Noventum Hosts Roundtable on Question of Standardisation or Personalisation
in Association with AFSMI

(NETHERLANDS, 29 November 2012) Noventum Service Management are proud to announce the success of their roundtable on the question of Service Standardisation or Personalisation, in partnership with the Dutch chapter of the Association for Services Management International (AFSMI) under the umbrella of the Confederation for Services Management International — a European not-for-profit member organisation promoting knowledge exchange and research activities for executives in the global technology services and support sectors.

The event was restricted to 16 members of the Association comprising service directors and senior executives from organisations to include Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, Tennant, Assembléon, Howden Thomassen, Cannon, DHL, Unica, Acto,  and VU University Amsterdam’s Professor Flikkema.

Facilitating the event, Noventum’s Managing Director Hilbrand Rustema explored this paradoxical theme; asking why services need to be standardised while also personalised and exploring how this can be achieved.

The benefits of standardisation were clear to most roundtable participants with one member citing that 5% of deviations from standard services can account for 80% of all cost variables.

Participants were in agreement that when companies do not standardise their service delivery they can accrue extraordinary expenses to meet customers’ expectations in line with their salesman’s (often ambitious) promise.

It was concluded en masse that standardisation provides a better customer experience, while delivering consistent profit margins and reducing the cost of delivery. The roundtable then debated the concept of standardised services, which also need to be personalised, with Mr. Rustema commenting: ‘The problem with standardisation is that there is no such thing as a standard customer.  Most customers want a solution that is tailored to their specific needs. Given the economic climate, leaders need to build organisations that can provide cost effective and yet customer-centric services’.

‘Mass customization is a widely accepted concept in the product world, but far less contrived when it comes to services’ he explained. ‘But if BMWs can be customized, why can’t services?’ he said.

However, so as to avoid excessive expenses and deliver a consistent customer experience he stressed the need to design customized services.

Three key questions were debated:
• How do companies decide how much to personalize their service propositions for each customer?
• How do they align their salesman’s promise to what can be delivered?
• How do companies organize standardised personalization within their company?

The solution recognised by most participants is a component based approach whereby companies adopt a set of core standard services while offering a number of personalised options within those services.

Assembléon provided a good working example, by way of offering a core maintenance contract with a number of different optionalised services attached, thus giving companies the choice to opt in or out. In the example of spare parts, the company offers the option of replacing a spare part while the original is being repaired, or simply repairing it without providing a replacement in the interim. Each option has a very different cost level.

Other methods of standardised personalisation were explored with regards to setting-up the customer interface, with one participant (Hewlett-Packard) having assigned a specific task-force to interface with their top thirty customers. Their interface was personalised so that the vast majority of these clients’ needs were met by design and for those that couldn’t be met, the company offered to coordinate with third companies. By personalising their interface points with the customer, they were still able to use standardised processes while offering an additional value via this coordinating layer of service.

‘Designing personalisation like this delivers an excellent customer experience but doesn’t have to be costly,’ commented Mr. Rustema. ‘The key is to really understand what your customers want and not to assume’.

The roundtable concluded that a best practice in answer to the question of delivering on your promise, within this framework is solution selling. ‘If you delve deeply into why your customer wants what they want in a certain way, you’re in a much better position to explain why your service propositions are distinctive and of value to that particular customer,’ he said.

‘It’s about listening to the customer and re-directing their questions to wards your solutions,’ he added.

Participants also concluded on the need to segment customers, setting up different delivery methods for each type but within the framework of the standard delivery model.

A substantial part of the roundtable debated the question of how to perfect this component-based approach and the time period required, concluding it requires a substantial commitment taking between 1 – 3 years to implement.

Mr. Rustema commented: ‘Component-based services aren’t simple to design. Not only must you create the offering for the customer but also consider their impact across your entire service delivery taking into account your business processes, performance metrics, your IT applications, people competencies, management practices and the customer’s experience.’

One participating company however was able to implement this within three months having already aligned their IT capabilities so as to analyse changes within their systems such as case management systems, phone systems and install-based management systems.

Another participant required thee years to fully implement the approach, citing the slow pick up time for customers to fully adapt to these new offerings and highlighting the need for effective communications to educate customers as to the value of their new offerings and the changes required on the customer’s side organisation to make it work.

‘Typically, it’s a multi-year effort but the key to improving the time to market is to define good processes and have people in your organisation that are really leading this change,’ said Mr. Rustema.

Concluding the event he commented; ‘Leaders might assume that because services are intangible, their company will be flexible enough to change quickly, but to achieve a good level of standardised personalisation requires a component-based approach.’

‘It’s a serious engagement but one which is flexible by design to changing markets and requirements and will pay long term dividends,’ he added.

Achieving Operational Excellence In Your Service Business

‘He who knows why can endure almost any how’
                                                                         – Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche may have held some radical views on the nature of humanity; but in this dictum the German philosopher makes an astute point on leadership. Far from subscribing to any idea of endurance however, Noventum’s Asher Cohen argues that one of the tenets of leading –be it in business, politics or social activism, is about speaking to the heart.  

Introducing our Service Leadership Course, Cohen talks about why good leadership is about providing purpose, why women make better leaders than men, and why ultimately, it’s all about talking to people’s hearts.

Asher Cohen studied psychology, philosophy and mathematics at Berkeley, University California before fulfilling a number of leading international marketing and innovation assignments for Procter & Gamble, British Telecom and Friesland. He is currently a consultant with Noventum.

INTRODUCTION TO CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

Although our recent Customer Experience Management Roundtable was restricted to only 15 members of the Association For Services Management International (AFSMI), we’d now like to give you an insight into that roundtable and the comparatively new subject of Customer Experience Management.

Derived from the concept of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), companies have invested millions only to discover that the model focuses on products and pricing but is incapable of managing a company’s relationship with thousands of different customers. What one can manage however, is the experience that customers have with your brand or company and whether that experience is consistent with what you want it to be. Customer Experience Management addresses the relationship between the customer’s expectations and the customer experience.

Noventum Service Management have launched the new Service Process Roundtable, representing service managers and process specialists across the IT, mechanical engineering, medical technology, electrical and electronics industries.

Chaired by Noventum senior consultant Wilhelm Taurel and managing director Hilbrand Rustema, participating companies included ABB Automation, Abbott Diagnostics, Bobst Group, Jungheinrich, Sick, Siemens, Wincor Nixdorf International and Carl Zeiss International.

The roundtable comprises part of Noventum's Service Innovation Programme —a research initiative aimed at advancing innovation in the service business through experience exchange and research. The event further marked the launch of a series of bi-annual sessions designed to explore best practices in process management for technical service organisations, how best to align process optimisation objectives with overall company objectives and how process improvements can better be implemented to effect real organisational change.

'Change before you have to', famously advised General Electric's champion chairman Jack Welsh. In today’s stressed economy, service organisations wanting a chance at survival know they need to embrace change to stay relevant and contemporary. With the increased commoditisation of products and product-related services, pressure on growth and margins are forcing companies to think outside of the box when it comes to delivering their services.

Service businesses need savvy new programmes, which allow them to evolve quickly and nimbly.  Today there's more pressure than ever to create new customer-oriented offerings, which can adapt quickly to changing markets. However, navigating the right path to service transformation isn’t always straight-forward, particularly because the most common approaches (Big Bang and Incremental), carry a multitude of risks and yield surprisingly low success rates.

There exists an alternate path however, and it’s the one increasingly being adopted by today’s more successful and forward-looking service organisations. The Service Factory is an emerging and agile approach to change —it’s a stepped approach but offers quantum leaps forward in service transformation and at limited risk.

Noventum has worked with many service companies to achieve operational excellence, enabling profitable growth whilst meeting customer expectations.

We can help you to identify improvement opportunities within your service delivery. Noventum can design a service factory in line with your service and brand, standardising your service delivery, processes and systems; enabling you to achieve effective service transformation to deliver profitable growth and reduce costs.

•     Operational Assessment

Many companies are continuously working to improve their service organisation; like transforming from a product into a customer driven service organisation; standardise service propositions and processes, improve effectiveness and efficiency.