Harvard Business Review

MAY 5, 2016

They see disrupted incumbents from retail, finance, health care, transportation, professional services, and manufacturing requiring radical restructuring of assets, productivity , and innovation. This clean-sheet customer experience prioritization over more traditional call center KPIs had a huge effect.

Levitt 8

Levitt Disaggregation Kaizen Call Center 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 9, 2011

We hear from business leaders who perceive that flexible work is a make-people-feel-good play that disrupts operations and drags down performance. Frontier Communications, for example, has found that work-at-home agents are 25% more productive and have double the retention rate of work-in-the-call-center agents.

Products 15

Products Productivity Real Estate Bottom-up 15

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 13, 2013

In the first article in this series, I showed some striking numbers to stress what many inferred: there are real costs to locating operations outside of a startup super-hub (San Francisco Bay, New York, or Boston). Finance has homes in New York, Hong Kong, and London. From engineer to call center employee, people loved being at Zappos.

Entrepreneur 8

Entrepreneur Venture Funding Finance Engineering 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 28, 2017

And AI success stories are becoming more numerous and diverse, from Amazon reaping operational efficiencies using its AI-powered Kiva warehouse robots, to GE keeping its industrial equipment running by leveraging AI for predictive maintenance. Investment in AI is growing and is increasingly coming from organizations outside the tech space.

Survey 12

Survey Execution First-mover Advantage Technology 12

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 31, 2018

They were employed in midlevel to upper-midlevel management positions in strategy, finance, marketing, legal, operations, and technology functions. These situations involved complex assignments focusing on strategy, product development, business operations, and financial management.

Management 13

Management Tacit Knowledge Diversity Leadership Pipeline 13

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 28, 2016

They’ve redesigned their core processes in the area of procurement (online shopping), talent acquisition (marketplaces), collaboration (social networking), market research (peer reviews), finance (mobile payments) and travel (room and ride sharing). Have you reinvented your core processes to the same degree?

Loyalty 8

Loyalty Peer Review Efficiency Call Center 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 4, 2011

A finance manager's proposal to reduce staffing in a customer call center, for example, may reduce expenses but handicap the organization's ability to respond to customer needs — and present a hurdle to completing a major new customer sale.

Proposal 13

Proposal Cialdini Execution Influence 13

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 9, 2011

We call these people Cost Center Consumers, and they come in two flavors. They tie up your call centers, incur costly returns, and generate other costs that occur below the gross margin line, which is harder to see. Divas: These are high maintenance consumers who drive costs up after purchase.

P&L 15

P&L Supply Chain Retail Price 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 8, 2017

Transformational CEOs Tend to be “Insider Outsiders” The list is topped by companies headed by visionary founders with no prior experience in their industries; Jeff Bezos came from the world of finance, and Reed Hastings from software. ” They Develop a Road Map Before Disruption Takes Hold.

Franchising 15

Franchising CEO Business Model Strategy 15