Fortune 150 Information Solutions Company: Differentiating the Customer Experience

Situation

While previous re-branding efforts had a very positive effect on this company’s corporate reputation, it became clear that to many customers, their products and service netted out as undifferentiated from their competition - the perception was that this company and two others were all the same, all three having world-class reputations for customer service. This forced senior leadership to ask the question: How can we differentiate ourselves and dominate the competition? The answer was to dominate the overall customer experience – all of the possible touch points with the customer (in areas like sales, claims, invoicing, and interactions with employees). The company embarked on a major global initiative to:

• Embed the customer experience values and promise into the culture;
• Develop common business rules and systems across all operating companies;
• Realign the metrics and rewards without compromising service and productivity;
• Reorganize to meet and reflect the customers’ needs not the company’s; and,
• Transform the technology infrastructure to optimize customer relationship management across all the companies.

Action

Key communication and change management elements of this global initiative:

• Development of a Strategic Communication and Engagement Plan that included global communications, leadership support, culture change, new human resource practices and measurement.
• Worked with Corporate Communications and Sales Communications to improve work processes, and in particular help them to collaborate more effectively with Marketing to improve message consistency out to the field.
• Change communications for a global IT transformation to develop a technical strategy and infrastructure that supports the customer experience initiative

Results

• J. D. Powers first-place award and positive trending on employee satisfaction related to brand engagement and pride.