Account Management Current State and Benchmarking Assessment

1. How is the account management or client success team structured? Are they split by geographies, verticals or other characteristics?
2. How many accounts are the account managers responsible for?
3. What level of service and interaction is required or expected in this industry?
4. How does the company's model compare with their key competitors?

Improve Current Account Management Process

1. What process does the company use to interact with their current customers?
2. Survey the account managers and create a flow chart of their of what their recurring responsibilities look like.
3. Based on the flow chart, are there any processes that are redundant or inefficient? Anything that can be automated?
4. How can they more effectively keep their customers satisfied?

Optimizing the Account Manager Role

1. What are main responsibilities of Account Managers at the host company?
2. How are Account Managers incentivized? Some examples are: renewals, up-sells, customer satisfaction, net promoter scores, and new business. Are these effective or should the host company consider adding other metrics and/or removing metrics that don’t result in optimal outcomes?
3. How can you best align incentives with internal operations to maximize success?

Cross Functional Synergies Assessment

1. What are some potential opportunities where the host company can align processes between account management and other functional departments in the company? (E.g., sales, marketing, product, and operations)
2. Create a hypothetical case where it would be beneficial for the Account Managers to have a cross-functional team with other departments within the organization.
3. What would it look like? (Map it out)
4. How would the process be different?
5. Who would need to be involved?
6. How would you measure success as a team?

For your reference, we've included some sample project ideas below. We encourage educators to mix-and-match components from various departments so that the projects are cross functional in nature. In all cases, we customize the projects based on company goals and course teaching objectives.

Industry Customer Service Benchmarking Assessment

1. Call the customer service line or inquire via email. Document your experience. How does this compare with competitors?
2. What does the company do that makes their customer service more effective than competitors? What could be improved?
3. How important is good customer service in this vertical or industry? How does it affect the lifetime value of the customer?
4. How does the business model affect the level of service required? Is there any automation that can be incorporated into the process to increase efficiencies?

Customer Service Diagnosis Challenge

1. How does the customer service team troubleshoot issues? How effective are their current processes?
2. What is the most time-consuming part of the troubleshooting process? Is there anyway this can be automated?
3. What process improvements would you recommend? Pay close attention to communication tools, knowledge base resources, and follow-up procedures.

Customer Service Process Improvements

1. How long does it take for the issues and cases to navigate through the internal organization before arriving at a resolution?
2. How can the process be optimized? Is information being circulated effectively internally?
3. Should the company consider circulating certain materials externally as well? If so, how? Can we reduce redundancy by leveraging existing resources and cases?

Customer Feedback Driven Process Improvement Recommendations

1. How does the company collect feedback from customers?
2. Can you identify consistent feedback from customers related to the company’s product or service?
3. What is the customer feedback process? How do the customers feel about the feedback process?
4. Does the company use technology or social media to collect customer feedback?
5. How can we better incorporate and address customer concerns before it escalates?

Customer Service Process & Technology Assessment

1. What technology is the company leveraging to administer the customer service process?
2. How does the company feel about the customer service process? Interview key team members inside and outside that part of the organization.
3. What other technologies could possibly improve the process? What is the cost of implementing new tools?
4. Would you recommend implementing new tools and procedures?

We've included some sample project ideas below. We encourage users to mix-and-match components from various departments for the best cross functional project experience. In all cases, we customize the projects based on company goals and student learning objectives.

Legal & Regulatory Assessment

1. What laws and regulations impact the company? (Consider: Industry, product, customer, suppliers on state/local/federal level)
2. How confident is the company’s management when it comes to navigating these laws, regulations and future changes?
3. Is the company compliant? What process is used to check on compliance? Can the process be mapped or organized more efficiently?
4. What sources can be used to keep these regulatory maps organized and up-to-date in the future?

Impact of Future Regulations on the Business

1. What laws are on the horizon that would impact the company?
2. What is the likelihood that these regulations will be enacted?
3. How will they impact the company? What can the company do proactively to manage these changes in regulatory expectations?

Influence on Impending Regulations (Lobbying)

1. Does the company try to impact regulation? If not, should they be?
2. What key regulations are the most pressing to consider lobbying? What events, conferences, and key stakeholders are involved in passing regulations?
3. How costly and/or potentially impactful would lobbying be for the company?

We've included some sample project ideas below. We encourage users to mix-and-match components from various departments for the best cross functional project experience. In all cases, we customize the projects based on company goals and student learning objectives.

• Analyze and Suggest Improvements for Internal Communication and Tools

  1. Investigate current ways the company’s team is communicating internally. How active is the company from a communication standpoint? What suite of tools are they using? How well are these tools integrated with one another? Consider: calendar, chat, email, and project management at the very minimum.
  2. Does the team seem to be using all of the same tools and doing so effectively? How do these tools compare to similar tools on the market? How do these tools affect productivity and employee satisfaction? Note: This assignment requires interviews and surveys of significant internal stakeholders at the company.
  3. Is there a cheat sheet when it comes to communication and project management at the company? If so, review the manual and provide recommendations on updates based on what you’ve learned from the company personnel. If not, produce a rough draft of the manual or cheat sheet and review it with your project managers.
  4. Provide the company with a proposal including the analysis of the status quo of communication in the company and thoroughly examine recommendations for future improvement.

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  Automation Assessment & Recommendations

  1. What suite of tools is the company currently using? How well are these tools integrated with one another?
  2. How can the company be better automating certain processes to improve productivity?
  3. Find 2-3 areas that could use automation.
  4. Select one area of potential automation to focus on. Build automation or suggest step-by-step process of how automation can accomplish the desired business objective. How would this automation save money and/or time for the business?

Cross Functional Departmental Cooperation Assessment & Recommendations

1. What are the different functional areas?
2. How do they interact with each other?
3. What improvements could you recommend to improve internal interdepartmental communication? Think standing meetings, internal newsletters, new checklists, and other mechanisms that might help improve cross functional department collaborations.