Capability Maturity Management

 

Over the last 10 years Round has helped clients such as Dell, T-Mobile, National Grid and Virgin align their operational and strategic capabilities to:

• Increase customer satisfaction and retention
• Increase employee morale
• Reduce operating costs
• Improve ROI for change initiatives and IT investments

Although every organization is an organism where all the parts are interconnected, planning has always been linear with a heavy emphasis on utilization, productivity, cost control and efficiency within the function, with little or no understanding of their interdependence with other parts of the organization. 

This led to goals being misaligned, investments under-scoped and gaps and inconsistencies designed into the way the business is managed.  The resultant customer experience was always fractured and inconsistent.

Increased competition, market deregulation and now the global recession are forcing companies to invest in their marketing capabilities in an effort to become more competitive, whilst at the same time driving down operational costs to manage profit margins.  These initiatives are pulling the business in opposite directions. 

As a result operational capabilities are aligned at a different place to the marketing ones, increasing external inconsistencies, damaging customer confidence as well causing internal tensions as customer-facing employees try to “join up the dots” to make things work for customers.

Every aspect of the customer experience is the outcome of a plethora of capabilities.  So if these capabilities are misaligned it’s like having a zero in a complex multiplication sum; the answer will always be zero.  Therefore investing in the development of some capabilities without the others that are related to them, will simply not achieve the expected return. 

But it’s not only a customer experience or financial impact; misalignment is the underlying cause of 80% of internal politics!

There is some awareness of the issues caused by misalignment:

• Marketing is focused on CRM
• Customer Service is focused on improving the customer experience
• HR is focused on goal alignment and developing a customer-centric culture across the organization
• IT focused on aligning technology capabilities with business operations
• Planning is focused on improving ROI
• Finance is focused on optimizing the P&L

But each function is trying to solve the problem using a different approach.  That’s like trying to build a jigsaw with different templates and pictures.

Consider who in your organization is responsible for collecting feedback from your different stakeholders.  For proactive customer feedback it’s Marketing; for reactive customer feedback it’s Customer Service; for employee feedback it’s HR; for partners it’s IT; for suppliers it’s Procurement and for sales channels it’s Sales.  And are they asking the same questions?  No!  They are driven by different needs and different goals.  Yet collectively these stakeholders could provide a 360° perspective of the organization’s capabilities and competencies.

A new method of planning is required, one that drives the alignment across the organization of all the customer management capabilities related to every business outcome: goals, initiatives, processes, customer experience etc. 

This is not just about people, process and technology which over-simplifies the issue and leads to a belief that customer-centricity is the responsibility of operational people.  Business Leadership (company vision, goals, planning process, leadership- style, brand values and market differentiation) needs to set the agenda and define the environment for People, Process and Technology which are then anchored by the Performance Metrics that create and reinforce behavior at all levels. 

These 5 Enablers are the vertical axis in a framework of change, while the maturity (horizontal axis) is represented by the 4 Bases in the Round customer centricity model.  Together they form the Round Capability Maturity Model that is used to align capabilities across the organization.  Round’s products utilize the Round Capability Maturity Model to provide assessment and planning tools that are tailored for each organization.