20th July 2022
Are you communicating the business value of your managed service or is this a missed opportunity?
In a competitive environment where operational efficiency is considered ‘table stakes’, success now depends on demonstrating the connection between your services and the client’s business outcomes.
Historically, organisations have struggled to communicate the value of the services they manage. Quarterly and monthly service review meetings consisting of static reports and one-way presentations focus on the service’s enabling technology and operational efficiency. Often leading to a lack of any relevance to the audience, a clear message, and believable supporting data.
These meetings are a missed opportunity to position the business value of your services and shift the dialogue and client perception from a service delivery cost to a business enabler and valued partner.
“Business leaders care very little about what the technology is. Quite rightly they care about what it allows them and their customers to do and the outcome that this has on the organization’s growth and profitability”
Gartner 2019
Any conversation about business value must inform stakeholders how the service impacts business objectives and contributes to their critical business metrics. Unfortunately, the standard response to anything involving data is additional and supposedly better reports. Communicating value effectively requires more than updating reports with more business metrics.
Conversations about value must be meaningful, interactive, and collaborative to be effective. Your client always determines value, and value metrics are a function of their context and situation, both of which are dynamic and changing. Active dialogue is required to ensure continued alignment and relevance. To facilitate an active discussion you require the ability to go with the flow of the questions, to explore and test dynamically in an on-demand and real-time manner. These are qualities that static reports, dashboards and presentations cannot support.
Creating a value narrative to forge dialogue is fundamentally different to making a report that you then present. Technology delivers value by enabling business outcomes. The aim is to structure the narrative in a way that evidences the business value drivers of your client through the filter of the service you deliver.
The additional challenge within multi-year service contracts is that your clients’ challenges and priorities at the start of the engagement will be very different to those at the end. Using a value-based dialogue is critical to understanding, addressing and staying ahead of these changes to surface new opportunities. Demonstrating the connection between the services you have delivered and your client’s business outcomes allows you to explore new areas for your service to grow, providing additional value for your client and additional revenue for your business. Managing these new opportunities with a closed-loop value focus, evidencing the outcomes delivered for the business, shifts the relationship to that of business enabler and valued partner.
Enabling your front-line employees to leverage data to its fullest potential and have powerful value conversations with clients is imperative for defending and growing revenue across your business, having the right tools in place that enable them to do this is essential.
At Hublsoft we approach data in a human-centric way, meaning it is open to everyone no matter their technical skill level. Our platform lets will let you explore and investigate your data in real-time facilitating the value lead conversation you need.
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