neil woodcock’s marketing blog

Are there any positives emanating from the turmoil and uncertainty in the financial markets at the moment?  Well one thing is certain; like it or not low growth and downward pressure on prices and margins will be the norm for the next 6-18 months! But there is a positive in this  – the environment provides the right motivation to do two things; (1) streamline your organisation even further and (2) move ahead of your competition.  Here’s how:

Whenever we look at large organisations we always find opportunities for streamlining their activities, sharpening their focus, reducing cost and improving revenue streams. Here are some things to look for:

• Contact Centre:
  • Occupancy (time on call+ time on wrap/available time); 25% reduction in total cost is very possible
  • Reduce unnecessary service levels
  • Cost of failure; analysis of this can reduce cost by 25-40%, and have massive impact on customer satisfaction and commitment rates
  • Streaming of sales enquiries into fast moving, empowered teams, reducing cost per order
  • Matching up best employees with best customers in service area; instant rewards possible
  • Multi-skilling agents to improve first call resolution
  • Increasing conversion rates through better contact handling
• Sales force:
  • Using web 2.0 techniques to focus the genius available in your company and outside it
  • Use Sales 2.0. management to
    support reps & managers manage the pipeline (managing the top 7 indicators that drive sales in any sales force)
  • Use knowledge 2.0 technologies to move the performance of the average field sales person (typically 50% of the sales force) more like the best 10%
  • Reducing the number of field sales people through telephone account management, for instance by twinning sales and telephone account managers EFFECTIVELY
    
• Marketing
  • Targeting marketing resource on smaller number of the RIGHT customers
  • STOP unnecessary customer contacts
  • Reduce cost of mailings – do you really need to spend that much on glossy brochure and ‘Premier Customer’ packs
  • Introduce lower cost digital strategies (e.g. email contact, social media interaction, podcasts) in place of the contact strategies you currently use
  • Introduce on-line panels for research in place of more expensive types of research.
  • Use your employees and partners to help you research what customers really need and how you can improve the experience
  • Brainstorm creative promotions, with high relevance to your target customers
  • Setting up propensity models to implement rapid contact management; potentially large customers buying small amounts from you now; people likely to order just once; people likely to defect; people not buying certain lines who have bought them before; people likely to upgrade or buy another product; people who are likely to prefer lower cost channels
  • Become more aggressive with affiliate and aggregator marketing strategies to reduce acquisition cost (sometimes by 10-20%) and increase the number of new customers
• Initiative Portfolio Management
  • STOP initiatives that are not COMPLETELY aligned with strategy (20-30% reduction in project budgets)
  • Combine initiative across different departments

If this is done carefully, customer management effectiveness and efficiency is improved (reducing actual cost and cost to serve) AND SO IS REVENUE AND CUSTOMER COMMITMENT.  Customers often notice the better targeting, see more creativity and relevance, mostly appreciate the no nonsense approach and, most importantly, they continue to hear from you.  The reduced costs of your operation may give scope for increased discounts too, maintaining margins, which customers will appreciate.  Most companies will panic and cut costs across the board but few will attempt to target their cost savings to build customer revenues.  The key is; continuing to manage customers actively and positively during a downturn and not just cutting costs across the board will reap greater rewards when we begin to come out of the recession. Is there evidence for this? Yes, please leave a comment I’ll we’ll send you our report on this.

Thanks, Neil