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Proactive and Reactive processes |
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By Peter Coy, President, Prodigm Inc.
Proactive: Things you plan to do, Reactive: Events to which you must respond.
It might sound simplistic, but to be consistently profitable and to remain competitive it is essential to drive down costs while maintaining or improving high service standards. To do this it is essential to find a way to handle event loads automatically and immediately. That means defining the appropriate responses to everything that can happen in the course of doing business. It also means defining workflow in a very flexible way to cope with and integrate the initiatives that you plan versus the customer-initiated events that your initiatives often stimulate.
For example, processing hundreds or thousands of prospect inquiries each day can pose a huge logistical challenge that is similar to a production system for perishable goods. Time is of the essence, response rates drop with every moment that is lost in delay. There are bottlenecks and machines that fail, inventory that does not arrive on time, staff that call in sick and prospects that change their mind about their needs. The system design to cope with all of this variability and challenge can make or break the profitability of the operation.
Proactively, you can decide to implement a strategy that calls for an initial quote package followed by two subsequent mailed follow-ups. Reactively, the prospect can accept your offer, a mailing can be returned with an invalid address or a policyholder may die. Both proactive and reactive processes must be sensitive to the product in question, the prospect status and the nature of the event.
We have successfully implemented a system that links both proactive and reactive responses within the customized marketing strategy assigned to each prospect. This means that both the proactive and reactive processes can be customized and tested for maximum positive effect. For example a strategy could contain several business rules that indicate that various proactive events should be created at specific points in time and that certain reactive processes should be executed when specific events occur for this prospect.
The impact of this capability is that all proactive events occur automatically and all reactive processes are handled automatically, thus driving down the cost of sales and service while driving up the service level and also the ability to compare different approaches.
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