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Could you please elaborate on the best practices of customer facing O2C?

To my mind there are a couple of components for designing and operating best practice customer facing O2C processes. First, start with your customer in mind: what customer experience do you want to provide ? Research has shown that every interaction, every touch point between a company and its customers, influences brand perception, and we as consumers can relate to that if we think of our own interactions with companies that give us a particularly good, or particularly bad customer experience. Thus, the customer facing processes you design should match the brand image and perception you want to share.

It is understandable that companies make mistakes sometimes. So, having a good understanding of the interactions you absolutely cannot afford to get wrong, because the detrimental effect would be disastrous on loyalty, is important. We call these the ''Moments that Matter''. Focusing on these will help gauge where process improvement efforts and money should be spent – therefore building insights by surveying regularly your customers and creating feedback opportunities, is a key component of successful process design and improvement.

What are the best practices in order management?

There are many best practices to choose from, and choosing what to change for the biggest impact will very much depend on the environment you’re operating in. However, it’s safe to say that a combination of competent and empowered order management staff (and customer service as a whole, for that matter), trained for maximum responsiveness and encouraged to own, solve and continually improve issues, is an excellent start to deliver superior O2C service. Together with a clear customer promise, and a standard set of consistently measured internal service level agreements, and modern technology such as customer and self-service portals, mobile apps et cetera, this will drive responsiveness and ease of use for customers.

I would however highlight that cross-functional integration between O2C, supply chain and master data management is of paramount importance for a super-efficient order management process to run. In addition, overlooking fundamental issues such as stock info reliability can make order management improvement efforts wasted, if not unproductive.

What is the change management challenge associated with this, and how to address it ?

Firstly, know your environment, know your culture – no benchmark process, even lifted from the best performing companies out there, will be guaranteed to work at your company. Assess how much change the organisation is able to bear, how process oriented the culture is (or isn’t), and how far ahead your competitors are. This will certainly help achieve a significant shift in customer facing order to cash.

In my experience the biggest part of the challenge has been (and still is) to strike the right balance between prescribing process steps (standardization) and triggering the right behaviours in the teams, away from silo-thinking. Creating the change of climate that leads to empowered and continuous improvement is not quick and easy!

For the C-suite, the process function must be able to translate customer requirements into process solutions, in order to turn theory into practice. For operational GBS, Sales, customer service staff, processes must be operationalized and performance managed via simple, consensual indicators, to protect the “common goal” (easy, profitable transaction and happy customer).

Overall, I would argue that organisations, which encourage speaking out when failures happen, and act decisively to correct them, tend to navigate the change curve more successfully.

What would you like to achieve by attending the 15th Annual EMEA Customer Experience and Order to Cash conference?

I am always keen on meeting my peers in other sectors and companies, as experience shows the issues we face are usually quite similar irrespective of what products or services the company sells. Specifically this time, I am looking forward to hearing from others how they are leveraging processes to create excellent service perception, how much does process play a role in customer experience versus behaviors, the major steps within digitalisation and e-commerce, and experiences in creating and running customer feedback loops.

Ahead of the 15th annual EMEA Customer Experience and Order to Cash, read here an interview with Mrs Anne-Sophie Andre Palange, Continuous Improvement Manager for Customer Experience about the best practices of Customer Facing O2C

Practical Insights From:

Edit Valentinyi

Customer Order and Fulfillment Manager,GE Aviation, Hungary
Chris Glanvill

Head of Customer Administration – EMEA, Thomson Reuters, UK
Philipp Lutzny

Senior Director Global Order Fulfillment and Supply Chain Management, ADVA Optical Networking SE, Germany
Ulli Kahle-Roth

Customer Service and Supply Chain Director EMEA, A. Schulman Europe GmbH & Co KG, Switzerland

About the conference:

This marcus evans event offers a unique opportunity and a great discussion platform for senior level management representatives to benchmark, share experiences and find solutions to their key tasks such as great customer experience, increased digitalization, the journey toward the true E2E O2C from planning to fulfilment and order management best practices. One of the workshops will be devoted to overcoming change management challenges related to O2C transformation. Other important areas covered will include key customer master data and dispute management project. The 15th annual EMEA Customer Experience and Order to Cash Conference will take place from the 15th until the 16th of September 2016 in Prague, Czech Republic.

Previous Attendees Include

Mondelez
DSM
DIAGEO
Medtronic
ABB
Boehringer- Ingelheim
Bayer Euroservices
Philip Morris Intl
Shell
Fiat Services
SAP AG
Capgemini
Ecolab
AkzoNobel

About the speaker:

Anne-Sophie André is in charge of deploying Continuous Improvement strategy globally to deliver enhanced, profitable customer experience in the Lubricants division of BP. She is passionate about making process efficiency and great customer experience a successful combination. Following business management studies, Anne-Sophie performed a wide range of roles in the Sales & Marketing, Strategy and Financial Optimisation areas, at country, regional and global levels. Over the last few years Anne-Sophie has been responsible for designing and implementing a number of process transformation programs, focusing on Customer facing and Order To Cash processes primarily, which have contributed to significant improvements in Customer satisfaction, productivity, Cash Flow and DSO. Considered an expert in the customer management arena, Anne-Sophie has led projects and teams across Sales Finance and Supply Chain, all in service of raising service levels sustainably and profitably. A certified Six Sigma Black Belt, she trains and coaches staff in applying problem-solving and change management methodologies to align processes to desired business outcomes.

Best Practices of Customer Facing O2C

An interview with BP

Anne-Sophie Andre Palange,
Continuous Improvement Manager for Customer Experience