Innovation in Enabling Customer Outcomes – Professional Services

Overview: What You Did

Provide an overview of your innovation at a high level. Details* might include, among others:

• Business challenges that led to the innovation
• Before and after process flows
• Processes or tools to enable communication and knowledge sharing with customers
• Soft skills or other training programs that staff were required to complete
• Incentives for employees to encourage and reward desired business behaviors
• Organizational change management issues
• The role of technology in the innovation
• Roadblocks or challenges faced, and how you overcame them
• Lessons learned. What would you do differently next time? What can others learn from your journey?

Business Impact: How This Innovation Has Helped Your Company

Describe how your innovation has impacted business outcomes for your company. Provide supporting evidence*, such as:

• Efficiencies in common professional services business processes (project management, delivery methodology, knowledge capture, resource management, etc.)
• Customer loyalty or repurchase metrics
• Product pull-through
• Account penetration for professional services offerings
• Cost savings
• Revenue growth
• Measures of employee performance (productivity, satisfaction, turnover, etc.)

Customer Impact: How this Innovation Has Helped Your Customers

Detail how your innovation has positively impacted your customers. Provide supporting evidence*, such as:

• Improvements in the delivery of professional services
• Customer satisfaction scores
• Improvements in the creation and  delivery of new products and/or product enhancements
• Metrics related to consumption of products/services
• Impact on your customers’ businesses and/or on their customers (e.g., improved ability to respond to their customers’ requests, enhanced operational efficiency, inventory reductions, etc.)
• Customer testimonials

Judging Criteria

Your application will be judged on the following criteria:

• The Pacesetter Factor of Your Application: Is your application based on a compelling “best practice” and/or is it truly “innovative” in today’s technology industry?
• Business Impact: How has this helped your company?
• Customer Impact: How has this helped your customers?
• The Cohesiveness of Your Application: Is there a single, end-to-end narrative that is easy to follow and supported by good examples and/or data? (i.e., business challenges, inception, creation, implementation, adoption, measurement, expansion, process, results, lessons learned, future projections)
• The Effectiveness of Your Metrics: Do the metrics that you included adequately support the story that you are telling and are they organized and presented well?