rejections for any particular transaction. Then look at the outliers – those transaction types that have the lower and higher ratios of rejection. For the transactions with higher rejections you will most likely find a lack of standard inputs that normally lead to process improvement. For those transactions with minimal or no rejections and with multiple layers of approvals, we should ask: is this really needed? Who’s creating value in the approval chain? What would our customer perceive if we eliminate this approval?

4. Understand Cultural IQ There is no perfect decision when selecting locations, but using trusted algorithms that give higher weights to language support, culture and client experience can minimize the negative impact. No one should expect that your SSC will be made of 100% native speakers, but getting the right cultural awareness training in place is extremely important. Getting to know how different cultures organize and process information is key. Also, understanding the value systems in other countries will result in a more intuitive behavior for Do’s and Don’ts among your SSC workforce.

5. Agile Operations At the end of the day, no strategy can be successfully deployed without the right mindset in the organization. Creating operating cells with the right talent in your SSC will make a big difference. These operating cells can be assigned to tackle real client issues to come up with new and innovative ways of doing business. No one knows better what can be improved at the desk level than your SSC operations staff. Make sure you identify who these people are and empower them to make decisions. Bottlenecks will decrease your reaction. Agility and responsiveness is what the client wants.

Note: To discuss this column, contact Jesus at jmichel@global.t-bird.edu or via Linkedin .

customer oriented

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