For almost four decades our veteran team and network has successfully designed and implemented thousands of workforce performance, relationship and technology optimization initiatives. Explore a sampling of our unique and diverse achievements.
A large New York-based bank knew they had a customer attrition problem, but didn't know why or how to fix it. And, they knew they weren't cross-selling effectively into their various services: referrals and leads were not happening. They needed a strategy to remedy the situation.
Our teams collaborated to develop and execute a cross-enterprise five-element strategy. We aggregated their customer account data (from seven disparate core/service systems) to produce single unified customer relationship profiles. We analyzed relationship product/service gaps and identified opportunities, profile-by-profile. Based on those gap opportunities, we designed and assisted execution of a direct-to-customer outreach program. We inserted those leads into a customized automated referral management system for specific branch and service company staff to contact, consult and sell. And, we designed and implemented a regulatory-compliant sales performance compensation program.
At six weeks, bank executives reported that they "...now had 60 months of historical-level leads in their qualified pipeline", and "...with those leads and our typical close-rate we can hit our annual revenue goals for the next five years without a single new customer." Of course, they continued to acquire new customers, also effectively cross-sold and retained those, and soon achieved large multiples of customer satisfaction improvement, growth and enterprise value.
An under-performing regional financial services firm, with hundreds of branches, a typical web presence, and a multi-thousand workforce, had no reliable facts about who their top-performing employees were or who their most valuable customers were: they found out when any of them regularly churned out of the firm. They were spending heavily on marketing, but had no useful method to know their return on investment and adapt strategy. They requested our assistance to develop pathways to better enterprise intelligence and improved profitability.
Knowing that our top employees should be optimizing revenues by directly serving our top customers, we devised a three-phased strategy. First, we aggregated all customer/account profiles from multiple disparate core/service systems, calculated Performance Scorecards for each customer, and segmented them by Revenue Contribution, Portfolio Value and Lifetime Potential; by local market and office. We identified the Top 20% of Customers, and which offices and markets were Sales Leaders, Service Leaders or both.
Second, we used the aggregated customer profiles, integrated the active workforce/employee lists, and calculated Performance Scorecards for each sales and services individual and office. We segmented them by Revenue and Cost Contributions, Portfolio Value, Attrition Risk, and Retention Opportunity. We identified the Top 20% of Workforce Performers, and which individuals and offices were Sales Leaders or Service Leaders.
Finally, we systemically matched, linked and assigned each of the Top 20% Workforce to each of the Top 20% Customers, by markets, product lines and office; and, automated the internal lead-prioritization and feed functionalities: Strategy 20/20 was born.
The positive results were almost immediate, strong and compelling. Relationship-expansion sales jumped dramatically, both customer Lifetime Revenue Values and workforce Revenue per Employee increased substantially, Top Performer Customer attrition dropped almost completely, Top Performer Employee retention quadrupled, and annualized revenue increased over 30%. Profitability increased further due to improved Top Performer Employee productivity, easier cross-sell/up-sell success and more cost-effective targeted marketing and sales investments.
A major mid-west consumer services firms was to acquire the locations of a competitor in a fan-rival state. So, their expectations for post-acquisition customer retention were very poor; expecting to retain only 10-12% percent of existing customers. They would get the facilities they wanted, but it would take years for them to claw back the lost customer base. They sought a strategy to soften the blow and accelerate customer (re)acquisition.
We proposed an ambitious solution. Collaborating with our technology partners, we rapidly (ten working days) deployed an office- and call-center based service issue reporting platform that routed all customer (and new workforce) issues and problems from 150+ locations to a quickly-configured rapid-response team: a dozen veteran experts collaborating around a large conference table, live-wired to the enterprise. The team was made up of product, service, process, fulfillment and information system specialists from across both buyer and seller enterprises. And, we fully-merged both enterprise customer/account databases into the platform.
In the months following the acquisition, the rapid-response team instantly resolved over forty-percent of all customer (and location staff) reported issues, resolved an additional fifty-percent of reported issues within 24 hours, and five-percent more within three working days. And, every response went straight to the reporting customer or co-worker. The system even filtered for duplicates, reducing multiple issue reporting by over thirty percent.
Three months post-acquisition, client management reported that they had retained an "...astounding 85% of pre-acquisition customers"; 7X their expectations. This saved millions of dollars. And, resulted in major revisions to their marketing and workforce staffing plans, accelerated new product initiatives, and generated large multiples of revenue, profitability, and market value of the combined businesses.
Revenue per Employee is a common metric to assess enterprise vitality and viability. It can be boosted by increasing revenues and maintaining/reducing the number of employees as you grow. Increased use of automation (e-commerce, subscriptions, process automation, bots, augmented intelligence) to reduce employee headcount is primarily driven by the goal to increase Revenue per Employee and resulting profitability.
While this works best for sales transaction-based businesses, it is more challenging for human-required relationship-based service businesses: many functions cannot be automated and still maintain service quality and customer satisfaction.
We've worked with hundreds of service-oriented relationship-based businesses to design incentive compensation, reward and recognition programs for individual, work-group, team, site/location and market/region performance. This means that individual workforce members earn additional compensation for their individual efforts, and also a percentage share of compensation pools attached to the efforts of the small work-groups, larger teams, locations and larger regions they belong to.
The performance compensation and reward metrics are always based on quantifiable improvements in customer relationship value, service quality, retention and enhancement, referrals, issue resolution, error remediation and other revenue-increasing, cost-reducing and profit-protecting results. We understand the recent popularity of NPS-type metrics, but they have been worth little for practically reporting true value and successful service outcomes; more importantly, the workforce perceives them as not relevant.
These real 'what-I-actually-do-at-work' performance incentives result in higher retention of top performing employees, departure of under-performing workforce, increases in customer satisfaction and portfolio revenue values, and ultimately increased Revenue per Employee.
A large super-regional consumer financial services firm, with millions of customers, had nearly 100 disparate data sources; real-time, daily, weekly, month-end, periodic, leads, referrals, quotes, sales, service tickets, portfolios, productivity, surveys, assessments, new hires and job changes, products and price changes, incentives and spiffs, and more.
It took two dozen people all week, every week to prepare and aggregate that data for once-a-week, 3-4 days-delayed, workforce and business unit performance reports.
Working with strategic technology partners, our team automated 100% of the entire process to run daily, error-free, in a few hours, with just a single FTE. And, through the analytics and reporting tools, the client's workforce and management were able to receive daily, instead of late weekly performance reports.
The result was a multiple orders of magnitude improvement in workforce cost-efficiency and performance productivity. And, with daily reporting, sales activity, service satisfaction and customer retention results skyrocketed.
Working with two competitors in the same market, both with virtually the same history and time in business, vendors, technologies, customer and workforce demographics, market conditions, and parallel financial results, gave us a very rare real-world laboratory for what strategies work and which don't in customer profitability and workforce performance.
We recommended to both that they implement Performance Scorecards, with specific metrics and goals, for Customer Relationships, Employees and Business Units (teams, locations, regions, markets/channels and product groups).
Performance Scorecards were suggested because they provide predictive/prescriptive 'leading' and descriptive/diagnostic 'lagging' metric analytics to inform on strategy-execution success or failure. Frequently these are known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) or Management By Objectives (MBOs). And, typically, these analytics have targets and goals, and are ranked, trended, segmented and drilled-down.
One of our 'laboratory' same-market clients implemented Performance Scorecards, the other planned it for the future. Only two months later, the positive results were dramatic. For all metrics, little had changed for the non-Scorecard company, but had shot up steeply for the Scorecard firm. We had to find out why, so we interviewed most of the Scorecard participants.
What we discovered was a simple, obvious in retrospect, but profound concept we came to name The Certainty Principle: the more certainty the workforce has about their work, the more they engage, participate, devote and contribute. An employee summed it up with "...the Scorecards tell us clearly what the company's priorities are, what we should be focusing on; I have no uncertainty about what I should be spending most of my time and energy on; it's easier to succeed, I'm doing more, and of the right things, and it makes me happy."
The positive results were substantial in productivity, revenue and profitability. But, for this client, most impactful was the huge increase in top performing employee retention, longevity, development and advancement (it improved recruiting, too): because it improved customer service, satisfaction and relationship profitability. And, then, we discovered that Certainty works with customers as well.
A 50-state licensed insurance brokerage began assisting direct-to-consumer businesses in their sale of ancillary insurance and warranty coverages to their core-service customers: travel insurance for individual group members traveling to attend group events, per booking liability protection for home-sharing vacation rental homeowners, property damage coverage, event protection for destination property managers, and more.
Inbound source-data referral and sales transactions were being submitted from over a thousand distribution affiliates across a widely disparate network, in scores of different formats and time-stamps. Because of the myriad of state-by-state insurance rules and approvals, the number of premium-, sales-, referral-, tax- and service-fee paid entities became vast and deep: each insurance transaction spawned dozens of separate micro-transactions requiring strongly-audited tracking, and remittance accounting and management.
The solution also required the capability to manage and resolve coverage modifications, cancellations, and state-approval-governed premium refunds and commission charge-backs. Finally, the system needed to be the centralized intermediary for multiple back-end claims processing and customer service third-party administrators (TPAs).
The client needed an unprecedented infinite-entity, international, multi-provider, multi-product, multi-currency, multi-lingual, document-fulfilling distribution and service management platform.
To resolve the high-degree of complexity of the resulting transaction flow, our team designed and assisted in implementing a comprehensive system-wide transaction management platform that integrated thousands of distribution partners, scores of state-by-state-approved products, and dozens of insurance carriers, underwriters and their TPAs.
The solution provides tracking and reporting of sales transactions and derived micro-transactions in order to generate insurance sales ‘bordereaux’ reporting to the carriers and underwriters, commission reporting for the sales and referral network, surplus tax reporting and all required premium trust fund accounting.
In addition, the solution enabled a centralized on-line functionality for coverage-holder claims, customer service and complaints submissions. Today, the system operates as a full intermediary distribution and service management platform that links a range of different carriers and underwriters offering a broad menu of each of their specialized programs, to a vast scope of consumer-facing retailers.
The system enables the insurance brokerage to maintain primary care and control of data for the purposes of underwriting; evidence of coverage fulfillment; management of customer relationships; first notice of loss, and full administration, accounting, documentation and reporting of all receipts and remittances for all parties.
Finally, a major ancillary benefit has been that issuing carriers/underwriters now have virtually real-time insurance coverage sales reporting capability. Instead of waiting 5-10 weeks for sales and claims volume results to be reported and semi-manually consolidated, the new platform automatically enables system-wide outcomes to be reported Next Day. By itself, that capability has the potential to save underwriters millions in operating, fulfillment, compliance and reinsurance costs.
One of the largest international conglomerates based in Africa set out to optimize sales, service and customer relationship value performance and results by creating an enterprise-wide workforce and customer performance management process and platform.
Spanning twenty-one diverse strategic business units, with nearly forty thousand employees at thousands of sites, and millions of customers, the challenge was to create a solution that would universally serve stakeholder and management objectives, customer relationship expectations and employee aspirations.
Over the multi-year project our team worked with hundreds of line-of-business, and process and technology support managers and teams, and created an unprecedented comprehensive Employee Performance plus Customer Relationship Management process and technology development and integration plan: EPM + CRM.
The plan included full-scope Business Requirement and Functional Specification documents, including frameworks and methods for unit and individual goal-setting and performance planning; on-demand activity and results management and reporting; individual and team-based sales, referral, service, relationship, and productivity incentive and recognition programs; multi-platform source data and data warehouse integration; technology platform development and deployment; management coaching; and performance evaluation.
The project pre-dated the popular emergence of CRM/ABM by half a decade, and the subsequent explosion in employee and business performance management by almost a decade.
A leading merchant services “super-ISO” network engaged our team in the design, development, and implementation of an enterprise-wide performance management initiative, primarily focused on business development, sales, service, and relationship retention and profitability.
With hundreds of thousands of clients, tens of thousands of sales and service reps, hundreds of sales hierarchies, thousands of products, and varying and daily-changing pricing and fees for every combination thereof, the complexity of integrating multiple data systems and calculating workforce and business unit performance metrics was unprecedented.
Our team developed an innovative approach to enable the rapid-velocity-of-change in day-to-day sales and service operations, the frequent changes to the organization entity hierarchies, and cost/price changes, contributing to their dramatic growth in the ensuing decade.
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