Accenture B2B Customer Experience Blueprint
Content
The B2B Customer
Experience Blueprint
Reaping the Benefits of a Tailored
Customer Experience
We’ve long understood in
business-to-consumer (B2C)
industries that a positive service
experience provides competitive
advantage in customer acquisition and retention. Yet, customer
experience management is
emerging as a critical component of success in business-tobusiness (B2B) industries as well.
In fact, recent research reveals
that half of B2B firms’ top
executives say customer experience management is a competitive differentiator and influences
major decision-making1.
Indeed, B2B companies are
still getting acquainted with
customer experience management. As executives are learning
how it differs from customer
satisfaction and relationship
management, investment is
increasing. Half of B2B organizations have increased investment
in customer experience management over the past five years
and, rightly so3. For businesses
serving businesses, understanding how to design and deliver
a superior customer experience
means competitive advantage.
Despite its importance, customer
experience management is just
emerging as a formal program
in most B2B companies. The
same research reports that just
20 percent of B2B companies
have implemented customer
experience management as a
formal business process and
only 28 percent of B2B executives base strategic decisions
on customer experience or
customer lifetime value2. And,
for many companies, investment
in customer experience management is minimal—about half (48
percent) of B2B firms invest
less than one percent of annual
revenue in customer experience
management.
These B2B findings are consistent with Accenture’s own global
research on the growing importance of customer experience.
Consumer research Accenture
conducted in 2010 highlighted
that the bar for acceptable
service performance continues
to rise4. The research showed
that customer service expectations among consumers globally
are higher compared with just
12 months ago and considerably higher than five years ago.
Indeed, for the first year since
Accenture began its annual
consumer research, customer
service became the top reason
(over price) that consumers
chose a new provider.
The research also confirmed the
consequences of poor service
performance are dire. In the past
year, two in three consumers
globally have switched the company from which they purchase
a product or service due to poor
customer service.
Page 1
In today’s service environment, a
differentiated customer experience strategy clearly enhances
the brand. However, it also
allows a company to deliver a
premium service, where appropriate, to top-tier customers while
maintaining the affordability of
the overall service experience.
Accenture’s research confirms
that companies can increase customer retention, reduce support
costs, and grow their customer
base by providing such differentiated treatment.
In this paper, we explore how a
business-to-business “customer
experience blueprint” can lay the
foundation for such differentiated treatment by illuminating where premium service
opportunities exist and how to
capitalize on these opportunities
while maintaining an acceptable
overall cost to serve.
Importance Doesn’t
Equal Action
Even as the importance of the customer experience grows, B2B companies
continue to apply a uniform approach
to service across markets, customer
segments and types of customer interactions. In fact, most B2B companies
provide a disparate and disaggregated
experience across the customer lifecycle of marketing, sales and service.
For example, a company may fail to
integrate the service organization into
a new product introduction, resulting
in service professionals not knowing
of a product launch until receiving a
customer call to order or ask questions
about it. Similarly, sales and marketing
may create a bundled offer that is
simple and attractive to customers.
However service delivery is not bundled
in any way. Therefore, if the customer
has a service question or issue, he may
have to traverse separate service organizations for each product or service in
the bundle—not an optimal customer
service experience.
For most B2B companies, service is
traditionally thought of as a cost to serve
and, therefore, begs the question: how
good a service can a company afford to
provide within its service cost structure?
The answer usually is to spread service
across all customers equally, in a “one
size fits all” service model. We refer to
this phenomenon as the peanut butter
analogy: a company takes what it has in
terms of the service model and spreads
it across all customers equally. In such
a model, servicing a $5,000 order costs
the same as servicing a $5 million order.
Top-tier customers are offered the same
kind of experience as a customer who
generates only a fraction of that revenue
for the company. And when the spreading of the peanut butter gets thin, the
experience of all customers diminishes.
Page 2
The Challenge of
the Differentiated
Experience
So why haven’t companies tailored
and optimized service to meet the
needs and value of customers? To many
companies it might seem intuitive to
differentiate the service experience
based on the characteristics of different
customer segments. Yet actually doing
so is challenging.
It is difficult to know who should get
what service treatment because many
companies cannot determine the value
of different customers now versus in
the future—and, thus, are uncertain
into which segment customers fit. For
example, if there are high-value and
low-value customer segments, where
does a customer fit based on current
behavior but also future potential?
Even if a company knows the current
and future value of its customers, it can
be expensive, complex and challenging
to create tailored service levels for different customer segments. In most organizations, service is an afterthought.
Organizations are overwhelmed by what
the tailored service structure should
be and how to deliver a differentiated
experience. Often companies aren’t
equipped to tailor services because
they don’t have a customer experience
design, and haven’t done research and
analysis to tailor the experience to
customer wants and needs.
Page 3
Mergers have further complicated
the issue. After all, it’s easier to have
one set of processes and responses
than several, and it’s typically faster
and cheaper to unify against a single
approach when bringing service organizations together after a merger.
But doing so often results in a poor
customer experience, a higher incidence
of unsatisfying outcomes for customers
and, ultimately, more customer turnover
and defection.
And, of course, there’s the issue
of bandwidth. In most companies,
customer service executives are busy
running day-to-day operations and
have little to no time to develop a
segmentation and treatment strategy if
one exists, to implement that strategy.
A segmented treatment strategy takes
time to design, implement, manage,
measure, and change the organization. It
simply won’t be a priority for a customer
service leader who is swamped daily by
escalations, service agent performance
problems, customers needing immediate resolution to critical problems and
internal meetings that consume large
chunks of his time. In other words, daily
operations often get in the way of doing
things right.
Accenture’s experience in helping
companies overcome the challenges of
customer experience implementation is
consistent with those found in recent
B2B customer experience research.
Overall, executives indicate that “a lack
of cross-organizational cooperation is
the greatest obstacle to customer experience management success, followed
by lack of customer experience strategy
and weak follow-through on customer
experience strategy; limited bandwidth
of managers and budget restrictions
have also inhibited CEM success5 .”
Making the Service
Experience Count
Despite these challenges, some leading
business-to-business enterprises are
moving aggressively toward providing a
tailored customer experience. Through
holistic customer experience design,
these companies are tailoring and optimizing the service experience to mirror
the needs of customers and the value
of customers to their organization (see
one company’s experience in the sidebar
“The Customer Experience Blueprint in
Action”). Several of these companies
share a common characteristic: they
utilized a well-established, customercentric approach to customer experience
design and implementation. The foundation for such a design is a customer
experience blueprint that:
• Considers premium service opportunities based on lifecycle management,
capabilities, and customer value.
• Meets the customer needs throughout
the lifecycle.
• Optimizes the experience through
appropriate channel management and
management of workforce.
• When implemented, allows the
company to deliver a premium service
where appropriate while managing,
and keeping affordable, the overall
cost to serve.
The approach used to create such a
design consists of three primary components: global operating model review,
understanding customer needs and intentions, and creation of the blueprint and
roadmap for implementation. We review
each component in greater detail below.
Global Operating Model
Review
As a first step, a company must
fundamentally understand how it currently delivers the customer experience
and how well equipped it is to offer
a tailored treatment strategy. This
includes a review of the global operating
model and go-to-market strategies from
marketing, sales and service. By taking
a holistic view across the full customer
lifecycle of all of the inputs and outputs
of the customer experience, the team
can glean detailed insight on what
services the company provides, how
it provides them, how well it provides
them, the challenges it faces, how it is
organized to provide services, and more.
From a global operating model perspective, there are 12 key components to
review: leadership and governance,
customer experience design, business
process management, new capability
development, channel management,
customer interaction operations, geographic alignment, enterprise engagement, global workforce management,
global talent management, operational
performance and metrics, and technology enablement (Figure 1).
True customer-centricity is more than
just having a strategy. It requires having
differentiated operations that enable
a company to flawlessly execute the
strategy, learn from evolving markets,
and incorporate lessons learned into
future strategy to consistently remain
ahead of customer needs, and the
competition’s ability to deliver against
them. A customer-centric operating
model enables companies to break the
silos—integrating and coordinating the
people, processes, data, and supporting
infrastructure across the organization
to deliver a unified, consistent, branded
customer experience. The full global
operating model review helps a company
assess where it stands against the
desired end-state of customer-centric
operations.
The operating model review also helps a
company understand how well aligned
its service experience is with its overall
strategy by answering a number of key
questions: what is the company’s overall
strategy? What does the company
want to be known for in the market?
What does the company want the
customer experience to be? How does
the operating model align to deliver that
experience? It’s very difficult to drive
sustainable results without an end-toend service strategy that is well aligned
to business objectives. For instance it’s
hard to focus on a goal such as trying to
create greater adoption of online selfservice if the broader business strategy
is to uniformly offer a high-touch customer experience.
Figure 1. Operating Model Components to Review
Leadership & Governance
Customer Experience Design
Business Units
Segments
Preferences
Personalization
Lifecycle
Management
Treatments
Channel
Management
Business Process Management
Idea to
Offer
Offer to
Market
New Capability
Development
• Program
description
Market to
Quote
Quote to
Order
Channel
Management
Face to Face
Order to
Book
Book to
Invoice
Forecast to
Deliver
Customer Interaction Operations
Market
Sell
Serve
Invoice to
Cash
Issue to
Resolution
Geographic
Alignment
North America
Customer segment 1
• Program
requirements
Phone
• Program goals
and measures
of success
Web
Email
Customer segment 2
Customer segment n
Global Workplace
Management
Global Talent
Management
Support
the Biz
Procure to
Report
Enterprise
Engagement
Marketing
Sales
Latin America
Procurement
Finance
EMEA
HR
IT
APAC
Legal
Operational Performance/Metrics
Technology Enablement
Copyright ©2011, Accenture LLP. All rights reserved.
Page 4
Understanding Customer
Needs and Intentions
According to research, today just 28
percent of B2B companies use customer
feedback to guide annual plans6. To this
end, a second step in creating a holistic
customer experience design is developing
a detailed understanding of customer
needs and intentions and how each customer experiences a given company across
its lifecycle. This requires an assessment
of the current customer experience across
all segments, interactions and customer
communication channels to determine the
needs for any given customer segment, as
well as for each channel.
In conducting this analysis, a company
should consider the customer experience from the “outside in.” This means
thinking about the experience from the
customer perspective based on the collection of voice of the customer (VoC)
data and customer feedback obtained
through monitoring interactions.
Customer wants and needs become
the footprint from which to build a
differentiated experience strategy and
channel-specific service capabilities.
From a detailed perspective, the
analysis identifies all of the reasons that
customers interact with the company
across each portion of the lifecycle: why
they want to interact and what they
intend to do at each of those interaction
points (Figure 2). Then it maps how the
customer wants to interact against how
the company operationalizes to serve
those intentions.
Of particular emphasis in the analysis
and design are the “moments of truth.”
A moment of truth is a point in the customer experience that has the potential
to enhance or weaken the customer’s
perception of the company. Identifying
and analyzing moments of truth is
important to help truly understand what
matters most to customers, what causes
them to be loyal, what is their desired
customer experience and what aspects
of that experience are, in fact, most
important to them.
Figure 2: How Customers Experience the Company
Customers
Segment 1
Segment 2
...
Segment 3
Segment n-1
Segment n
Learn
Buy
Get
Use
Pay
Support
• Become aware of
product/ service
• Decide to buy
• Check delivery
status
• Learn how to use
product/ service
and tools
• Receive bill
• Check product/
service or
account info
• Review and
research
product/service
• Select product/
service options
• Place order
• Confirm order
• Receive
product/service
• Activate
product/service
• Change order
(contents,
delivery speed/
date)
• Optimize use of
product/service
(utilization check)
• Review bill
• Pay bill
• Manage account
and preferences
• Identify need
(self-identify
or receive
notification)
• Acknowledge
need
• Request support
• Check status
• Resolve issue
Face to Face
Phone
Email
Web & Chat
Channels
Copyright ©2011, Accenture LLP. All rights reserved.
Page 5
Mobile
Collaboration
The Customer
Experience Blueprint
in Action
model for all customer
segments, across all service
intentions and interaction
channels.
A global telecommunications
product and service company
identified the need to transform
its customer operations to
provide a consistent and
differentiated service delivery
model that was competitive
across customer segments.
Using the approach outlined
elsewhere in this paper,
the company developed a
customer experience blueprint
that balanced outstanding
delivery with affordability
and was based on a strong
understanding of customer
needs and intentions.
Based on the blueprint, the
company is now implementing a
competitively differentiated and
branded customer experience
across its customer care and
service operations. The roadmap
for implementation is aligned to
four overarching objectives:
The effort was quite complex,
as there were ten customer
segments across four lines of
business. The team identified
over 40 interaction types across
the customer lifecycle from
ordering, use and understanding,
to invoicing, support and
repair, and disconnection. These
interactions occur across six
channels (face-to-face, phone,
email, Web and chat, mobile
and collaboration). Identifying
“moments of truth” was quite
helpful to simplify and prioritize
this complex analysis. Based
on customer feedback, the
team identified multiple such
moments within the most
critical customer interactions.
The customer experience
blueprint that resulted from
this effort provided a treatment
• Enhancing the customer contact experience with simplified points of entry and consistent standards in customer
interactions.
• Shifting interactions to selfservice channels by improving
the online experience through
usability and prioritized interactions and driving online
adoption.
• Differentiating customer
treatments across contact
handling, business process and
policies and interaction channels.
• Enabling sustainable improvement by improving Voice of
the Customer and adopting a
holistic approach to customer
experience management.
more transactions online, the
company expects to save over
$100 million per year, at which
point more than 15 percent of
its total of 100 million annual
interactions will occur online.
Another key objective,
simplifying entry points,
involves reducing the number
of toll-free numbers through
which customers access the
company by almost 75 percent.
Not only will this initiative ease
customer navigation, it will
significantly reduce the overall
cost and resource required to
maintain toll-free lines.
Finally, in support of its
environmental responsibility
objective within this initiative,
the company will launch
a program to get business
customers to stop receiving
paper bills. As some business
customers receive hundreds
of pages of bills per month,
this effort will have significant
ecological impact while saving
the company tens of millions of
dollars per year.
While it is still too early in the
implementation to measure,
overall the company expects to
increase customer satisfaction
by two full percentage points—a
very significant improvement
in this industry. Furthermore,
through its efforts to improve
the online experience and
a multi-year push to move
Page 6
Construction of
a Blueprint and
Operational Roadmap
Based on customer needs and intentions
within a given segment, the final step is
to determine how the company should
provide the experience: what are the
functional capabilities a company must
deliver through specific channels (Web,
voice, email); how does it provide those
capabilities; and what service factors
are relevant and required to match
expectations?
The blueprint provides a treatment
model for all customer segments, across
all customer intentions and interaction
channels (Figure 3). In addition, because
all interactions contribute to the customer experience, the blueprint spans the
full customer lifecycle. The model may
emphasize different channels across the
customer interaction lifecycle and provide
different levels of treatment by segment
and channel. In addition, it’s important
to ensure that a company’s blueprint is
global in nature but with local relevance,
specificity and customization.
Finally, the blueprint should be optimized
from the perspective of affordability,
balancing available budget and resource
constraints against service needs and
customer expectations. In other words,
the blueprint should be taken through
a process that maps available resources
against the most critical service needs
and expectations of customers.
Once a company solidifies the customer
experience blueprint, it can use the
blueprint, along with the operating model
review, to create a gap analysis. The gap
analysis calibrates the blueprint against
the company’s goals and objectives,
which helps to identify the highestpriority outstanding capabilities on which
to focus. Once it identifies those capabilities, the company can build a prioritized
roadmap of programs and projects to
implement the blueprint and align the
organization to meet identified customer
needs and intentions (Figure 4).
Figure 3: Sample Components of a Customer Experience Blueprint: Treatments by Interaction Channel
Lifecycle Stage
Channel
Phone
Email
Web
Face to Face
Place Order
Change Order
Service Level
80/60
80/60
Average Speed to Answer
<60 Seconds
<60 Seconds
Average Handle Time
<10 Minutes
<10 Minutes
Dedicated Phone Number
Yes
Yes
Account-Customized IVR
Yes
Yes
Dedicated Email Address
Yes
Yes
Auto Acknowledgement
Yes
Yes
Response Time
2 Hours
1 Hour
Account-Customized Portal
Yes
Yes
Personalization
Yes
Yes
Single Sign On
Yes
Yes
Available
Yes
Yes
Channel Treatment
Copyright ©2011, Accenture LLP. All rights reserved.
Page 7
Overcoming the
Stumbling Blocks
Arriving at an implementable customer
experience blueprint and roadmap is
not easy. However, there are some
important aspects of the customer
experience blueprint approach that help
ensure its success.
First and foremost is creating the
blueprint from a customer-centric perspective that starts from gathering true
customer needs and experiences versus
relying on the company’s perceptions of
those needs and experiences. A company
should use a customer needs analysis
approach that is fact-based—one that
starts from mapping and analyzing the
existing customer footprint, applies the
results from that analysis against interaction channels, and tests them against
market trends, company experience, and
other factors.
Last but not least, the optimal strategy
often is the result of a combination
of best approaches from not only the
company’s own industry, but also from
other industries. Therefore, a company
must be sure to approach the effort
with a cross-industry perspective of best
service practices.
Second, analyzing customer needs and
intentions and constructing the appropriate blueprint is an extremely dataand time-intensive, complex effort.
Doing it well requires “heavy lifting”
in terms of intellectual, analytical and
implementation resources; thus, providing adequate and appropriate resources
is paramount to success.
Figure 4: Illustrative Roadmap
Months
Operational Model Component
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Customer Experience Design
Leadership & Governance
Business Process Management
New Capability Development
Channel Management
Customer Interaction Operations
Global Workforce Management
Global Talent Management
Geographic Alignment
Enterprise Engagement
Operational Performance/Metrics
Technology Enablement
Copyright ©2011, Accenture LLP. All rights reserved.
Page 8
Reaping the Benefits
It is clear that while a customer experience blueprint is not easy to execute,
it can generate significant benefits for
companies—including superior customer
satisfaction and retention, environmental
responsibility, lower cost to serve, and a
better overall branded customer experience. Ultimately, these benefits translate
into greater market value. A recent study
conducted by Vanderbilt University
looked at the predictive value of quarterly customer satisfaction scores over a
10-year period. A portfolio of companies
whose American Customer Satisfaction
Index (ACSI) scores had risen over the
past year and were above the national
average far outperformed the market,
gaining an average value of 1.08 percent
per month. Over the 10-year period, the
portfolio more than tripled, gaining 212
percent while the Standard & Poor’s 500stock index rose 105 percent7.
From a detailed perspective, the customer
experience blueprint can drive the appropriate customer segments and service
interactions to less-expensive interaction
channels such as online self-service. It
can significantly improve service metrics
such as routing of contacts, average handle times, and abandoned and dropped
calls— all of which increase customer
satisfaction. In addition, the strategy can
simplify the number of customer entry
points, which also can boost customer
satisfaction by easing navigation, but
also can reduce maintenance and support
cost for the business.
Page 9
For many companies, environmental
responsibility is a top strategic objective. Global consumer research that
Accenture conducted in 2010 confirmed
that customers across industries are
also highly interested in environmental
responsibility8. The research reported
that having access to environmentally friendly options was important or
extremely important to 56 percent of
survey respondents (up from 51 percent
the prior year). The customer experience
blueprint can be integral to furthering
sustainability objectives by, for instance,
moving the customers for whom environmental responsibility is important from
paper bills to online bills. Such a move
also can create huge cost savings as B2B
customers often receive hundreds of
pages of paper bills each month.
Customer Experience by
Design or Default
Customer experience will occur by
design or default. Our experience in the
marketplace proves that a company
either intentionally enhances the brand
by designing and delivering a branded
and differentiated customer experience
or, by default, diminishes the brand
through a poor customer experience. In
other words, without a service experience
design to specifically enhance the brand,
customer interactions frequently result
in a customer experience that negatively
reflects on the company and its brand.
Only through holistic blueprint design
can a company achieve its collective customer experience objectives and benefits.
In an era where B2B service is becoming
a significant differentiator and source
of customer acquisition and retention,
companies are compelled to create and
implement a global customer experience
blueprint that will further their pursuit of
high performance.
References
1. 1st Annual ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management
Benchmarking Study, ClearAction, 2010.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Accenture 2010 Global Consumer Research.
5. 1st Annual ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management
Benchmarking Study, ClearAction, 2010.
6. 1st Annual ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management
Benchmarking Study, ClearAction, 2010.
7. “Customer Service when Service Means Survival”, Bloomberg.com, http://www.
businessweek.com/blogs/personal_finance/archives/2009/02/customer_service_
when_service_means_survival.html, posted February 18, 2009.
8. Accenture 2010 Global Consumer Research.
Page 10
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 215,000
people serving clients in more than 120
countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across
all industries and business functions,
and extensive research on the world’s
most successful companies, Accenture
collaborates with clients to help them
become high-performance businesses and
governments. The company generated net
revenues of US$21.6 billion for the fiscal
year ended Aug. 31, 2010. Its home page
is www.accenture.com.
Copyright © 2011 Accenture
All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and
High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.
About Accenture CRM
Solutions
Accenture’s Customer Relationship
Management service line helps organizations achieve high performance by
transforming their marketing, sales and
customer service functions to support
accelerated growth, increased profitability and greater operating efficiency.
Our research, insight and innovation,
global reach and delivery experience
have made us a worldwide leader,
serving thousands of clients every year,
including most Fortune® 100 companies, across virtually all industries.
Contact Us
For further information, please contact:
Michael Flodin
[email protected]
Dwayne Norton
[email protected]
Christopher Mohr
[email protected]
Stay Connected
Join Us
Follow Us
Watch Us
Connect With Us
Experience Blueprint
Reaping the Benefits of a Tailored
Customer Experience
We’ve long understood in
business-to-consumer (B2C)
industries that a positive service
experience provides competitive
advantage in customer acquisition and retention. Yet, customer
experience management is
emerging as a critical component of success in business-tobusiness (B2B) industries as well.
In fact, recent research reveals
that half of B2B firms’ top
executives say customer experience management is a competitive differentiator and influences
major decision-making1.
Indeed, B2B companies are
still getting acquainted with
customer experience management. As executives are learning
how it differs from customer
satisfaction and relationship
management, investment is
increasing. Half of B2B organizations have increased investment
in customer experience management over the past five years
and, rightly so3. For businesses
serving businesses, understanding how to design and deliver
a superior customer experience
means competitive advantage.
Despite its importance, customer
experience management is just
emerging as a formal program
in most B2B companies. The
same research reports that just
20 percent of B2B companies
have implemented customer
experience management as a
formal business process and
only 28 percent of B2B executives base strategic decisions
on customer experience or
customer lifetime value2. And,
for many companies, investment
in customer experience management is minimal—about half (48
percent) of B2B firms invest
less than one percent of annual
revenue in customer experience
management.
These B2B findings are consistent with Accenture’s own global
research on the growing importance of customer experience.
Consumer research Accenture
conducted in 2010 highlighted
that the bar for acceptable
service performance continues
to rise4. The research showed
that customer service expectations among consumers globally
are higher compared with just
12 months ago and considerably higher than five years ago.
Indeed, for the first year since
Accenture began its annual
consumer research, customer
service became the top reason
(over price) that consumers
chose a new provider.
The research also confirmed the
consequences of poor service
performance are dire. In the past
year, two in three consumers
globally have switched the company from which they purchase
a product or service due to poor
customer service.
Page 1
In today’s service environment, a
differentiated customer experience strategy clearly enhances
the brand. However, it also
allows a company to deliver a
premium service, where appropriate, to top-tier customers while
maintaining the affordability of
the overall service experience.
Accenture’s research confirms
that companies can increase customer retention, reduce support
costs, and grow their customer
base by providing such differentiated treatment.
In this paper, we explore how a
business-to-business “customer
experience blueprint” can lay the
foundation for such differentiated treatment by illuminating where premium service
opportunities exist and how to
capitalize on these opportunities
while maintaining an acceptable
overall cost to serve.
Importance Doesn’t
Equal Action
Even as the importance of the customer experience grows, B2B companies
continue to apply a uniform approach
to service across markets, customer
segments and types of customer interactions. In fact, most B2B companies
provide a disparate and disaggregated
experience across the customer lifecycle of marketing, sales and service.
For example, a company may fail to
integrate the service organization into
a new product introduction, resulting
in service professionals not knowing
of a product launch until receiving a
customer call to order or ask questions
about it. Similarly, sales and marketing
may create a bundled offer that is
simple and attractive to customers.
However service delivery is not bundled
in any way. Therefore, if the customer
has a service question or issue, he may
have to traverse separate service organizations for each product or service in
the bundle—not an optimal customer
service experience.
For most B2B companies, service is
traditionally thought of as a cost to serve
and, therefore, begs the question: how
good a service can a company afford to
provide within its service cost structure?
The answer usually is to spread service
across all customers equally, in a “one
size fits all” service model. We refer to
this phenomenon as the peanut butter
analogy: a company takes what it has in
terms of the service model and spreads
it across all customers equally. In such
a model, servicing a $5,000 order costs
the same as servicing a $5 million order.
Top-tier customers are offered the same
kind of experience as a customer who
generates only a fraction of that revenue
for the company. And when the spreading of the peanut butter gets thin, the
experience of all customers diminishes.
Page 2
The Challenge of
the Differentiated
Experience
So why haven’t companies tailored
and optimized service to meet the
needs and value of customers? To many
companies it might seem intuitive to
differentiate the service experience
based on the characteristics of different
customer segments. Yet actually doing
so is challenging.
It is difficult to know who should get
what service treatment because many
companies cannot determine the value
of different customers now versus in
the future—and, thus, are uncertain
into which segment customers fit. For
example, if there are high-value and
low-value customer segments, where
does a customer fit based on current
behavior but also future potential?
Even if a company knows the current
and future value of its customers, it can
be expensive, complex and challenging
to create tailored service levels for different customer segments. In most organizations, service is an afterthought.
Organizations are overwhelmed by what
the tailored service structure should
be and how to deliver a differentiated
experience. Often companies aren’t
equipped to tailor services because
they don’t have a customer experience
design, and haven’t done research and
analysis to tailor the experience to
customer wants and needs.
Page 3
Mergers have further complicated
the issue. After all, it’s easier to have
one set of processes and responses
than several, and it’s typically faster
and cheaper to unify against a single
approach when bringing service organizations together after a merger.
But doing so often results in a poor
customer experience, a higher incidence
of unsatisfying outcomes for customers
and, ultimately, more customer turnover
and defection.
And, of course, there’s the issue
of bandwidth. In most companies,
customer service executives are busy
running day-to-day operations and
have little to no time to develop a
segmentation and treatment strategy if
one exists, to implement that strategy.
A segmented treatment strategy takes
time to design, implement, manage,
measure, and change the organization. It
simply won’t be a priority for a customer
service leader who is swamped daily by
escalations, service agent performance
problems, customers needing immediate resolution to critical problems and
internal meetings that consume large
chunks of his time. In other words, daily
operations often get in the way of doing
things right.
Accenture’s experience in helping
companies overcome the challenges of
customer experience implementation is
consistent with those found in recent
B2B customer experience research.
Overall, executives indicate that “a lack
of cross-organizational cooperation is
the greatest obstacle to customer experience management success, followed
by lack of customer experience strategy
and weak follow-through on customer
experience strategy; limited bandwidth
of managers and budget restrictions
have also inhibited CEM success5 .”
Making the Service
Experience Count
Despite these challenges, some leading
business-to-business enterprises are
moving aggressively toward providing a
tailored customer experience. Through
holistic customer experience design,
these companies are tailoring and optimizing the service experience to mirror
the needs of customers and the value
of customers to their organization (see
one company’s experience in the sidebar
“The Customer Experience Blueprint in
Action”). Several of these companies
share a common characteristic: they
utilized a well-established, customercentric approach to customer experience
design and implementation. The foundation for such a design is a customer
experience blueprint that:
• Considers premium service opportunities based on lifecycle management,
capabilities, and customer value.
• Meets the customer needs throughout
the lifecycle.
• Optimizes the experience through
appropriate channel management and
management of workforce.
• When implemented, allows the
company to deliver a premium service
where appropriate while managing,
and keeping affordable, the overall
cost to serve.
The approach used to create such a
design consists of three primary components: global operating model review,
understanding customer needs and intentions, and creation of the blueprint and
roadmap for implementation. We review
each component in greater detail below.
Global Operating Model
Review
As a first step, a company must
fundamentally understand how it currently delivers the customer experience
and how well equipped it is to offer
a tailored treatment strategy. This
includes a review of the global operating
model and go-to-market strategies from
marketing, sales and service. By taking
a holistic view across the full customer
lifecycle of all of the inputs and outputs
of the customer experience, the team
can glean detailed insight on what
services the company provides, how
it provides them, how well it provides
them, the challenges it faces, how it is
organized to provide services, and more.
From a global operating model perspective, there are 12 key components to
review: leadership and governance,
customer experience design, business
process management, new capability
development, channel management,
customer interaction operations, geographic alignment, enterprise engagement, global workforce management,
global talent management, operational
performance and metrics, and technology enablement (Figure 1).
True customer-centricity is more than
just having a strategy. It requires having
differentiated operations that enable
a company to flawlessly execute the
strategy, learn from evolving markets,
and incorporate lessons learned into
future strategy to consistently remain
ahead of customer needs, and the
competition’s ability to deliver against
them. A customer-centric operating
model enables companies to break the
silos—integrating and coordinating the
people, processes, data, and supporting
infrastructure across the organization
to deliver a unified, consistent, branded
customer experience. The full global
operating model review helps a company
assess where it stands against the
desired end-state of customer-centric
operations.
The operating model review also helps a
company understand how well aligned
its service experience is with its overall
strategy by answering a number of key
questions: what is the company’s overall
strategy? What does the company
want to be known for in the market?
What does the company want the
customer experience to be? How does
the operating model align to deliver that
experience? It’s very difficult to drive
sustainable results without an end-toend service strategy that is well aligned
to business objectives. For instance it’s
hard to focus on a goal such as trying to
create greater adoption of online selfservice if the broader business strategy
is to uniformly offer a high-touch customer experience.
Figure 1. Operating Model Components to Review
Leadership & Governance
Customer Experience Design
Business Units
Segments
Preferences
Personalization
Lifecycle
Management
Treatments
Channel
Management
Business Process Management
Idea to
Offer
Offer to
Market
New Capability
Development
• Program
description
Market to
Quote
Quote to
Order
Channel
Management
Face to Face
Order to
Book
Book to
Invoice
Forecast to
Deliver
Customer Interaction Operations
Market
Sell
Serve
Invoice to
Cash
Issue to
Resolution
Geographic
Alignment
North America
Customer segment 1
• Program
requirements
Phone
• Program goals
and measures
of success
Web
Customer segment 2
Customer segment n
Global Workplace
Management
Global Talent
Management
Support
the Biz
Procure to
Report
Enterprise
Engagement
Marketing
Sales
Latin America
Procurement
Finance
EMEA
HR
IT
APAC
Legal
Operational Performance/Metrics
Technology Enablement
Copyright ©2011, Accenture LLP. All rights reserved.
Page 4
Understanding Customer
Needs and Intentions
According to research, today just 28
percent of B2B companies use customer
feedback to guide annual plans6. To this
end, a second step in creating a holistic
customer experience design is developing
a detailed understanding of customer
needs and intentions and how each customer experiences a given company across
its lifecycle. This requires an assessment
of the current customer experience across
all segments, interactions and customer
communication channels to determine the
needs for any given customer segment, as
well as for each channel.
In conducting this analysis, a company
should consider the customer experience from the “outside in.” This means
thinking about the experience from the
customer perspective based on the collection of voice of the customer (VoC)
data and customer feedback obtained
through monitoring interactions.
Customer wants and needs become
the footprint from which to build a
differentiated experience strategy and
channel-specific service capabilities.
From a detailed perspective, the
analysis identifies all of the reasons that
customers interact with the company
across each portion of the lifecycle: why
they want to interact and what they
intend to do at each of those interaction
points (Figure 2). Then it maps how the
customer wants to interact against how
the company operationalizes to serve
those intentions.
Of particular emphasis in the analysis
and design are the “moments of truth.”
A moment of truth is a point in the customer experience that has the potential
to enhance or weaken the customer’s
perception of the company. Identifying
and analyzing moments of truth is
important to help truly understand what
matters most to customers, what causes
them to be loyal, what is their desired
customer experience and what aspects
of that experience are, in fact, most
important to them.
Figure 2: How Customers Experience the Company
Customers
Segment 1
Segment 2
...
Segment 3
Segment n-1
Segment n
Learn
Buy
Get
Use
Pay
Support
• Become aware of
product/ service
• Decide to buy
• Check delivery
status
• Learn how to use
product/ service
and tools
• Receive bill
• Check product/
service or
account info
• Review and
research
product/service
• Select product/
service options
• Place order
• Confirm order
• Receive
product/service
• Activate
product/service
• Change order
(contents,
delivery speed/
date)
• Optimize use of
product/service
(utilization check)
• Review bill
• Pay bill
• Manage account
and preferences
• Identify need
(self-identify
or receive
notification)
• Acknowledge
need
• Request support
• Check status
• Resolve issue
Face to Face
Phone
Web & Chat
Channels
Copyright ©2011, Accenture LLP. All rights reserved.
Page 5
Mobile
Collaboration
The Customer
Experience Blueprint
in Action
model for all customer
segments, across all service
intentions and interaction
channels.
A global telecommunications
product and service company
identified the need to transform
its customer operations to
provide a consistent and
differentiated service delivery
model that was competitive
across customer segments.
Using the approach outlined
elsewhere in this paper,
the company developed a
customer experience blueprint
that balanced outstanding
delivery with affordability
and was based on a strong
understanding of customer
needs and intentions.
Based on the blueprint, the
company is now implementing a
competitively differentiated and
branded customer experience
across its customer care and
service operations. The roadmap
for implementation is aligned to
four overarching objectives:
The effort was quite complex,
as there were ten customer
segments across four lines of
business. The team identified
over 40 interaction types across
the customer lifecycle from
ordering, use and understanding,
to invoicing, support and
repair, and disconnection. These
interactions occur across six
channels (face-to-face, phone,
email, Web and chat, mobile
and collaboration). Identifying
“moments of truth” was quite
helpful to simplify and prioritize
this complex analysis. Based
on customer feedback, the
team identified multiple such
moments within the most
critical customer interactions.
The customer experience
blueprint that resulted from
this effort provided a treatment
• Enhancing the customer contact experience with simplified points of entry and consistent standards in customer
interactions.
• Shifting interactions to selfservice channels by improving
the online experience through
usability and prioritized interactions and driving online
adoption.
• Differentiating customer
treatments across contact
handling, business process and
policies and interaction channels.
• Enabling sustainable improvement by improving Voice of
the Customer and adopting a
holistic approach to customer
experience management.
more transactions online, the
company expects to save over
$100 million per year, at which
point more than 15 percent of
its total of 100 million annual
interactions will occur online.
Another key objective,
simplifying entry points,
involves reducing the number
of toll-free numbers through
which customers access the
company by almost 75 percent.
Not only will this initiative ease
customer navigation, it will
significantly reduce the overall
cost and resource required to
maintain toll-free lines.
Finally, in support of its
environmental responsibility
objective within this initiative,
the company will launch
a program to get business
customers to stop receiving
paper bills. As some business
customers receive hundreds
of pages of bills per month,
this effort will have significant
ecological impact while saving
the company tens of millions of
dollars per year.
While it is still too early in the
implementation to measure,
overall the company expects to
increase customer satisfaction
by two full percentage points—a
very significant improvement
in this industry. Furthermore,
through its efforts to improve
the online experience and
a multi-year push to move
Page 6
Construction of
a Blueprint and
Operational Roadmap
Based on customer needs and intentions
within a given segment, the final step is
to determine how the company should
provide the experience: what are the
functional capabilities a company must
deliver through specific channels (Web,
voice, email); how does it provide those
capabilities; and what service factors
are relevant and required to match
expectations?
The blueprint provides a treatment
model for all customer segments, across
all customer intentions and interaction
channels (Figure 3). In addition, because
all interactions contribute to the customer experience, the blueprint spans the
full customer lifecycle. The model may
emphasize different channels across the
customer interaction lifecycle and provide
different levels of treatment by segment
and channel. In addition, it’s important
to ensure that a company’s blueprint is
global in nature but with local relevance,
specificity and customization.
Finally, the blueprint should be optimized
from the perspective of affordability,
balancing available budget and resource
constraints against service needs and
customer expectations. In other words,
the blueprint should be taken through
a process that maps available resources
against the most critical service needs
and expectations of customers.
Once a company solidifies the customer
experience blueprint, it can use the
blueprint, along with the operating model
review, to create a gap analysis. The gap
analysis calibrates the blueprint against
the company’s goals and objectives,
which helps to identify the highestpriority outstanding capabilities on which
to focus. Once it identifies those capabilities, the company can build a prioritized
roadmap of programs and projects to
implement the blueprint and align the
organization to meet identified customer
needs and intentions (Figure 4).
Figure 3: Sample Components of a Customer Experience Blueprint: Treatments by Interaction Channel
Lifecycle Stage
Channel
Phone
Web
Face to Face
Place Order
Change Order
Service Level
80/60
80/60
Average Speed to Answer
<60 Seconds
<60 Seconds
Average Handle Time
<10 Minutes
<10 Minutes
Dedicated Phone Number
Yes
Yes
Account-Customized IVR
Yes
Yes
Dedicated Email Address
Yes
Yes
Auto Acknowledgement
Yes
Yes
Response Time
2 Hours
1 Hour
Account-Customized Portal
Yes
Yes
Personalization
Yes
Yes
Single Sign On
Yes
Yes
Available
Yes
Yes
Channel Treatment
Copyright ©2011, Accenture LLP. All rights reserved.
Page 7
Overcoming the
Stumbling Blocks
Arriving at an implementable customer
experience blueprint and roadmap is
not easy. However, there are some
important aspects of the customer
experience blueprint approach that help
ensure its success.
First and foremost is creating the
blueprint from a customer-centric perspective that starts from gathering true
customer needs and experiences versus
relying on the company’s perceptions of
those needs and experiences. A company
should use a customer needs analysis
approach that is fact-based—one that
starts from mapping and analyzing the
existing customer footprint, applies the
results from that analysis against interaction channels, and tests them against
market trends, company experience, and
other factors.
Last but not least, the optimal strategy
often is the result of a combination
of best approaches from not only the
company’s own industry, but also from
other industries. Therefore, a company
must be sure to approach the effort
with a cross-industry perspective of best
service practices.
Second, analyzing customer needs and
intentions and constructing the appropriate blueprint is an extremely dataand time-intensive, complex effort.
Doing it well requires “heavy lifting”
in terms of intellectual, analytical and
implementation resources; thus, providing adequate and appropriate resources
is paramount to success.
Figure 4: Illustrative Roadmap
Months
Operational Model Component
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Customer Experience Design
Leadership & Governance
Business Process Management
New Capability Development
Channel Management
Customer Interaction Operations
Global Workforce Management
Global Talent Management
Geographic Alignment
Enterprise Engagement
Operational Performance/Metrics
Technology Enablement
Copyright ©2011, Accenture LLP. All rights reserved.
Page 8
Reaping the Benefits
It is clear that while a customer experience blueprint is not easy to execute,
it can generate significant benefits for
companies—including superior customer
satisfaction and retention, environmental
responsibility, lower cost to serve, and a
better overall branded customer experience. Ultimately, these benefits translate
into greater market value. A recent study
conducted by Vanderbilt University
looked at the predictive value of quarterly customer satisfaction scores over a
10-year period. A portfolio of companies
whose American Customer Satisfaction
Index (ACSI) scores had risen over the
past year and were above the national
average far outperformed the market,
gaining an average value of 1.08 percent
per month. Over the 10-year period, the
portfolio more than tripled, gaining 212
percent while the Standard & Poor’s 500stock index rose 105 percent7.
From a detailed perspective, the customer
experience blueprint can drive the appropriate customer segments and service
interactions to less-expensive interaction
channels such as online self-service. It
can significantly improve service metrics
such as routing of contacts, average handle times, and abandoned and dropped
calls— all of which increase customer
satisfaction. In addition, the strategy can
simplify the number of customer entry
points, which also can boost customer
satisfaction by easing navigation, but
also can reduce maintenance and support
cost for the business.
Page 9
For many companies, environmental
responsibility is a top strategic objective. Global consumer research that
Accenture conducted in 2010 confirmed
that customers across industries are
also highly interested in environmental
responsibility8. The research reported
that having access to environmentally friendly options was important or
extremely important to 56 percent of
survey respondents (up from 51 percent
the prior year). The customer experience
blueprint can be integral to furthering
sustainability objectives by, for instance,
moving the customers for whom environmental responsibility is important from
paper bills to online bills. Such a move
also can create huge cost savings as B2B
customers often receive hundreds of
pages of paper bills each month.
Customer Experience by
Design or Default
Customer experience will occur by
design or default. Our experience in the
marketplace proves that a company
either intentionally enhances the brand
by designing and delivering a branded
and differentiated customer experience
or, by default, diminishes the brand
through a poor customer experience. In
other words, without a service experience
design to specifically enhance the brand,
customer interactions frequently result
in a customer experience that negatively
reflects on the company and its brand.
Only through holistic blueprint design
can a company achieve its collective customer experience objectives and benefits.
In an era where B2B service is becoming
a significant differentiator and source
of customer acquisition and retention,
companies are compelled to create and
implement a global customer experience
blueprint that will further their pursuit of
high performance.
References
1. 1st Annual ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management
Benchmarking Study, ClearAction, 2010.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Accenture 2010 Global Consumer Research.
5. 1st Annual ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management
Benchmarking Study, ClearAction, 2010.
6. 1st Annual ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management
Benchmarking Study, ClearAction, 2010.
7. “Customer Service when Service Means Survival”, Bloomberg.com, http://www.
businessweek.com/blogs/personal_finance/archives/2009/02/customer_service_
when_service_means_survival.html, posted February 18, 2009.
8. Accenture 2010 Global Consumer Research.
Page 10
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 215,000
people serving clients in more than 120
countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across
all industries and business functions,
and extensive research on the world’s
most successful companies, Accenture
collaborates with clients to help them
become high-performance businesses and
governments. The company generated net
revenues of US$21.6 billion for the fiscal
year ended Aug. 31, 2010. Its home page
is www.accenture.com.
Copyright © 2011 Accenture
All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and
High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.
About Accenture CRM
Solutions
Accenture’s Customer Relationship
Management service line helps organizations achieve high performance by
transforming their marketing, sales and
customer service functions to support
accelerated growth, increased profitability and greater operating efficiency.
Our research, insight and innovation,
global reach and delivery experience
have made us a worldwide leader,
serving thousands of clients every year,
including most Fortune® 100 companies, across virtually all industries.
Contact Us
For further information, please contact:
Michael Flodin
[email protected]
Dwayne Norton
[email protected]
Christopher Mohr
[email protected]
Stay Connected
Join Us
Follow Us
Watch Us
Connect With Us
