Case Study:
Ease of Doing Business Generates Millions of Dollars

This market-leading technology firm used customer insights to make it easier to conduct business and as a result, saved hundreds of millions of dollars.

Every customer-focused business strives to be seen as easy to work with. The concept is known to consistently drive customer loyalty and enable positive future customer intentions. However, this can be a tough concept to address and improve, as it largely depends on a customer’s perception of how the relationship should work, and can vary from business to business.

Challenge

One of the world’s largest and most influential technology firms creates long lasting partnerships and identifies customer and partner needs to provide solutions that support their success. They are extremely focused on customer and partner satisfaction. However, the Ease of Doing Business emerged as a primary area of customer and partner focus and was statistically identified as a leading driver of both customer and partner loyalty to them.

How

To track perceptions and progress relative to the Ease of Doing Business, They leverage a number of customer, partner, and employee listening posts including their annual customer and partner relationship surveys, an executive pulse survey, and also monitoring social media to collect, summarize and respond to customer and partners who share opinions about ease of
working with them.

In order to facilitate cross-functional views of Ease of Doing Business, care is placed on making certain there is consistency in both survey and scale wording across the listening posts.

Based upon Ease of Doing Business insights gleaned from their listening posts, teams are actively working on processes improvement initiatives targeted at stakeholder priorities identified in the analysis phase. Each of these actions is tied to a learning uncovered as part of the stakeholder listening system.

Outcome

As a direct result of their focus on Ease of Doing Business, their investment in customer, partner, and employee improvements has yielded the following business impact:

Improved access and navigation of their support website: In fact 81 percent of technical support issues are now resolved online, which avoids 356,000 cases each month. This has resulted in a cost savings of more than $300M annually.

Establishment of consistent ordering rules and platforms: Efficiencies brought about by the consolidation and streamlining of ordering platforms and rules has reduced OPEX costs by $200K per year.

Creating unified tool platforms: Aligning disparate tools into central locations has saved $20M per month in invoicing delays.