Concentra Case

The Customer:
Concentra is a multimedia company in Belgium with seven activity clusters: Newspapers, Free Press, Industry and Services, Audio-Visual, Books and Magazines, Classifieds and Digital Media.

Newspapers. The editorial and the marketing divisions for the Het Belang van Limburg and Gazet Van Antwerpen newspapers constitute the newspapers business unit.

Free Press. Concentra publishes a whole range of (supplemental) free newspapers, weeklies and magazines. Well-known titles include Metro, De Streekkrant, De Weekkrant, De Zondag and Jet Magazine.

Classifieds. The Classifieds business unit helps users who are looking for a home, car, job, holiday or bargain to get in touch with estate agents and dealers. Well-known titles include Hebbes and Koopjeskrant.

Books and Magazines. Concentra publishes niche magazines, guides and books for specific communities. Well-known titles include Ambiance, Cyclosprint and Semindex.

Digital Media. The Digital Media business unit builds websites for communities, provides content and develops business models around them. The digital media manages websites such as hbvl.be and gva.be

Audio-Visual. Concentra produces regional television, national radio and audio-visual productions for third parties. Well-known media include TV Oost, TV Limburg, ATV, and Radio Nostalgie.

The project scope:
In a highly competitive market, Concentra Media is - as a customer centric organization- continuously looking for new and improved ways of satisfying customer needs. Not only are the end-customers - external customers such as readers, subscribers, advertisers, etc.- at the center of the marketing and sales organization, internal customers are also key focus for all organizational support departments.

In search of continuous opportunities to improve with regard to their internal customers, Concentra Media asked 4C Consulting to investigate the performance of their customer service department. 4C Consulting proposed an objective evaluation by the 4C Consulting customer interaction domain experts combined with an industry benchmark. The project, baptized as the “Concerto” project, consisted of three important chapters:

• Identification of efficient opportunities for improvement in customer services
• Design of customer centricity guidelines for internal customers
• Industry benchmark of the key back office processes of the customer service department

 
The solution:
Through a series of in-depth interviews with customer service staff and internal customers from marketing and sales, the 4C Consulting customer interaction specialists gained qualitative insight in the performance of the customer service department of Concentra Media. The telephony was analyzed and a pragmatic activity based costing approach was designed to allow quantitative benchmarking against best practices.

4C Consulting identified several opportunities for improvement that were translated into a rejuvenated service delivery model with key changes on three dimensions:

1. Customer contacts were streamlined through a first and second line contact model
2. Online self service was launched for the B2C business to reduce the number of inbound calls and increase the quality of service
3. Service Level Agreements were introduced between the customer service departments and their internal customers

Domains of expertise:
This project is an excellent example of how customer interaction management and aligning marketing, sales and service can create unique value for all key stakeholders: customers, employees and shareholders. Our initial focus was on customer service. Early in the project our marketing experts joined the discussion as key areas such as “managing customer expectations” and how to be “intelligently and profitably” customer centric also turned out to be areas in need of attention.