S-Business: Contract Management (page 1 of 4)

With a typical contract containing, among countless other line items, provisions for service duties and obligations, representations and warranties, termination clauses, remedy clauses, arbitration clauses, and merger clauses, the complexity of the simplest contract can be daunting. In essence, contractual agreements are the de facto lifeblood of most businesses, and adhering to them is a fiscally paramount pursuit. Yet to date, few companies have automated contract management through enterprise software, and fewer still have tied such systems into their service management software applications.

The end result? Service organizations that are bogged down by manual and error-prone contract management processes, countless missed revenue-generation opportunities, and minimal adherance to compliance. And let's not forget the lack of the service organization's ability to provide personalized and targeted customer service. Automated and effective contract management should enable a service organization to live up to its potential, both in terms of achieving greater efficiency and lower operational cost, but also in terms of higher revenue-generating power.

Good Service: Is It All in Our Minds?
The theory of linking customer service and contract management software is that it functions to maximize customer satisfaction, employee productivity, and company profitability. Taken a step further and integrated with service and field service applications, contract management applications promise to ensure that all service and support activities, from initial contact with the customer to final issue resolution, are handled in manners that comply with contractual obligations. Being able to deliver on these obligations and enabling service agents to be skilled relationship managers draws heavily from "true" interoperability between software systems that traditionally have been implemented as silos of information.

If your service department does not know what it's contractually obligated to provide a customer, or in other words, if the pieces of the system are not "talking" to each other, how can you provide personalized service? You risk providing a service that a customer hasn't paid for, or worse, you could damage your customer relationship by not providing them with the level of service they have paid for and expect. And given that keeping an existing customer costs a company about one-tenth as much as acquiring a new one, damaging customer relationships is the last thing you want to do.

Preventive Maintenance for Your Contracts
By automating the service department's response to certain customer events, such as the upcoming expiration of a contract, companies can take advantage of the sales opportunities represented by service calls. If a customer calls in for service and a company's service representative can see that the customer's contract is about to expire, the representative can alert the customer to that fact, while providing them statistics on how much they have utilized their current service agreement over the past year, in order to entice service contract renewal.

This level of personalized service also addresses a service organization's constant need to proactively address and resolve every customer issue before the issue even arises. By alerting a customer to an expiring contract, the service agent can take care of an impending customer problem ahead of time as opposed to notifying the customer that he cannot be helped until the contract has been renewed.