Customer expectations are continually shaped by everyday experiences, customers expect immediate responses and on-demand self-service touch points. Building relationships and sustaining a distinct brand image are reliant on the delivery of outstanding and increasingly distinctive experiences—not just for a single project or at management levels, but consistently across every customer contact point.
What shapes how Professional Service organisations (PSO’s) interact with their market?
Professional Service Organisations following key global customers
Globalisation is increasing, with more business becoming multi-market and multi-regional organisations. Therefore Professional Service providers are increasingly looking to establish a presence overseas to maintain their strategic relationship and appeal to the enterprise (ESA) market, as stated by Baumer et al (2012), in their book Globalisation of Professional Services, “…in most cases, the globalisation-pull was driven by the client demanding the chosen service provider to follow in overseas expansion”. The difficulty is making sure Professional Service organisations (PSOs) follow the right clients overseas. Therefore PSOs need to be able to define which customers are drivers of profitable growth and which market segments are worthy of investing time and money in. It is essential that PSOs have a 360-degree view of their customer. “In order to continue on their path of success, Professional Services firms must therefore strive to understand these global critical shifts; they are shaping their business today and driving it into the future. They need to develop innovative strategies and new organisational designs for enhancing coordination, increasing the standardisation of delivery quality, and successfully managing their professional workforce while maintaining a customer focus.”
The changing workforce – matching project requirements with talent management
We have previously blogged about the changing demographic of the workforce and the millennial effect. With the change in experienced skilled professionals to the rapid growth of well-educated, social workers the Professional Services industry faces both opportunities and challenges. The shift will change the internal culture of a PSO and now more than ever talent management, acquisition, management and training will be critical. HR and resource managers must be able to identify and assign new talent to correct projects whilst allowing customer, sub-contractor and employee profiles to be shared across the business. Adapted business management technology, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows organisations to manage resource and plan project phases and tasks.
Hybrid professional service project teams across geographies
Technology is facilitating collaboration between teams and enabling information to be shared across teams, this is vital where project teams are cross-firm, client and contractor boundaries – hybrid project teams. Hybrid project teams allow organisations to demonstrate value, increase responsiveness and provide reliable extensions to your customers. Hybrid teams are increasing the need for integrated business management systems that seamlessly connect project development, increase best practices and drive consistent processes. Collaboration platforms such as SharePoint with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, allow cross-border, multi-lingual teamwork enabling delivery of increasingly personalised service to broader audiences.
Maintain agility to respond to the ever-changing environment
With PSOs increasingly following clients into new markets there is an increase in the demand for diverse talent in multiple markets.
To adapt to the ever-changing customer landscape, Professional Service organisations must be able to identify problems and respond in a timely manner, maintain visibility across the organisation to enable decision making whilst implementing controls with the flexibility to evolve with the market.
Responding to these challenges tends to be delayed by tactical execution and coordination issues, implementing change as in any industry tends to be difficult. Microsoft Dynamics CRM enables firms to empower their most valuable assets—their people—and leverage them across the company to deliver consistently outstanding client experiences. For more information about the benefits of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in the Professional Services landscape download our white paper or contact us today.
Leave a reply