CASE STUDY 004 - Part I· From Reactive Service to a Connected Customer Operations Model
Building the service foundation before scaling technology and automation.
Case Study in Progress
This case documents an active customer-operations transformation. Additional stages and validated results will be added as the work progresses.
Stage 1 — ESTABLISHING THE SERVICE FOUNDATION
A manufacturing organization is working through a largely reactive Customer Service environment.
SAP serves as the primary transactional system of record, while Customer Service currently works primarily through Outlook. But having a system of record does not necessarily create an integrated operating environment.
As the assessment progressed, a broader issue became visible: information and execution across the order lifecycle had become fragmented. Order entry, estimating, engineering, planning, production, staging, warehousing, shipping, and Customer Service each hold pieces of the order story, but those pieces do not consistently come together into one reliable operational view.
At the same time, representatives often depend on several operational functions to understand the true status of an order. Production constraints, engineering activity, planning issues, shipping status, and internal escalation do not always translate into one accessible operating view.
Three questions quickly emerged:
How is Customer Service actually performing?
What is happening with the customer’s order right now?
How effectively are Customer Service and Operations working together?
The first challenge is visibility.
ESTABLISHING AN INITIAL BASELINE
The Customer Service organization had very little dependable service-performance data available to manage the operation.
Because a mature reporting environment did not yet exist, an initial baseline had to be constructed manually.
More than 700 Customer Service emails were reviewed over a defined period using a structured classification approach. The analysis provided a directional view of:
total email volume
purchase orders received
order-status inquiries
customer complaints
recurring inquiry types
The exercise helped establish the scale and nature of incoming demand, but it was intentionally treated as a baseline rather than production-grade operational data.
It did not provide a reliable real-time view of response time, unresolved work, aging, backlog, escalation, or workload by employee.
The conclusion was clear:
Customer Service was operating largely blind from a service-management perspective.
THE MEASUREMENT GAP
The lack of reliable metrics extended beyond Customer Service.
At the department level, there was limited visibility into how effectively work and information moved between functions.
At the operational level, it was difficult to see where delays, repeated follow-up, and unresolved exceptions were accumulating.
At the leadership level, there was no single view connecting Customer Service activity, operational performance, and customer impact.
The objective is not simply better Customer Service reporting. It is to create a connected performance view that moves from departmental activity, through operational handoffs, to leadership-level visibility of customer and execution risk.
THE OPERATIONAL VISIBILITY CHALLENGE
SAP contains core transactional information, but the assessment revealed that transactional data alone does not provide a dependable picture of how an order is actually progressing through the operation.
The larger challenge exists across the order lifecycle:
Quote → Order Entry → Estimating / Engineering → Planning → Production → Completion → Staging → Warehousing → Shipment
Information does not consistently move across these handoffs as a connected operating flow. In some areas, system configuration and historical process decisions have contributed to fragmentation. In others, execution still depends heavily on manual follow-up, physical searches, spreadsheets, individual knowledge, and cross-functional escalation.
The consequences are significant.
Customer commitments can become disconnected from current operational reality. Orders may enter production before all requirements or materials necessary for completion are available, while other executable orders remain in the production queue. Finished or partially completed goods may require physical investigation to locate. Scanning and inventory-location disciplines are not consistently providing the visibility required to know where material or completed work resides.
Meanwhile, an open-order population exceeding 400 orders creates a volume of exceptions that is difficult to manage through individual order-by-order investigation.
The performance implications are substantial. On-time delivery has been operating at approximately 30%, far below the level expected of a reliable operation.
It would be premature to attribute that performance to any single process failure. What is clear, however, is that fragmented information, unreliable handoffs, physical-material visibility, production constraints, and commitment management make both execution and recovery considerably more difficult.
For Customer Service, the consequence appears downstream:
The team is expected to communicate confidently with customers while often lacking a reliable, real-time account of what is actually happening with the customer's order.
The challenge, therefore, is larger than creating another dashboard. It is reconnecting the operational information flow so that the organization can establish credible commitments, identify risk earlier, manage exceptions, and communicate accurately with customers.
TWO VISIBILITY PROBLEMS - TWO CONNECTED WORKSTREAMS
The assessment revealed that improving Customer Service requires progress on two related but distinct fronts.
The first is customer-service visibility.
Customer interactions currently flow primarily through email, making it difficult to reliably measure demand, response time, aging, backlog, inquiry type, escalation, and workload.
Email-to-Case is being introduced to establish structured capture of those interactions and create a dependable service-management data foundation.
The first test of success is not whether Salesforce is technically live. It is:
Can the organization trust the service data it is generating and use that information to manage the customer operation differently?
The second is operational visibility.
Customer Service cannot solve an operational-information problem with a CRM alone. The organization also needs a more reliable flow of information across the order lifecycle—from order entry through engineering, planning, production, staging, warehousing, and shipment.
That work is broader than Customer Service and will require examination of process design, SAP configuration, operational disciplines, ownership, data flow, and cross-functional handoffs.
These workstreams ultimately have to converge.
One establishes visibility into what the customer is asking of the organization. The other establishes visibility into whether the organization can deliver what it has promised the customer.
A connected customer-operations model requires both.
WHAT COMES NEXT
Future stages will address broader operational visibility, system integration, manual order-entry reduction, and eventually automation and AI-enabled service.
Those stages will be documented only as they are implemented and validated.
For now, the priority is straightforward:
Establish reliable measurement, improve visibility, and use that foundation to decide what should be improved or automated next.
TRANSFORMATION STATUS
In progress.
This is Part I of a live case study documenting an active customer-operations transformation. This stage focuses on establishing the service foundation—creating greater visibility into customer demand, service activity, workload, and performance.
As the work progressed, a broader operational challenge became increasingly visible: improving Customer Service requires more than understanding the customer interaction. It also requires reliable visibility into the operation responsible for delivering the customer commitment.
Part II — Reconnecting the Order Lifecycle continues the case study by examining that operational challenge and the work underway to restore visibility and control across the customer order.
About the Author
Steven Waltz is a Customer Operations and Customer Experience executive focused on service transformation, operational excellence, global delivery, BPO strategy, AI-enabled operations, and enterprise customer experience strategy.
— Steven Waltz
