Corporate Shared Services

Business Challenges

Shared Services is the centralized management of activities for a company’s internal customers. The typical support functions included are HR, IT, Finance, basic office services, and legal services. The goal in each case is similar to that of services provided to external customers, namely, reduced costs, improved productivity, tools and processes for improved ‘customer’ performance, quality of the deliverable, and, ultimately, high ‘customer satisfaction’. In addition, these shared services should encourage teamwork and facilitate collaboration within and across organizations. Because control and accountability underlie this business model, it is important to track and report how delivery of services stacks up against agreed targets.

Companies that currently offer shared services, are seeking to expand the range of services provided, or are in the planning stage for launching their program face certain challenges if they are to experience the full range of benefits:

Costs and operational complexity exceeding expectations
Achieving economies of scale with high degree of integration and standardization, while taking into account cultural, regulatory anbd geographic differences
Decision about outsourcing or offshoring
Employee resistance to change, coupled with lack of strong commitment at the top.
Establishing inadequate controls and accountability
Management of rising technology costs
Measuring performance, including costs, quality, service, customer satisfaction
Use of shared services program in less-traditional areas, e.g., R&D, procurement
Responsiveness to new opportunities that present themselves

CustomerImpact Solutions Enable:

Tracking usage by services by department, employee status, and region, and linking to employee satisfaction customer segment, and region
Categorizing types of issues
Analysis of efficiency of service delivery
Analysis of customer-recommended service improvements and additional services through satisfaction scores and comments

Benefits

Transforming data to insights

Faster generation and analysis of data
Ability to correlate operational measures and customer intelligence with key metrics

Improved service management

Analysis of Web traffic—reasons customers went there, satisfaction with that experience, success rate
Leveraging quantitative and text-based feedback for rapid deployment of solutions to problems
Greater efficiencies in service delivery
Identification of opportunities, with priorities based on customer input, costs, and capability of delivering with quality and speed
Possible staff reduction without negative impact on quality
Work fragmentation minimized through centralization of each service

Customer Relationship

Increased customer satisfaction

Help Desk

A prime example of a critical corporate support function is the Help Desk. The basic business of the Help Desk is to answer questions/solve problems, do so effectively and efficiently, satisfy its “customers,” and manage the Help Desk staff. Support processes and activities should ensure that end users continuously have the resources and services needed to perform their job functions in an efficient and effective manner. The dashboard is a vital tool used to measure performance, including costs, quality, service, and customer satisfaction. Through an analysis of closed calls, we monitor the customers’ experiences with those tickets. Through an analysis of open cases, we know what is going on currently and are in a position to take timely action to avert problems, as well as to plan for the future.

The Solution Enables

Tracking number of monthly calls, number of total tickets opened, number of current open tickets
Further analysis of currently open cases, monitoring number of days, severity level, department, and by product and support rep
Analysis of reasons for the calls by product, affected system
Operational metrics, such as response time, time on hold, actual time to resolution, first call resolution, number of calls to resolve the issue
Financial measures, including number of staff, employee turnover, revenue per employee, technology investments

Benefits Include

Faster generation and analysis of data
Detailed and timely customer satisfaction feedback, providing ability to solve problems quickly
Expected call volume vs. trend of actual calls, in order to highlight where there might be a problem in staffing
Tracking of staff performance by key metrics to determine whether further training or other action is required
Immediate identification of product “troublemakers” in order to fix problems, thereby optimizing enterprise staff performance
Indication of issues at the department level to show whether there are issues with the product’s features/functions meeting needs of that department or whether there is need for more training of the department’s employees
Through comment category analysis, greater understanding by Support, Product Marketing, and Engineering of how the products are being used and perceived

Business Solutions