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How BCG Helps Optimize Service Operations and Corporate Support Operations
It takes two perspectives to get business service operations right. First, you needoperational excellence. But you also need to understand how service and support—including customer service, technical asset management and services, and corporate operations—fit with yourbusiness strategy. By stressing both dimensions, along with the technology necessary to optimize them, our service and support operations consultants do more than improve processes. They create better end-to-end journeys, generating value for customers and companies alike.
How We Build Value Through Service Operations and Corporate Support Operations
Service and support functions are often an untapped opportunity: a catalyst for growth, when designed and implemented in just the right way. By looking at how service operations and corporate support operations can foster efficiencies, enhance experiences, and spark agility and savings, we take their potential out of the back office—and off the back burner.
- Leveraging a Multidisciplinary Team.One of the key differentiators of our service and support operations consulting is our breadth of talent and resources, which include the data scientists and designers inBCG X, our tech build and design division. We deploy teams made up of experts in the functional, technical, and industry areas most relevant to each client’s specific context.
- Looking at the Big Picture. Spot solutions can help boost the speed or lower the cost of a specific process. But business service operations don’t work in a vacuum. They impact overall journeys, experiences, and goals. That’s why our service operations consulting experts look at the business context of a process and where—and how—it best fits with a company’s strategy and priorities. This lets us do more than simply optimize service and support operations. It lets us optimize your business.
- Collaborating and Enabling. Partnering with the client is a core BCG value—and it means more than just sharing updates and seeking feedback. By embedding a company’s experts within our own team of service operations consulting experts, we foster close alignment and strong engagement. Such close collaboration also helps clients master new techniques and ways of working when it comes to business service operations—so they can run with the baton after we’ve left the scene.
- Getting to Value Quickly. Through baselining and benchmarking, our service and support operations consultants can zero in on a client’s strengths, identify areas for improvement, and understand how the company compares with competitors in its service and support operations. But just as importantly, the analysis helps reveal quick wins: initiatives that can create value in the near term while building momentum for—and funding—the longer-term transformation.
Our Approach to Service Operations and Corporate Support Operations
BCG's experts have worked across the spectrum of service operations—customer service operations, technical asset management and services, and support operations—as well as corporate operations like finance and HR operations. We’ve applied that expertise across a broad array of industries and markets, with significant experience working withfinancial institutions.
But no matter the focus, our work is defined—and fueled—by the relentless pursuit of value.
Corporate Operations
Corporate operations excel—and drive long-term value creation—when they not only align with business strategy but also accelerate it. To make that happen, we take an integrated approach, helping companies apply different levers to optimize their corporate operational models. This means basing support functions on customer centricity, identifying where—and how—to improve selling, general and administrative cost efficiency; striking the right balance between insourcing and outsourcing; and fostering a collaborative culture where synergy isn’t a goal but a given. And it means imbuing the effort with world-classchange management to make it all stick.
The results are tangible. BCG clients typically achieve:
The results are tangible. BCG clients typically achieve:
- 2x to 3x faster processes
- 20% to 30% cost reduction
Customer Service Operations
When companies transform the customer service experience, it’s a win for both the business and those it serves. By optimizing processes and creating seamless journeys, we spark faster, more satisfying interactions—boosting efficiency, effectiveness, and customer loyalty in one fell swoop. To do it right, we leverage BCG's expertise in an array of functional and technical areas, includingAI, service design,agile, and outsourcing. And we employ advanced techniques like process mining, which helps companies see how their processes really work—and how best to improve them.
Working with our service operations consultants, BCG clients typically see:
Working with our service operations consultants, BCG clients typically see:
- 20%–30% reduction in contact volumes
- 30%–40% efficiency gain
- 10pp improvement in customer and employee satisfaction
Operations in Financial Institutions
We help financial institutions streamline operations to speed processes, reduce costs, and improve the satisfaction of customers and employees alike. But getting there is anything but simple. So we leverage unique enablers, like AI-driven insights, to help companies optimize end-to-end processes, turbocharge customer service, and transform costs in a smart way that helps spark—and fund—their broader transformation.
By removing complexity, we remove barriers to growth. BCG clients typically see:
By removing complexity, we remove barriers to growth. BCG clients typically see:
- Up to 50% cost reduction
- Significant improvements in time to market
- An increase in customer loyalty scores
Technical Asset Management and Services
As markets become more competitive and businesses start adopting ever-evolving digital technologies, even small changes in performance can propel huge business impacts. Companies in asset-intensive industries face increasing pressures to ride the digital wave and harness the benefits of these new changes. But maximizing that value isn’t always straightforward. So we take a multipronged approach, ensuring thatcapex and maintenance strategies align with business goals, helping clients navigate large projects, and making certain that every decision about investments, design, maintenance, and operations is rooted in data and metrics. Clients typically see:
- 10% higher net present value on asset investments
- Up to 30% reduction in project costs
- A 20% reduction in maintenance costs, while improving asset reliability
Our Clients’ Success in Service Operations and Corporate Support Operations
Holistic cost optimization and reorganization forestall cost increases. Our client, a regional European bank, saw a significant cost increase in recent years—alongside stagnating revenues. We were engaged to lead a bank-wide cost and efficiency program, including a complete reorganization of the bank involving ambitious cost targets and measures. The program resulted in a reduction of 20% of the cost baseline, with improved allocation of functional processes along with improved management structures.
AI helps optimize service—and lowers costs—at contact centers. We worked with a health care organization to bring the power of AI and digital technologies to its service operations. Using call center data, we developed 40 conversation flows that enabled us to design AI-driven customer interactions and improve agents’ performance. At the same time, we shifted specific types of calls to digital self-service and—after studying the fastest agents—developed a set of best practices to help train their less proficient peers.
Digital technologies drive a field service transformation. Our client, a leading European telecom operator, sought a full overhaul of its technical service organization, which suffered from low efficiency, high error rates, and little visibility into frontline performance. While such transformations always take time, to create results—and momentum—early in the journey, we prioritized high-value digital use cases such as automated dispatching, zero-touch provisioning, and IT-guided fault repair.
An AI tool lowers maintenance costs, reduces gross margin losses, and builds digital capabilities. The client, a North American utility, was undergoing a transformation that focused on digital tools and data analytics. The first digital tool included two maintenance use-cases: one to optimize the maintenance strategy and the other to optimize the maintenance plan. It was piloted at one coal plant and then scaled across three others. The tool has the potential to drive significant efficiencies, including a 7%–10% reduction in maintenance costs, 17%–20% reduction in gross margin losses and 8%–10% work-planning efficiency gains.
Our Featured Tools and Solutions for Service Operations and Corporate Support Operations
We leverage a variety of tools and methodologies—many of them proprietary—to optimize corporate operations and service operations management. Here’s a look into our toolkit:
ZBO
ZBO combines powerful methodologies, software, and benchmark data to guide organizational improvement efforts.
ZBO
OptiMA
OptiMA leverages text mining and analytical capabilities to recommend the most optimal maintenance strategy for any individual asset.
OptiMA
FieldSOX
FieldSOX, a cloud-based solution, combines advanced data science with BCG expertise to transform field force operations.
FieldSOX
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