ServiceLine White Papers

The Economic Impact of Superior Customer Experiences —
Why Merely Satisfied Customers No Longer Ensure Success for IT Service Providers

Introduction
Thousands of technology manufacturers, resellers, and independent service providers compete in the global market of information technology (IT) services. Moreover, this market promises to reach a trillion dollars within the next decade. Which IT service providers will prevail in the competition to differentiate? The answers are becoming clearer - economic trends show that those companies that focus on creating a superior customer experience (CE) are taking the lead.

To bring context to the existing IT services market, we must consider the greater economic picture. During the past 50 years, rapid development and innovation in technology hardware and software products drove global economic growth. Productivity increased in this product economy because people continually exploited innovative technology products to do more with less.

Then, over the last 20 years, as technology products gradually became commoditized, the services economy emerged as the dominant driver of economic growth and a major component of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). The 2005 list of Fortune 500 companies contained more services companies and fewer manufacturers than ever before.

Today, the services economy is growing, evolving, and undergoing commoditization. Competition has introduced a myriad of choices for buyers, so companies now must differentiate on the total customer experience. As a result, we are now entering an experience economy that challenges IT service providers to go beyond delivering basic products and services. The new economic landscape requires IT service providers to create superior customer experiences that drive revenue, profits, customer loyalty, and shareholder value.

Part 1 - The Real Economic Value of the Customer Experience

The global, digital, and virtual reach of today’s business world has challenged and transformed the once simple concept of customer service. The days of sending disgruntled customers to a customer service desk are gone. In the Internet age, you may not have a brick-and-mortar location, so such face-to-face interactions are less common. Furthermore, the visibility of numerous competitors makes it easy for dissatisfied customers to simply take their business elsewhere. Customer service can no longer remain an afterthought to business transactions; the entire customer experience must become the culture of the business.

The Services Economy
As technology products gradually became commoditized during the past few decades, services became the dominant driver of economic growth and a major component of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). As the relative importance of the services component in product offerings grew, the services economy emerged. In fact, the 2005 list of Fortune 500 companies contained more services companies and fewer manufacturers than ever before.

This is also true in the world of IT products and services. For example, market leader IBM has transitioned to a services business model. Although it still manufactures hardware and software, it views its product business as a smaller component of its overall business. In IBM’s case, 52% ($47B) of its revenue comes from services.

Over time, competition and commoditization in technology products have driven many other traditional hardware and software manufacturers, along with their resellers, to invest heavily in their long-neglected professional services organizations. The common objective is increasing revenue, profits, and customer loyalty. However, many organizations are finding that creating a robust IT service organization presents a real business challenge.

The Services Challenge
Like the evolution in the product economy, the services economy is evolving and becoming increasingly commoditized – especially information technology (IT) services. According to Gartner Dataquest, end-user spending for IT services worldwide grew to $624 billion in 2005. Even at a modest annual growth rate of six percent, the worldwide technology market promises to reach a trillion dollars in the next decade.

Given the modern global economy, this market is highly fragmented. Consider the fact that, according to VAR Business magazine’s VARBusiness 500, IBM was the largest player in the IT services sector in 2005. Yet with $47 billion in services revenue, IBM captures only seven percent of the market for worldwide IT services spending. The second-biggest player, EDS, less than half the size of IBM at $21 billion, claims only three percent market share.

The last company on the list of 500 reported only $18.5 million in revenue, indicating that a vast majority of IT services are being delivered by tens of thousands of independent IT service providers. Thus, as we’ll see, the market is now wide open for IT service providers to claim a larger share of the growing market.

Good News and Bad News for Buyers
Such a highly fragmented and commoditized market represents both good news and bad news for buyers. The good news for buyers is that the balance of power has now shifted in their favor. Rapid technology advancements and global competition have led to a proliferation of technology products and services -- a rich opportunity for buyers to find just the right product and service mix to solve their customers’ business problems.

Moreover, these trends in the technology marketplace have contributed to global commoditization, which forces prices down. Buyers now enjoy instant access to information on products and services, as well as multiple channels of distribution, including the Internet. For example, Dell and Cisco transact most of their business online, sometimes unaided by any human selling component. As a result, buying products and services has become faster, easier, and cheaper for buyers - placing them in the driver’s seat.

The bad news is that because IT service providers have greater difficulty differentiating their offerings, buyers often feel confused and overwhelmed by the wide variety of choices for IT products and services. Moreover , because of commoditization in IT services, price is no longer a significant factor in the decision-making process. With literally thousands of options, buyers face more compelling concerns: “What combination of products and services are right for my business?” and “Who do I buy from and what sets them apart from their competition?”

The Opportunity
As professional services take a more central role in the overall value proposition, there are clear opportunities for organizations that differentiate themselves by combining world-class technology products with a compelling professional services offering. However, they will still encounter relentless pressure to constantly differentiate and deliver further value to their clients and shareholders.

The concept of differentiation in IT services is analogous to competing in the 100 meter dash in the Olympics: After training and sacrificing for most of their lives, the runners line up, the gun goes off, and in just over 9 short seconds, the race is over and someone wins, often by mere fractions of a second.

The first, second, and third place winners receive their medals, and the winner is showered with contracts and endorsements. But what do the fourth, fifth, and sixth place winners get? Though these are some of the fastest human beings on earth, they leave with little more than the memory that they were there, competing in the Olympics.

For organizations looking to gain market share in the IT services market, the same holds true. Regardless of how strong their product and service offerings are, the only real distinction will go to those that clearly break away from the pack and differentiate themselves by creating a superior customer experience.

Enter the Experience Economy
Even though technology product markets go through continuous commoditization, traditional feature-benefit selling can still be effective since the products are tangible. Demonstrating the economic value of intangible services, however, can present a much greater challenge. For example, how do you convey the tangible value of a $50,000 assessment or a $25,000 installation service?

To overcome this challenge, organizations are now focusing on the customer experience as a competitive differentiator and real economic driver for their services businesses – and in doing so, they are creating the new experience economy.

According to Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, authors of The Experience Economy, the services economy is being superseded by something that most product-centric companies will find even more ethereal and intangible than services ever were: the customer experience. Pine and Gilmore suggest that continued relevance in a services market depends on the ability to provide a rich, compelling experience for the buyer.

In other words, since the product and service economies are now highly fragmented and commoditized, customer solutions that simply combine technology products with services are no longer sufficient to provide a competitive advantage. To differentiate in a hypercompetitive technology market, IT service providers must surround and support innovative product and service solutions with consistent, predictable, and even delightful customer experiences.

Thus, products and services alone are no longer enough – future economic growth depends on mastering superior customer experiences.

Before we explore the ways IT service providers can achieve superior customer experiences, let’s examine the real and “tangible” value of the customer experience.

Superior CE Drives Higher Shareholder Returns at Lower Risk
A recent article in the Journal of Marketing entitled Customer Satisfaction and Stock Prices: High Returns, Low Risk examines the correlation between customer experience and shareholder value. Authors Claes Fornell, Sunil Mithas, Forrest V. Morgeson III, and M.S. Krishnan suggest that superior customer experiences tend to increase shareholder value through repeat business, positive word of mouth, cost competitiveness, and long-term growth.

Furthermore, superior customer experience tends to reduce risks by lowering customer complaints, transaction costs, warranty costs, field service costs, customer defection, and employee turnover.

Based on this evidence, we see a chain of events linking real shareholder value with superior customer experiences. Superior customer experiences drive customer loyalty. In turn, loyal customers drive growth in revenue and profits, which are ultimately the key drivers of shareholder value. For organizations looking to build their IT service businesses, the implications of this pattern are measurable.

The authors found that customer satisfaction, as measured by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), relates directly to market value of equity. According to their findings:

"Between February 18, 1997 and May 21, 2003, a period when the stock market had both ups and downs, a portfolio of the top 20 percent ACSI performing companies generated a cumulative return of 40 percent. In fact, these companies outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 93 percent, the S&P 500 by 201 percent, and NASDAQ by 335 percent."

"When the stock market grew, the stock prices of many firms with highly satisfied customers grew even more. The only exception occurred at the peak of the stock market bubble in 1999 when NASDAQ and the S&P 500 generated short-lived, but higher returns. When the stock market dropped in value, the stock prices of the firms with higher customer satisfaction seemed to benefit from some degree of insulation."

For organizations who want to grab greater market share in the growing IT services market, delivering superior customer experiences presents a real, measurable, and tangible opportunity. Yet this research is only one piece of the puzzle.

Challenging the Satisfaction Myth
Most executives would agree that delivering a quality customer experience should be one of their primary objectives. After all, satisfied customers are more likely to spend more money, buy more products and services, and recommend the company to others – generating even greater revenues and profits. In addition, delivering high customer satisfaction has also been shown to reduce the overhead and operating costs of supporting these customers.

However, new research indicates that customers who are only “satisfied” may not actually bring this perceived economic value to the firm. Since the services economy has become more commoditized and competitive, merely satisfied customers are no longer enough. To truly create customer loyalty and produce predictable, sustainable revenue and profit growth, IT service organizations must deliver a superior customer experience.

Comparing "Switchers" and "Loyals"
In the previous research we saw how customer satisfaction drives shareholder value. However, a recent survey by RainToday.com shows that most IT service providers average a score of C+ in satisfaction ratings. This metric appears most important when predicting how likely buyers are to consider switching or remaining loyal to their current IT service provider. Although all buyers seem reasonably satisfied, a closer look at the survey results reveals a startling trend in customer loyalty.

In the report entitled How Clients Buy: The Benchmark Report on Professional Services Marketing and Selling from the Client Perspective, authors Mike Schultz, Andrea Meacham, and John Doerr identify the critical difference between “Satisfied” and “Very Satisfied” customers.

Although 49 percent of customers were “Satisfied,” 66 percent of all buyers indicated that they are still open to switching to a new IT service provider in the next two years. Only the 29% of buyers who rated themselves as “Very Satisfied” were dependably loyal to their current IT service provider.

In other words, if an IT service provider rates a 4 (Satisfied), most of its customers are willing to defect over the next two years. However, if an IT service provider rates a 5 (Very Satisfied), most of its customers intend to remain loyal. Suddenly, the five-point rating scale does not have as much significance – 4 and 5 are the scores that matter most.

Thus, authors Schultz, Meacham, and Doerr suggest:

"For providers seeking to improve client retention, the difference between satisfaction ratings of a 5 and a 4 may very well be the difference between keeping a customer and losing them to the competition."

This represents a critical disconnect for many professional services organizations and it highlights the significance of a superior customer experience for any IT service organization. Merely satisfied customers are not enough to sustain growth and profitability in the new experience economy – IT service providers must deliver superior customer experiences.

Summary
For IT Service providers, mastering the art of superior customer experiences builds security around their services investment.

The question then becomes, “How do organizations deliver a superior customer experience?” The good news is that it can be done. In Part 2 of this two-part series, we examine proven strategies for delivering superior customer experiences.

While superior customer experiences may be intangible, even ethereal, they are not out of reach. By carefully investing in four critical success factors – culture, people, processes, and systems – companies can create an actionable strategy for creating customer experiences that produce real, tangible economic results.

PART 2 - The Culture of Superior Customer Experiences

Introduction
In Part 1 of this article, we discussed how commoditization in the Product Economy was a catalyst for the shift to the Services Economy.

Now we’re seeing the same commoditization play out in the IT services economy where there are literally tens of thousands of IT service providers vying for a share of the $650 billion global IT services market. Because of this rapid commoditization and fragmentation in the IT services market, we are now evolving into the Experience Economy.

In fact, superior customer experiences are the only way to differentiate true value in the commoditized, yet evolving IT services market which is well on its way to becoming a trillion-dollar market over the next 8 years.

Part I of this paper examined the true financial significance of superior customer experiences as well as the first hurdle we all have to face - our own perception of how satisfied our customers really are.

A recent Bain & Company survey reveals just how commonly companies misread the market. After surveying 362 companies Bain & Co. found that 80% of those firms believed that they delivered superior customer experiences. But when they asked customers about their perceptions, only 8% of the customers agreed that the companies delivered superior customer experiences.

The good news is that consistently delivering predictable, superior customer experiences, and translating that into a competitive differentiator for your organization, is possible - but it’s not easy.

The Culture of Superior Customer Experiences
In our own organization, building a culture of superior customer experiences was (and continues to be) a journey, not a destination. It’s a constant and never-ending improvement cycle. We’re constantly making changes and advances in our model as we continue to evolve. It’s an economic investment program and while it doesn’t produce instant results, it does produce long-term value for our business and for our shareholders.

In other words, delivering superior customer experiences consistently and predictably is not an event; it’s not an initiative; and it’s not a department. Delivering superior customer experiences is a culture – and this culture must permeate every person, process, and system throughout the organization.

Delivering superior customer experiences consistently and predictably can be achieved, but it all starts with the organization’s culture. So, the first thing organizations must understand is that developing this culture is not easy and it’s not something that can be done overnight.

The entire organization has to be aligned behind the strategy and discipline of superior customer experience - and it all starts at the top. Executive leadership must buy in to this culture and be the ones to lead the charge.

But this is also the reason that so many companies have a difficult time getting their organizations aligned to the culture of superior customer experiences. It doesn’t impact revenue immediately - and since most executives are highly focused on driving revenue and profits on a quarterly basis, it can be difficult to get organizations to invest in a long-term strategy which will only pay dividends sometime in the future.

However, those organizations that do take the leap and invest in developing a culture of superior customer experiences are ultimately going to be the winners in the long run.

Here’s how it happened for us.

In 2001, our fifth year in business, Entelligence was on course for its fifth consecutive year of record growth. Things were going great. So great, in fact, that we landed a spot on the Inc 500 list of America’s fastest growing, privately-held organizations.

Then, three things happened all at once that created a “perfect storm” that nearly sank the ship. First, our largest customer, Compaq, announced they were merging with HP and, therefore, nearly all project work was either canceled or put on hold. Next, 9/11 temporarily froze the American economy. And if that weren’t enough, another major client, Enron, collapsed overnight. So, between September and December of 2001, we lost over 60% of our business.

Then, one day, I saw a book over on the corner of my desk, and it really jumped out at me: The Discipline of Market Leaders – Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus and Dominate Your Market, by Treacy and Wiersema. The message of The Discipline of Market Leaders is that no company can succeed today by trying to be all things to all people.

The authors maintain that there are three different types of value disciplines that successful companies can adopt to command leadership in their markets. Which of these value disciplines (if any) is taken by any particular firm depends upon the sort of product or service that they provide, and upon the organizational culture that they maintain.

Prior to this time, even though we had been largely successful, we didn’t have any single, focused value discipline that we could become the market leader in. In fact, as a company, we were part of growing body of tens of thousands of IT service providers whose success was being driven by rising tide of economic growth during the dot-com boom.

So, when the dot-com boom became the dot-com bust, our organization suffered greatly because we didn’t have a clear value discipline that gave us a significant competitive advantage to differentiate us in the market.

At the same time, we were making some early progress with one of our clients delivering private label IT services focused around the culture of superior customer experiences. What we found was that as our customer experience ratings continued to improve, so did our revenue, profits, and shareholder value.

In early 2002, we recognized this as an opportunity to truly distinguish ourselves by focusing on the value discipline of providing superior customer experiences. After all, most companies in the IT services business compete on delivering innovative products and services or on price and availability. But no company in technology services, as far as we could tell at that time, competed on the value discipline of superior customer experience.

And so, building from our early success in our private label services business, we started a massive cultural movement to master superior customer experiences in IT services. The leadership of our company got together and created a BHAG – a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal – that we would become the market leaders in superior customer experience throughout the IT services world and do everything possible to align our values and culture to achieve this goal.

This was the beginning of the journey – and while we’ve made significant progress on our BHAG over the past four years, the fact is that we are constantly looking for new and better ways to go even farther. Market drivers and increasing competition in the highly-commoditized and highly-fragmented IT services world force us to continue to improve and find new and innovative ways to deliver consistent and predictable superior customer experiences.

The bottom line is that in order to begin the journey, to make the investments in this strategy, company leaders must make a conscious decision to get their organization culturally aligned first before you move on. And once company leaders make the decision to align their organizations to the culture of superior customer experiences, the real work begins.

In our own business, and through our work with our clients, we have found three powerful economic building blocks that helped us and our clients on the journey to mastering superior customer experiences so that these experiences became predictable, consistent, and repeatable: The Power of Putting People First, The Power of Processes, and The Power of Systems.

Let’s explore each of these economic building blocks.

The Power of Putting People First
In a services organization, your true power comes from putting your people first. Now, this may sound like a tired cliché because in the IT services business, most companies typically say something like: “Our people are our most important asset.”

In their book, The Services Profit Chain, Heskett, Sasser, and Schlesinger asked this question and spent a great deal of time studying the economic links between Employee Value, Customer Value, and Investor Value.

The Services Profit Chain works like this: in order to drive economic value, organizations must focus on the employee experience first. After all, happy employees are more productive, produce better quality work, are more capable, more satisfied with their jobs and employers and, therefore, more loyal to the company.

These happy, motivated, productive employees directly impact the experience of the customers with whom they come into contact. Thus, happy employees create happy customers.

Following the chain, happy customers tell more people about you; you retain them longer; and they’re more loyal to buying from you. As an organization with happy, loyal customers, you get the economic benefit of increased revenue and profits. And, when you have increases in revenue and profits, you get happy investors that believe in you, believe in your company, tell other potential investors, and stay with you for the long run.

It all starts with putting people first and making sure that your employees are happy and motivated. In fact, the authors state that “Recruiting, Training, and Retaining High Performing Employees is the Most Critical Element of Delivering a Great Customer Experience”.

One great example of this philosophy is Hal Rosenbluth, the former CEO of Rosenbluth travel, who leveraged this strategy to turn his once sleepy family travel business into a multi-billion dollar mega-travel agency by adopting a “people-first” strategy.

In his book, The Customer Comes Second, Rosenbluth says that “Companies are only fooling themselves when they believe that ‘The Customer Comes First’. People do not inherently put the customer first and they certainly don’t do it because their employer expects them to…“We’re not saying choose your people over your customers. We’re saying focus on your people because of your customers. That way, everybody wins.”

If you can build a program of hiring, training, nurturing, and developing your people, this program can become a tangible asset that produces real returns for your business.

There are a lot of great programs out there that can help your organization cultivate the power of putting people first. One of the best systems we’ve found to hiring, coaching, and motivating our people is Topgrading by Bradford D. Smart, Ph.D.

In his book and through his consulting organization which boasts clients such as GE, Honeywell, and others, Smart, has put together a solid program on how to hire and keep what he calls “A Players”.

Statistically, he says, the average company today hires 25 percent A Players and has 25-40 percent A Players in management. However, companies using Topgrading hire and promote A Players 90 percent of the time and eventually achieve 90 percent A Players in management.

Hiring and keeping A Players makes a bottom line impact. In fact, companies using Topgrading or similar programs produce 22% greater shareholder returns than their industry averages.

Here, a seemingly trite remark - “people are the most important asset in the company” – has become a solid economic building block that can be tangibly measured and through which you can drive revenue, profits, and shareholder value.

So, find a program that fits your organization, if you don’t already have one, because if you can instill a program like this as part of your culture, then you’re going to get compounded benefits over time.

The Power of Process
Building on the Power of Putting People First, the next economic building block is The Power of Process. This is where your great people get to show their stuff. The Power of Process is all about consistent, predictable, repeatable execution. Powerful, detailed processes are the keys to empowering your people to deliver superior customer experiences.

Business Process Improvement, Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, Balanced Scorecard, etc., are all great programs - and chances are your organization may have one or more of these programs in place already. If not, you can certainly find plenty of books, seminars, and professional services organizations to help you build your organizational processes.

The one that we use is called “No Be-Backs”.

While working as a private label service provider for a large hardware company, I had a meeting with a professional services manager and asked the basic question: “what keeps you up at night?”. He said: “Be-Backs”. I wasn’t sure if this was a technical term or something he made up so I asked: “What’s a Be-Back?”

He told me their partner channel would send a consultant out to install a new storage solution, usually starting on a Monday, and take the better part of the week to deliver the engagement. By Friday, the engagement would come to an end, the project was complete and the engineer would get the customer to sign off on the delivery.

The following Monday, the manager would get a call from the customer and say something like this: “Well, your guy was out here and he installed the storage solution, but it doesn’t work. I need you to ‘be back’ out here to fix it.”

So, in order to avoid any ‘be-backs’, we quickly started developing processes and methodologies for the technical side of these deployments. We also realized that most of the ‘be-back’ problems were not really technical in nature. Things like: missing, wrong or damaged parts, customer name and address problems, or the times and dates were wrong. The problems causing significant customer experience issues really had nothing to do with the way the hardware and software worked. They were process problems.

So, trying to figure out how to solve these problems one morning, we took inspiration from a shampoo bottle. We developed a process called: “Lather, Rinse. Repeat.” We sat in a conference room with our delivery consultants and reviewed some of our early experiences with the process problems that occur during these engagements. Then, once we made a comprehensive list of anything we could think of that had happened (or could happen in the future), we scripted out the entire process from start to finish, including exactly what to say to our partner and to the customer, both during the engagement and when we encountered problems – both technical and process-related.

Then, we used this knowledge to develop a process to either avoid problems or to anticipate them and let the customer know that, if they occur, we had a ready-made solution for it.

Next, we empowered our people to focus on the customer by training, rehearsing, and role-playing the processes to deal with potential problems. After creating the initial process documentation, whenever we discovered new problems that we had not encountered before, we added them to our documents and retrained our people again.

The power of creating detailed, scripted processes made a huge impact on our business because once we implemented these processes for this particular customer, we went 5 consecutive quarters without a single dissatisfied customer experience over the course of hundreds of very complex engagements.

The Power of Systems
We’ve all heard that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Our third strategy leverages the power of the right systems to track, measure, and provide insight into the leading and lagging indicators around people and processes.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins says that “The Good-to-Great companies used technology as an accelerator of momentum, not a creator of it.” They clearly articulated and executed their value propositions first, before they leveraged technology systems to accelerate growth.

Collins goes on to say: “None of the Good-to-Great companies began their transformations with pioneering technology, yet they all became pioneers in the application of technology once they grasped how it fit their [business].”

So, once your organization is culturally aligned and your people and processes are in order, then and only then, can you implement the right systems to track and measure your progress. In fact, like most organizations, we ran our business off spreadsheets and databases before we realized what a Professional Services Automation (PSA) tool could do for us.

Since, the development and refinement of a culture of superior customer experiences is a constant and never-ending improvement cycle, implementing powerful systems to help you track and identify leading and lagging indicators throughout your professional services business is critical.

PSA tools can provide up-to-the-minute insights into the health of your business and, when set up to match your people and process systems, they can serve as predictors of key financial and business metrics, such as revenue, profits, utilization and, most importantly for us, the predictors of the customer experience.

Once we were able to pull all of our disparate information into a single PSA tool, we made some remarkable progress in the economics of our business.

Since going live in January, 2006 with our PSA system (even with our people and processes programs already in place) we were able to drive utilization up by an additional 9%, revenue up by 34%, and profits up 12% - all because our PSA system gave us better insight into our business and better tools to manage it. That’s the power of using technology as an accelerator of business, rather than the creator of it.

Pulling it All Together
This is how we used these three powerful economic building blocks to culturally align our organization around superior customer experiences and impact not only our organization and its future, but also the clients that we serve. The two following cases show how superior customer experiences can drive economic value throughout the organization.

The first is a snapshot of our organization taken over the last four years. Since we implemented the tools we talked about today, Entelligence has been able to:

• Increase Employee Satisfaction by 12 points, taking it from 78% to 88% “Very Satisfied” Employees
• This led to a 17% increase in Customer Experience from 82% to 96% “Very Satisfied Customers”
• As a result, Entelligence grew revenue 39% compounded annually in each of the last four years…which led to a 122% increase in net profit for the firm
• And since values for privately-held service companies are tied to a multiple of profits, we were also able to increase the shareholder value for the company by 120%

So, this is how we impacted our own business by creating and nurturing the culture of superior customer experiences. Now, let’s look at how this strategy also impacted one of our client’s business.

We used these strategies to build a private label service business for a large technology storage manufacturer (the one with the “be-back” problem).

Driving our own employee experience led not only to an increase in the customer experience for this client and their customers, but it was also a catalyst to significant revenue and market share growth.

Between 2004-2005, by working together with our client and implementing these three strategies, our client was able to grow product revenue by 17% and, subsequently, grew their market share of the external storage disk market by 27%. This is clear evidence of the power of the culture of superior customer experiences.

Conclusion
A company driven by the culture of superior customer experiences can make a difference in the lives of your employees and clients - and it can make a huge financial impact to your organization’s bottom line. As we’ve seen, happy employees mean happy customers - and happy customers mean happy investors. This is why superior customer experiences make such a significant, tangible, positive economic difference.

As stated earlier, building a culture of superior customer experiences is a journey, not a destination. It’s a constant and never-ending improvement cycle and those organizations that do take the leap and invest in developing a culture of superior customer experiences are ultimately going to be the winners in the long run.

About the Author
Stephen R. Satterwhite founded Entelligence in 1997 with the vision to build the company he had “always wanted to work for.” As President and CEO, Satterwhite has pioneered a new IT services business model for the experience economy, creating private-label IT services for the world’s leading hardware and software manufacturers and their resellers – services that drive revenue, profits and shareholder value.

Throughout the company’s nine-year history, Satterwhite has committed to a forward-thinking business model putting his passion for his employees first and delivering IT services with a 96% superior customer experience rating. As a result, Entelligence was a winner of the Inc 500 list of the fastest growing privately-held companies in America, and a 2-time winner of the Houston Business Journal’s FastTech 50, as well as the 2005 Dell Diversity Supplier of the Year.

About the Entelligence
Entelligence is the leading provider of private-label technology services. The world’s leading technology manufacturers, and their resellers, turn to Entelligence to deliver superior customer experiences across their services portfolio. Leveraging its unique experience from thousands of enterprise technology engagements, Entelligence helps its partners increase their services revenue, impact bottom line profits and create a loyal customer following – services that ultimately impact shareholder value. Entelligence, founded in 1997, is headquartered in Houston, Texas.

For more information, please contact Entelligence at:

CE@Entelligence.com or Toll Free: 1-888-877-4450

Or, visit us on the web at: www.entelligence.com.

For more information, please contact Entelligence at:

CE@Entelligence.com or Toll Free: 1-888-877-4450

Or, visit us on the web at: www.entelligence.com.