Rolls-Royce & Bentley Motor Cars: customer management process documentation

Rolls-Royce & Bentley Motor Cars planned to grow its Bentley business through launching a new range of luxury sporting cars, breaking into new sectors of the car market. The challenge facing its CRM team was how to develop a new customer proposition to a new audience and then deliver it in a way that stayed true to the traditional brand values. A high-level process framework was agreed to capture and map all the touch points and 'moments of truth' in the customer experience (Figure 10.3) as it happened at the start of the development process, and as it would be. The constituent processes in the framework were then developed by a cross-functional team to deliver the proposition across the touch points. The resulting processes were then fully documented and maintained via the Company's Quality Assurance infrastructure. Maps covered parallel processes operating in different channels, and documentation covered:

the scope;
ownership;
stakeholders affected;
process map and narrative;
measures;
people, standards and technology requirements;
an assessment of risk.

Figure 10.3: Prospect Enquiry Management

Table 10.2: Selected facts and figures from research
6% HAVE formally identified all customer management processes	Fewer than 1 in 16 companies have attempted to identify the wide set of processes that affect the management of prospects and customers. For example, the following processes may have an impact on customers: New product development and launch Product withdrawal Customer segmentation Contact planning Volume/margin forecasting Order processing Customer deliveries Returns and credits Enquiry management Prospect conversion Customer upgrade Key account management Complaint management Invoice payments Credit control Customer defection Customer return
	War story: empowered organization? One organization had an explicit policy within sales, marketing and service that it did not have any process documentation. It 'empowered' its people to do what was best for customers. In fact people started documenting processes for themselves, in their own way, and hiding the documents so that they were not seen. The assessment actually uncovered the fact that most staff felt uncomfortable about not having a process framework to at least give them a start point.
11% DO formally check for the organizational acceptability of their processes	Few companies check the acceptability of processes to their organization (their people).
13% HAVE got measures in place to look for radical change in customer management processes	Organizations are now more willing to review processes radically and be prepared to change (8%–13%)
	War story: don't forget the customer An organization had a very effective staff ideas scheme with substantial rewards for good ideas that generated step-changes in the way they operated. There were all sorts of category of idea, such as production, logistics and finance, but no category at all that vaguely accommodated a customer management idea.