Relationship-Centric Companies: Part 5 - "Demonstrable Return on Investment"

The benefits to be gained from investing in the strategies mentioned in this series can be substantiated, and the return on investment can be quantified, by assessing real-world case studies and comparing our customer’s pre- and post-solution key performance metrics.

ROI at TRANZACT
Tranzact is a relationship-centric performance marketing agency that specializes in large-scale, fully integrated customer acquisition solutions and acquires hundreds of thousands of new wireless, credit card and insurance customers for its business affiliates — all while maintaining the systems and infrastructure to support 20 million annual satellite TV transactions. Theirs is a complex, high-volume and ever-changing transactional environment where each clients’ campaigns are not only vastly different, but also subject to daily change.

By implementing software that focuses on interaction delivery and enables the strategies discussed here, Tranzact was able to:

• Reduce development costs by 30% through improved efficiency and reduced IT lifecycles.
• Reduce time-to-value by 38%. Previously, new project roll-outs took 16 weeks as compared to the new, and considerably speedier, 6 weeks for new launches.
• Reduce workforce levels while improving manageability.
• Hire programmers who are proficient in solving business problems rather than hiring highly paid architectural experts.

"The results have been remarkable. From an infrastructure performance standpoint, just relating to our satellite TV business, we’re now processing more than 822,000 web service calls per day for our clients, while managing Web applications in real time that are used by more than 80,000 call center agents daily—and we are exceeding 99.9 percent uptime." - Jonathan Washburn, CIO, Tranzact

Relationship-Centric Companies: Part 4 - "The Benefits of Relationship-Centric Strategies"

While there are numerous benefits to be gained from adopting a relationship-centric strategy for interaction delivery we have identified five primary benefits that any company, of any size and in any industry, can achieve.

They are:

1. Technology-Enabled Agility
   Minimizing the risk of lengthy all-or-nothing software development cycles by facilitating an aggressive micro iterative release strategy that delivers progressive incremental value rather than heavily regimented and regulated process methodologies that are time-consuming and often inflexible to change.
2. Optimized Operational Efficiencies & Reduced Operational Costs
   Optimizing internal efficiencies related to staging and coordinating the people, processes and programs that result in a reduction in the costs associated with those operations.
3. Lowered Resource Costs
   Decreasing the cost of resources — operational, technological and managerial — associated with implementing new business initiatives and offers or maintaining and changing existing ones.
4. Compression of Time-to-Market
   Reducing the amount of time it takes to conceive, design, test, and implement new, technology-enabled business initiatives and more rapidly positioning the business for
   return on investment.
5. Reduced Total Cost of Ownership
   The cumulative effect of achieving the preceding benefits results in the apex of any value proposition: reduction of the total cost of ownership — in terms of systems (software applications and hardware and other IT assets), processes (manual or programmatic procedures that guide all manner of business activities) and people (the internal and external end-users, software developers, IT staff, managers and executives).

Relationship-Centric Companies: Part 3 - "Maximizing Relationship Value Through Technology"

Software can enable companies to broker value-driven business relationships through agile technology solutions. By focusing on the relationship-centric business pattern and the delivery of agile interactions, software product suites should help a company manage the internal relationships between business, operations and IT that together drive the external value-based relationships between the business, its partners and its e ndcustomers.

Value to the Company
By using appropriate products and services companies can reduce the time it takes to deliver their offers to the market by efficiently optimizing operations and reducing the resources (personnel and costs) required to do so through the adoption of agile methods. Agility with respect to the interactions that affect the internal development lifecycle and the external interactions that forge value-driven relationships with partners and end-customers ultimately result in a lowered total cost of ownership.

Value to the Partner
Companies that have been enabled through appropriate software and strategies can extend to their partners the intrinsic value gained from the use of those same products and strategies by establishing deeper, more meaningful connections by way of seamless integration and linkage of business processes that present the end-customer with a consistently delivered, contextually relevant and brand appropriate, high quality customer experience.

Value to the Customer
The end-customer is the ultimate recipient of these benefits because they are able to manage their relationship with the business on their own terms: they chose when, where, how and why they initiate interactions with our customers and their partners. And the end-customer knows the power is with them — if Company A is not committed to the relationship, Company B certainly will be. The right software can enable companies and their affiliates to elevate the end-customer to their rightful position: the top.

Relationship-Centric Companies: Part 2 - "The Characteristics"

While the characteristics of each industry segment are unique, similar underlying business goals exist: building strong business partnerships and delivering personalized interactions to their end-user base. And while the preceding examples show the relationship pattern on a large scale, the fundamental concepts are scalable in both directions and significant value can be achieved from even a simple implementation of these concepts.

Even if they themselves don’t think about it in these terms—these companies have demonstrated an evolution in thinking beyond brick and mortar concepts and widget-based sales, and even beyond SOA and traditional IT implementations. These companies are embracing an evolved vision of providing all-encompassing value in the way they deliver their offerings to their affiliates and customers that goes beyond their individual products and services.

There are common and recognizable characteristics common to the relationship-centric company:

1. Substantial Customer Relationships
   Relationships between end-users and the business that rely upon historical relationship data being readily available and contextually relevant to the specific interaction (i.e. placing an order, checking an account balance, or requesting service).
2. Collaborative Business Affiliate Relationships
   Strategic and partnering relationships between organizations that collaborate to drive mutual value and to deliver product/service offerings to end-users. These relationships often require different processing rules and branding and may benefit from deeper integration with partner systems and data stores.
3. Content Rich Touch Points
   Highly personalized and appropriately branded end-user interaction points that deliver targeted, relevant information through a variety of presentation channels. These offer-related interactions, initiated internally or indirectly via affiliates' systems, need to be delivered in a repeatable and consistent manner through multiple channels—web, desktop, voice/IVR, mobile, etc.—while fully leveraging the benefits and characteristics of the underlying media.
4. Substantial Underlying Technology Investments
   Investment in systems to support core business, industry functions and data stores related to proprietary, differentiating, and end-user information. These systems bring meaningful content and value to both the end-user and affiliate conversations.
5. Recombinant Business Offerings
   The ultimate goal: Virtualized combinations of products and services that may include discrete items, subscriptions and/or associated terms and conditions, which are driven and created by both internal business initiatives and business affiliate relationships. These offerings are dynamic, highly mutable and drive the real value to the business, their affiliates and the end-user experience.

Relationship-Centric Companies: Part 1 - "What is a Relationship Centric Company?"

Relationship-centric companies are those organizations that, while focused on the delivery of their unique products and services, are chiefly interested in establishing and nurturing business relationships with strategic business affiliates and end-customers.

To leverage fully a relationship approach, a company must ensure that the individual interactionsthat make-up those relationships are appropriately branded, contextually relevant and personalized to the end-user, and they must also be delivered consistently across multiple channels.

Such an approach to relationships and interactions enables highly dynamic and recombinant business offerings which are driven internally and through strategic relationships. These offerings are made up of the unique and targeted configurations of products, services, terms and conditions that a company brings to the market through its business and marketing relationships and delivers to their customer base; building value on both sides of the relationship chain.

By looking at specific examples from different verticals, it can be seen that while particular industry goals might be widely divergent, the underlying opportunity of a relationship-centric business pattern, and the ability to fully leverage affiliate relationships, is common and quantifiable across many modes of operation.

ecommerce
Amazon.com is best known as an ecommerce company that began as an online bookstore and later diversified by adding a broad variety of offerings. However, Amazon does not limit themselves to the descriptions of being an ecommerce company or an online retailer. Their vision statement confirms their dedication to a relationship-centric business pattern, claiming that they strive "to be earth's most customer centric company."

Amazon maintains long-term relationships with its end-users through a powerful, unified multichannel platform and website “…where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” They clearly manage a vast ecosystem of business affiliates; supply a highly personalized end-user component (the website) based on previous history and behavioral predictions; and recombines their offerings in ways that suit ever-changing market conditions. Behind all of this is a massive infrastructure of technology assets, databases and applications that facilitate these business relationships with both their customers and their affiliate partners.

Performance Marketing
Rapp Collins Worldwide is one of the world's leading direct marketing and customer relationship management agencies, providing services for the planning and implementing of integrated marketing campaigns including direct mail, television, telemarketing and interactive media. Firmly ensconced between their customers (product and service companies with offerings), end-users (the desired customers) and a host of suppliers (every other organization that plays a role in the relationship), Rapp Collins is more than just a performance marketer—they are in the business of facilitating interactions that support and inform all manner of relationships.

As such, the company has articulated their understanding of and commitment to relationship-centrism through what they call the ConsumerScape, the "new" marketing relationship between company and customer where the customer is in control by virtue of being able to block and opt-out of unwanted offerings.

Within this new environment Rapp Collins has begun "deepening the connection between consumers and brands" by marrying new thinking with new technologies to create "individual touchpoints that give consumers more ways to respond than ever before."

Subscription Services
DIRECTV delivers satellite-based television subscription services and equipment to US home consumers and business services to an eclectic base of organizations including bars, restaurants, hotels, dorms, and hospitals as well as mobile solutions for cars, boats, RVs and aircraft. DIRECTV’s compelling mix of content, technology and service represents a significant investment in technology assets and sophisticated processes that inform and shape the relationships that exist between the company and its numerous business affiliates and service providers, support centers, order processing and delivery agencies, and 16+ million US customers.

To support the effort of offering "a seamless viewing experience" to their customers, DIRECTV must efficiently manage numerous interactions between multiple relationships that require unique business processes, branding variations, and instant, reliable connections between business partners and back-office systems, including complex satellite monitoring capabilities. And in their extremely competitive market space, DIRECTV must be able to accommodate frequent change, as market conditions demand, to a massive infrastructure of complex and interrelated technology assets that all affect the delivery of the service. DIRECTV’s interaction with the customer includes web, retail and contact-center interactions.

Financial Services
Barclays PLC, one of the fastest growing credit card issuers in the U.S., operates on this simple premise: "anticipate the needs of…customers and clients, then serve them by helping them achieve their goals." Quite rightly, the financial services giant recognizes the need for, and represents a textbook example of a relationship-centric company.

The relationship with end-customers, the card holders, is an obvious area of focus for Barclays. These customers demand immediate response to their needs, in any channel they prefer, and full, flexible access to their account information.

Equally important to Barclays are the more than 40 existing card partnerships with some of the most successful travel, entertainment, automotive, educational and financial companies. These business affiliate relationships each carry their own unique rules for application processing, decisioning, and relationship management—and interactions with end-customers must be consistently delivered through each customer touchpoint, whether self- or full-service.

Companies such as US Airways, AirTran Airways, Carnival Cruise Lines, TiVo, Gulf Oil, and UBS rely on Barclays to manage numerous, substantial customer relationships with account holders for whom their service personnel interact in multiple communications channels, and with disparate systems, to provide information and process requests according to the affiliate’s requirements.

Manufacturing
Perhaps less obviously than services-based industries, manufacturing organizations are very much relationship-centric enterprises as well. They have end-users in the sense of final consumers of their manufactured goods, and they almost certainly have end-users in the sense of suppliers, resellers, wholesalers, retailers, logistics and delivery partners, etc. And, in order to differentiate themselves from their competition, they will strive to make sure those relationships are as informationally rich as possible, contextually appropriate to each end-user, and consistently accurate.

Harley Davidson, the immensely popular US manufacturer of motorcycles and the nation’s #1 seller of heavyweight motorcycles, is also fully committed to the relationship management pattern by being "dedicated to creating experiences and developing relationships with all…stakeholders – customers, employees, investors, suppliers, governments and society." Described as "The Family," Harley Davidson's universe of relationships spans customers, suppliers, dealerships and their own employees to include every possible entity in the lifecycle of motorcycle manufacturing, purchasing and ownership. The company views their dealerships as "starting points and destinations," rather than simply a place to buy a motorcycle, for a long-lasting relationship that is centered on trust and dependability. In this way Harley Davidson recognizes the difference between simply making and selling motorcycles and developing long-lasting business relationships, and therefore promotes the relationship-centric enterprise.