Background

The Engagement Managers/Key Account Managers are the first points of contact for customers. The main responsibility is the development and improvement of the customer's products, the joint development of new business areas, the optimisation of business processes and strategy planning. As Single Points of Contact the job contained also a lot of operational tasks. Since the operational side of the job required most of day time little time was left to concentrate on strategic topics. This resulted in a cost-benefit imbalance as well as hardly no focus on customer development.

Also there was a large dependency on the Engagement Managers. When these persons were out of office business as usual continuation was challenging.

Objective 

• Create a cost-efficient customer success structure which allows also a response-time within one business day and a resolution time of one to three business days, depending on the urgency of the customer request. 

Solution

• Establishing a service excellence team handling all operational tasks. At least two team members were trained on the same clients ensuring business continuity in case one person was out of office. 
• These Service Excellence people were selected with the objective to scale up and grow more into the engagement role when required.  

Result 

• Lower HR costs. 
• Zero impact on business as usual in case of absence of Engagement Managers. 
• Faster delivery of client requests. 
• Increase of client's profitability due to better focus on of Engagement Managers on client development.