Dear {!firstname},

In this issue, you'll find key decision factors for moving facilities or considering a building move.

We discuss benchmarking in our article, "Benchmarking Customer Expectations - What's the Right Yardstick?". Are you making the most appropriate comparisons?

Feel free to forward this to others who may find this newsletter helpful.

Sincerely,

Laura Pettit Rusick
OPT Solutions, Inc.
www.optsolutionsinc.com

From rearranging space to full facility moves, we've planned and implemented quite a few. Before you decide on a new location and sign the lease or purchase agreement, consider the IT impacts.

Here are a few of the things to evaluate:

• Do you have boxes and boxes of paper that need to be moved? Consider imaging it rather than paying for the cost of moving it and the additional space. You'll have better access and redundancy as well. Outsourcers regularly handle projects like this.
  
• Does the move put you close enough to your current disaster recovery provider (tape storage or recovery space) that it requires a provider change?
  
• Are you one of the many companies that have an out-of-date phone system with hard to find replacement parts? A move is the ideal time to replace it, and it allows for testing ahead of the move, reducing risk.
  
• Are you planning to have a data center at the new facility? You may want to lower your costs and instead rent space at a hosting facility. Don't forget ongoing power costs when you compare prices.
  

So you benchmark your company against others in your industry. Maybe you look at maximizing revenue per full-time employee, increasing first call resolution in your contact center or IT expense as a percent of revenue. How do you compare to your competitors? Is that the right comparison?

Your customers, whether they are consumers or businesses, rarely measure you against others in your industry. Think about it. When you pay your doctor bill, do you compare that process against other doctors, or do you think about being able to pay your credit card bill online?

Health care organizations get compared by consumers to their auto insurance company, their bank and their cell phone companies. A customer's last memory of service is rarely another organization of your type.

For business to business companies, the comparisons may be different but they still happen.

• Can your client look at its transactions online? Their bank lets them view transactions, transfer funds and make payments.
• Can they easily get a human on the phone if they need one? Their accounting firm probably makes it easy, and can take a message or route the call to the desired accountant's back up.
• Can they schedule an appointment online? My reservations for my last business lunch were done via opentable.com which promptly sent a notification to the person joining me for lunch. Easy.

Think about giving your client the ability to... More Advice on Benchmarking Customer Expectations >>>


Copyright © 2010 by Laura Pettit Rusick.

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