How can CPQ transform CX faster and increase profitability?
October 15, 2021
Using advanced CPQ capabilities to achieve greater business value
How can configure-price-quote (CPQ) software make such a difference to your overall customer service capabilities? Accenture’s Hazel Wheldon explains how CPQ can significantly improve the overall experience you can deliver to customers. “The best CPQ offerings on the market help you deliver better quotes faster,” says Wheldon. CPQ enables collaboration, while also offering a single view across contributors, reviewers and approvers. “With CPQ, all products are shown in one simple quote. A sales rep and other teams, such as finance, can review all elements of the deal, and a customer can quickly see the impact of decisions and changes.”
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With CPQ, customers can serve themselves, allowing them to access what they need, when they need it. The advantage of modern CPQ platforms is that you can build for one channel and re-use across others. So, when you build a CPQ flow for sales agents, you can also use it to build customer self-service.
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Customers also receive a more personalized experience. With CPQ, you can build intelligence around product recommendations and next-best actions throughout the customer lifecycle. CPQ acts as the connector between the sales and contract management teams. It feeds product and pricing data through to provisioning and billing functions and bridges the customer experience gap that often exists between the sale and a customer’s use of the product.
Customers also get access to self-service capabilities, a big plus these days. “With CPQ, customers can serve themselves, allowing them to access what they need, when they need it. The advantage of modern CPQ platforms is that you can build for one channel and re-use across others. So, when you build a CPQ flow for sales agents, you can also use it to build customer self-service,” says Wheldon.
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In, “Three ways to design an effective CPQ,” Clare O’Brien of Accenture shares an important key to CPQ success: designing with effective product optimization in mind. This means focusing on an intelligent way of defining product models that responds to market trends, customer needs and internal viability to deliver the product effectively and efficiently. O’Brien outlines three key components of product optimization:
- Rationalize and replace: The products portfolio must stay relevant to the market. Products that are not related to current customer intentions should be retired so you can invest more on the products that make the most revenue and profit, and that respond to customers more effectively.
- Standardize as your default: Define product attributes (e.g., price points, product variables) within a standard framework defining clear business rules, product models and logic that can be easily maintained. Standardizing products by creating uniform and repeatable frameworks will make onboarding and maintenance of products in CPQ faster and more cost-efficient – while also delivering an improved experience for the end-customer.
- Embed product optimization in the product go-to-market process: The go-to-market process should provide frameworks defining guidelines and templates for product owners to use to drive standardization across the product model.
Owen Sweeney, Strategy Consultant at Accenture, shares how Managing change during a CPQ initiative is vital to overall success. “Moving from spreadsheets and other manual processes to integrated CPQ software can dramatically alter current ways of working. So, you need to help your teams embrace this ‘new normal.’”
"Start out," Sweeney says, "by identifying the people who are affected by this change and how. Explain to your sales and service people, in their own terms, how the new CPQ experience will be better and help them hit their goals and ways of working.”
“Then,” says Sweeney, “identify the stakeholders who will be most impacted by the change and make sure they have input into key design decisions. This approach improves their engagement in CPQ and, equally important, can produce a functional design that is more fit for purpose.”
Finally, support the CPQ delivery with a comprehensive and engaging training curriculum. You’ll have a wide range of capabilities, from beginners to experts. “By catering to all of levels, you can encourage and support overall CPQ adoption.”
Overall, share the new user experience and benefits of CPQ, and be open to adjusting your plans based on people’s feedback. Give people exposure to the new user experience upfront. Being flexible and open, and maintaining a long-term solution, will give the business and your people confidence that CPQ will be adaptable to changing business objectives over time.
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