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CE Competence Center

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At the Clarabridge Customer Connections conference, Troy Powell, Ph.D., vice president of statistical solutions, of Walker Information discussed creating customer experience competency centers. Troy said, "A Customer Experience Competency Center is a cross-functional unit that drives and supports customer experience management efforts through the collection, integration, analysis, communication, and delivery of customer information." It is a central hub around which the data rotates. The goal of the CE competence center is to create better, more customer-focused decisions.

The five key components of a customer experience competency center are People, Information, Analysis, Communications and Delivery.

• People - One Walker client calls their competency center its "Customer Stewardship Program" and charges its staff with determining how they can be stewards of their most precious resource, customers. Each department has at least one person who is a "customer steward" and is part of this cross-functional team (typically part-time). This has resulted in a massive decrease in customer complaints. Other organizations have built customer advocacy networks, with a customer strategy owner at the center, with support from an executive sponsor, program managers, regional and business unit liaisons, researchers and analysts, marketing, IT, third party consultants and finance.
• Information - The Walker vision for customer intelligence includes creating a central repository for all customer experiences and feedback, with data gathered from multiple sources and aggregated in the repository, which is accessible throughout the company and used to develop strategic and tactics to grow and serve customers. The IT process can be the most challenging to overcome for many organizations as they seek to collect and integrate information from as many listening posts as possible.
• Analysis - As Troy said, "The competency center is not and should not be responsible for conducting all analyses [but] should be responsible for coordinating analyses of customer information."
• Communications - To be successful, the competency center must market itself internally and externally. Internally, to get buy in and contributions from across staff and departments, and externally in order to maximize the feedback collected. Develop a launch marketing plan as the competency center is developed, and craft a sustainable campaign of monthly newsletters or other periodic communiqués to keep people informed on how the organization is learning and acting on feedback.
• Delivery - If Communications is about educating groups, Delivery is about targeting individuals. The CE competence center needs to provide the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format for action. The insights are delivered in a wide range of formats: an account management application, online reporting tools, BI tools, sales playbooks, iPhone apps, SFDC apps, iGoogle gadgets, scorecards and RSS feeds.

Troy presented a case study for one Walker client who set up a CE competency center that aggregated feedback from customers, conducted focused analyses (contact requests, low scores, high scores, key opportunity identification) and followed-up with accounts. Based on an internal assessment of the success from the first-wave implementation of the competency center, the client estimated that $32M in revenue was saved from at-risk accounts and $45M was generated in new business opportunities, for a total impact of $77M.

For the large organization especially, CE competency centers can have a dramatic effect on the top line.