Summary: Does your business excel in recruiting, networking, or company culture but struggle with service delivery? Leverage these three implementation management tips and strategies to increase referral leads and stabilize customer retention.

How would you grade yourself, or your business, on its helpfulness towards customers?

Some businesses thrive in the recruitment space. Others are known as networking experts and attend industry-leading conferences. Maybe your business boasts record-low turnover rates and excellent company culture.

But when it comes to delivering on the services you sell, how are you doing? An easy way to grade this is by taking a peek at customer retention or the percentage of referral leads you receive.

Why do firms get dropped?

At Tuck, we’ve been around the block a few times when it comes to implementations. We’re also no strangers to cleaning up messy implementations from other firms.

In our experience, there are three primary reasons for why firms get dropped by their clients:

1. They have the technical talent, but not the infrastructure.
2. They have poor communication or lack of an implementation management playbook.
3. There is a poorly planned or unadopted change management process.

So, as an organization, how do you improve your implementation management to increase customer retention and referrals? Here are three small steps you can start on now.

Step 1. Start Small.

If you’re going to start the conversation around implementation management, instead of asking, “how should we set up an implementation management process?” ask your teams “what will the change management impact be to our teams and existing customers?”

Here’s your meeting agenda for kicking off this conversation with your team:

• What changes do we know occur when doing an implementation?
• What changes can we predict?
• What are common customer complaints during implementations?

The outcome of this meeting should be a list of change impacts, ranking the highest-value items at the top.

Then you’ll schedule a follow-up conversation to outline a plan for improvement based on the list.

Here’s an example of what this might look like:

Common customer complaint: “I never know where we’re at during implementation or what is needed from me. I’d like to be kept in the loop.”

Solution: Establish communication requirements from project manager to customer before the beginning of the implementation.

Step 2. Appoint an implementation project manager.

Who is responsible for running projects on your team? Is that person a legitimate project manager, or are they simply filling a gap where they should be focused on other priorities?

Your team needs to focus on what they’re good at without taking on additional tasks outside the scope of their role. This is how businesses fall into a loop of inefficiency.

Here’s an example of an inefficiency loop: an account manager acting as a project manager. Your account manager should focus on cross-selling and upselling. The project manager role keeps your customer in the loop on project progress, intercepts and resolves issues, and keeps internal teams moving forward so you can deliver value, faster.

Step 3. Commit to your processes.

Create, maintain, and commit to your processes — this is key to maintaining efficiency. Encourage organization-wide adoption. Employees should recognize, know, and practice your processes. Customers should recognize, accept, and anticipate your processes.

How do you ensure widespread adoption of implementation management processes?

1. Create a source of truth for your internal teams. Does an employee have a process question? The goal is that they know exactly where find the answer to their own question.
2. Keep processes right in front of the customer’s face. Work your processes into statement of work docs and kickoff decks. Pin a source of truth for processes to the top of a Microsoft Teams channel.

Closing

If you need help starting these conversations with your team, leverage our bench of expert implementation project management consultants. You can schedule time with our team using this link.

Sign Up For Our Newsletter