PROCESS: Interview (con't)
Phone Interview: Data Collection
Our technology assessment team’s job is to create a business case by assessing the quantitative business impact the solution (or service) has on the customer’s entire organization. The team’s expertise is in uncovering, measuring, and quantifying the business impact from the technology investment.
- After project timing (implementation duration) is first reviewed during the interview with the customer, the team looks to understand the DIRECT one time implementation costs and the DIRECT ongoing costs.
- Then, questioning focuses on the solution’s DIRECT impact on revenue, productivity, and cost savings (both IT & business savings).
- Then, based on the customer’s industry, the team looks toward directing their questions around how the solution is DRIVING VALUE in the organization through its Contribution to Revenue (impact of application usage on the user’s productivity), Cost Reduction (cost avoidance, containment, risk mitigation), and Asset Optimization (efficiency gains).
- For the interview, we do not expect the customer to have measured gains or benefits on their own. We do not ask the customer to spend time researching the answers. We are simply looking for their high level inputs.
- For answers to quantitative questions where the customer has little or no information - we prompt their responses by asking how the industry average for the solution might compare to their organization’s results; select reasonable data points from their responses; then, during the edit process, work through the business case with the customer to fine tune the data points until the results reported accurately reflect the actual benefits achieved.