Managing Director & Senior Partner
Düsseldorf
Many service organizations across industries are chasing digital players, which set the standard in customer experience and efficiency. BCG helps clients unleash the full potential of their service operations with a focus on smart technology and enabled organizations.
Nothing underscores the vital role of service and support operations more than the downside of neglecting these functions. Inadequate focus results in waste of resources, poor speed and quality of service, and low customer satisfaction.
By taking a comprehensive view of end-to-end processes within both service and support operations, we help clients make the kinds of transformative moves necessary to fully optimize their selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses. That same encompassing view also helps our clients get the most out of digitization and automation.
BCG’s approach transcends a single offering or focus, acknowledging different natures of service industries and support functions. We combine the right project type with the right methodology, supported by ready-made tools.
What’s more, we bring a multidisciplinary team to every engagement. Our experts employ human-centered design, digital solutions, and agile principles to cover the full spectrum of your business needs.
Put simply: we offer broad knowledge across the full range of functional capabilities to all service and support operations while also providing deep expertise specific to individual industries.
BCG’s service operations consulting teams focus on several key functions across industries, leveraging specialists who bring deep and proven expertise to every facet of your service operations. Our aim is straightforward and sweeping: to optimize your SG&A expenses and supercharge performance. Below, you can find more on specific areas.
We look at every support function and shared service as a major source of value creation and competitive advantage. We don’t just focus on improvements that cut costs; we look for opportunities to make processes faster, smoother, and less complicated, giving employees more time to concentrate on value-creating activities. This perspective allows us to help clients complete ambitious digital transformations of their support functions and shared service organizations. Our service operations consulting teams deliver results through structural redesign, process simplification, and digital service operations, with an unrelenting focus on operational excellence and customer satisfaction.
As a result, BCG clients are typically able to reduce costs by 20% to 30% and implement processes 2 to 3 times faster.
Transformation of Support Functions Drove Efficiency to New Levels
Organizations with globalized support functions have much to gain from a holistic transformation. Savings can be unlocked and satisfaction increased with more efficient processes and more consistent service levels.
We helped a client through a successful transformation with our combined focus on efficiency, effectiveness, and culture. This effort led to the simplification of processes and operations through the introduction of agile ways of working and cross-functional collaboration, the establishment of global service owners, and a review of the activity portfolio.
A Contract Over Coffee Slashes Lead Time
A client with an unnecessarily long lead-to-order time sought to standardize its highly manual process, which was bogged down with unnecessary data.
Our solution: BCG introduced standardized, modular systems; simplified the screens for customer requirements; and integrated a back-end system that provided quotes in real time. This new “contract over coffee” system slashed lead time from 40 days to two hours.
Customer interactions with brands will soon be transformed by a new breed of conversational chatbots offering no wait times, 24/7 access, and 100% recall of support information—at cost savings up to 80 percent.
In an increasingly digital world, companies, especially service businesses, that transform themselves to compete in real time can gain an advantage over rivals.