Strategic Document Management with SAP and StreamServe: Cost Savings, Improved Value, and Customer Satisfaction

Strategic Document Management with SAP and StreamServe: Cost Savings, Improved Value, and Customer Satisfaction Joshua Greenbaum EAC Principal Enterprise Applications Consulting SPRING 2009 2303 Spaulding Avenue ▪ Berkeley CA 94703 tel 510.540.8655 ▪ fax 510.540.7354 ▪ josh@eaconsult.com ▪ www.eaconsult.com Table of Contents Introduction: The Business Case for Document-Driven Customer Satisfaction .............................. 1 Documents, Enterprise Software, and the Customer Service Imperative ....................................... 2 Beyond Content: Customer Satisfaction, E-billing, Sustainability, and Strategic Printing ............... 6 The StreamServe/SAP Solution: Satisfied Customers and Customer Satisfaction ........................ 9 Conclusion: Meeting the Need of the Line of Business, and Removing the Burden from IT ........ 13 Strategic Document Management in the SAP Market Introduction: The Business Case for Document-Driven Customer Satisfaction Customer service and customer satisfaction are key components of a successful corporate strategy in the best of times, and in times of economic uncertainty, the ability to retain and leverage existing customers becomes a powerful tool for survival and success. Study after study shows that companies with high levels of customer service and support can take those capabilities literally to the bank in terms of higher rates of customer retention, revenue per customer, and shareholder value. This leveraging of the existing customer base can take many forms, but all have one thing in common: the ability to inform customer contacts on all levels with information, offers, and assistance that is tailored to the needs and interests of each customer. While this is relatively easy for companies with few products and fewer customers, companies in industries that measure their customers in the tens and hundreds of thousands tend to find supporting the “mass customization” of customer-facing interactions to be complex, expensive, and fraught with error. One reason this has been so difficult is that some of the most common forms of customer interactions – bills, invoices, statements, or delivery documents – are rarely optimized to leverage the customization that would lead to improved customer satisfaction and retention. Most billing and invoicing systems – such as the system available from SAP AG in its flagship Business Suite product – are designed to support a relatively modest degree of flexibility and advanced functionality in addition to creating the output. While systems like SAP are replete with the data a company needs to support a more personalized billing and invoicing function, many of the advanced capabilities needed to truly optimize the data in customer service are lacking or only available through an IT-centric set of processes. These limitations need not stand in the way of achieving the levels of customization and personalization that are the hallmark of the customer-centric organization. One of SAP’s close partners, StreamServe, Inc., has been successfully augmenting SAP Business Suite’s and SAP Industry Solutions’ document output capabilities across over 300 joint customers across the globe. The result is an integrated SAP/StreamServe solution that has been instrumental in improving everything from the costs and complexity associated with standard printing functions, to the delivery of highly personalized invoices in print, on-line, and even text message format, Copyright 2009 EAC 1 Strategic Document Management in the SAP Market in every case delivering higher levels of customer satisfaction while using significantly less IT and capital resources. Enterprise Applications Consulting (EAC) recently researched the impact of StreamServe’s document composition, management, and output solutions in the SAP market. That research – which included interviews with multiple StreamServe/SAP customers across key industries such as utilities, oil and gas, supply chain and government – reveals a solution that significantly augments the functionality and value of SAP implementations, while providing line of business capabilities that improve customer satisfaction and retention. This report has three sections. The first is a discussion of the overall issue of strategic document management in the context of customer service and customer satisfaction. The second section details how joint StreamServe/SAP customers have been able to use the combined offering to streamline operations, improve customer service, support key initiatives like sustainability, and derive important costs saving in the process. This report concludes with a discussion of the overall impact of a StreamServe/SAP solution in terms of aligning business goals with IT while simultaneously removing the IT burden for meeting these goals. Documents, Enterprise Software, and the Customer Service Imperative Companies continually struggle with how to improve the value and quality of their customer interactions, and much effort has gone into improving the direct, person-to-person interactions such as those handled by a contact center’s sales and service functions. Investments in software and training have sought, in many cases successfully, to improve that which many companies think of as their most common and most important forum for customer interaction and influence. For many companies, however, particularly those in the services sector – utilities, financial institutions, insurance companies, and other service providers – there is a more frequent and potentially more valuable customer interaction that is all too often ignored as a potential medium for improving customer centricity. This is the invoice or monthly statement sent out, usually by mail but increasingly in on-line form, which is more often than not designed to be informational without being part of a larger, customer satisfaction initiative. Copyright 2009 EAC 2 Strategic Document Management in the SAP Market This missed opportunity for a net positive customer interaction is staggering in size. SAP AG’s customers, in the utility sector alone, send out over 3 billion bills per year, each one representing an opportunity for a positive interaction that reinforces customer satisfaction and opens the possibility for the up-sell and cross-selling of new goods and services in an extremely low-cost of sales. Making the bill or invoice customer centric, particularly when the volume of bills produced at any one time by a company is measured in the tens of thousands, requires an important capability: the ability to leverage existing data about an individual customer, his or her usage history, and any preferences or personal information contained in the customer record, with the design and content of the specific bill that each individual receives. In other words, the bill must be personalized to a sufficient extent that what the customer receives every month is targeted to what he or she might need in terms of information and new service or product offerings, as well as simply offering a personalized greeting or other indication of personal connection between service provider and customer. The value of the personalization of something as apparently mundane as a monthly gas or electric bill is surprisingly high. A study conducted in Europe by market research firm Bonpago showed a very powerful correlation between personalized statement presentment and the willingness on the part of the customer to buy more goods and services from their vendor. (See Figure 1.) Figure 1: Research Results B O N P A G O B A N K IN G C U S T O M E R S U R V E Y R E S U L T S • Over 50% of customers were interested in customized, relevant product information • 30% of customers were dissatisfied with current account statement design • 32% of banking customers were very likely to buy additional products • 62% of customers welcomed information to help them manage their investments Source: BonPago Copyright 2009 EAC 3 Strategic Document Management in the SAP Market The Bonpago study looked at the banking sector in Germany. In that country over 600 million account statements are delivered each year to bank customers. Bonpago interviewed a representative sample of customers from a major German bank, seeking to establish a correlation between customer satisfaction and the content of the customers’ banking statements. The results show both the positive and negative side of statement or document content. On the negative side, reflecting the status quo of most statement content, 30 percent of the customers surveyed were dissatisfied with their statement design, and at the same time two-thirds of the customers expressed an interest in information that would help them manage their investments. On the positive side, the opportunity for well-designed, content rich, and highly customized statements was shown to be significant. In the Bonpago survey, over half the customers surveyed were interested in customized content in their statements, and over 32 percent said they were “very likely” to buy additional products from the bank based on suggestions contained in their statements. That last data point is perhaps the most relevant of all: Customer satisfaction, as promoted by a more personalized and personally relevant statement presentment, can potentially have a net positive effect on up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.