Businesses approach funding (setting aside cash to pay for a project) in a very logical way. They view the return on an investment as what they are owed for making the investment. And businesses are certainly in business to earn a return, after all if they can get 4% from a cd why would they invest in a project that only returns 3%.
The sticky ground I run into is when the return is hard to measure and quantify. Take a place like amazon.com, they rely on their web portal for their existence and they make changes that please customers because if they do not please the customers sales will drop. There is a direct connection between sales and quality of their web site and the projects they fund to make the site more productive. This all seems pretty reasonable, easy to connect and even pretty easy to measure.
But take a web portal that is removed from the direct sale chain and instead is in support of the customer after the sale. Customers visiting the support site are generally displeased, you know what displeases them, you know why it displeases them and you even know how to fix it to make them happy. The rub is how do you quantify in $'s returned to the company those enhancements that you need. An investment is needed to fix the issues but where is the return, and worse yet what if it will take 2 years to fix everything and the company wants a return in the next 9 months.
There must be a structured approach to connecting disatisfaction with a company after the sale with lost revenue or lost sales, I just can't seem to find it.
No comments:
Post a Comment