Peppers & Rogers write:
Failure to execute to plan has been a thorn in the side of executives for decades. For many organizations, the complexity of today's hypercompetitive, multichannel business environment has widened the gap between execution and plan. A study of 197 companies published in the July/August issue of Harvard Business Review claims that those businesses lost an average of 37 percent of their overall performance due to breakdowns in the planning and execution process. The HBR study identifies several cracks in the process. One is closely related to maximizing customer value, and that is: Companies rarely track their performances versus their original plans. This ties in to our insistence in our new book, Return on Customer, that companies must balance their short- and long-term goals. Short-term decisions, even marketing-related decisions such as contact center complaint resolution, can have a long-term effect on customer value.
Companies should measure and compensate on long-term goals, as well as on the short-term results of their plan. In sales, for example, instead of gauging success entirely on current sales and profits, reward reps for meeting monthly sales and pipeline targets and compensate them for the time invested in gathering key customer data and creating relationships that will pay off long-term dividends for the company.
When executing a truly enterprisewide customer strategy, you have to bring together people playing different roles in a variety of functions across your entire organization. Sales reps, financial staff, marketing managers, contact center personnel, service technicians -- everyone in the company must center themselves on the customer and take the customer's point of view.
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