The User, The Beneficiary or The Bill-Payer: Who Are Your Customers?

Having just returned from a great European Summit for Leaders in Shared Services this week, the sharedserviceslink.com are revived and inspired. The many interesting discussions and debates that emerged have provided us with much food for thought.

One topic in particular kept coming up, and that was customer satisfaction.

According to our pre-conference benchmarking survey, nearly 70% of our delegates reported that their shared services operation was growing, consolidating into larger centres, or moving towards a global business services model. Process standardisation, automation technology and governance frameworks are all important steps to support the expansion in both size and scope of shared services. But these are all essentially enablers to service provision. We all know that without the approval and support of your customers, you will never get the investment to take your SSO to the next level.

According to our survey, 80% of all delegates reported that improving customer satisfaction was in their top three priorities for the next year. While 66% of our delegates claimed to have ‘good’ customer satisfaction levels, however, only 3% said it was ‘excellent’. Interestingly, those who were providing ‘good’ levels of service were four times more likely to be focussed on continuous improvement.

But what surprised me the most was that very few people could define exactly who their customers were: The CFOs and senior management; the heads of the business units; the users of the service; the people that pay for your services; or everybody that interacts with you, even your suppliers?

Then once you’ve established who your customer base is, how do you communicate with them and get their feedback?

Luckily, TIBCO Nimbus were on site to provide some fascinating insight on these topics and more following thorough analysis of the results of an in-depth survey we ran last year.

If you weren’t able to attend this year’s event, I would highly recommend tuning in to their webinar next week when they will be running through the key success factors to growing and standardising your processes whilst keeping your customers happy.