Articles

Managers must understand which competencies they can safely outsource and which they should manage internally.

Companies should organize their service innovation processes to be more open to external ideas.

Increasingly, innovation is being applied to the development of new service offerings, business models, pricing plans and management practices.

Credit insurance and debt protection product seller Assurant Solutions ran a classic customer service call center–operationally optimized, “skills-routed,” managerially enlightened. But when it explored analytics-based approaches to rethinking how the center worked, a strange thing happened: The success rate for customer interactions tripled. According to Cameron Hurst, vice president of Targeted Solutions at Assurant, the result surprised them. “We learned that operational efficiency and those traditional metrics of customer experience like abandon rate, service levels and average speed to answer are not the things that keep a customer on the books.” They found instead that technology could assist the company in retaining customers by leveraging the fact that some customer service reps are extremely successful at dealing with certain types of customers. Matching each specific in-calling customer to a specific customer service rep made a huge difference. Science and analytics couldn’t quite establish why a particular rapport would be likely to happen, but they could look at past experience and predict with a lot of accuracy that a rapport would be likely to happen. In this SMR case-study interview, Hurst explains how Assurant Solutions figured out the right questions to ask, used analytics to focus on new ways to match customers with reps and figured out the best ways to solve the problem of conflicting goals.

A quarter-century after the best-known romance and breakup in modern executive history, the partner who vanished (while the other one flourished) has popped up with insights to share--about the "methodology" that separates his now iconic old pal from the competition, what he learned in his ill-fated Apple sojourn and why he shouldn't have been hired by Jobs in the first place.

Too little attention from head office executives can cause problems in global operations.

Six practices can help companies implement licensing as part of an open innovation strategy.

Internal knowledge markets can facilitate information sharing within large organizations.

Jonathan Byrnes offers techniques to improve your organization's profitability.

People with optimistic dispositions get jobs more easily and get promoted more, research suggests.