Wolters Kluwer: Setting Standards in Service Excellence

Wolters Kluwer: Setting Standards in Service Excellence

Many organizations claim to be customer-centric; but very few go beyond lip service. Maruthi gives us insights into an organization which strives for service excellence.

Maruthi Pani Kumar B. N.

IInd Year, PGDM

The gospel truth which has been emphasized repeatedly since decades is that companies need to ensure that their focus is towards the customers and their varying needs; and not only on a particular product or technology in order to attain strategic growth. This phenomenon has predominantly been brought to fore by strategists and has showed results for companies even during the recessionary phase. For any company that focuses on its customers and customer service, attaining their satisfaction and capturing lifetime value would not be a mammoth task.  

There is a company which has been setting standards in service excellence year after year and nonetheless, has been a dream company for many others to follow. This company namely, Wolters Kluwer, has institutionalized the very process of creating customer satisfaction in all its endeavours; starting right from its vision and strategy statements. In this article, I am going to lay emphasis on one of its business divisions, which is Wolters Kluwer Health. It definitely was not surprising when Wolters Kluwer Health announced on March 23, 2009 that its customer service organization has earned the prestigious ‘Center of Excellence’ certification from BenchmarkPortal, and the Center for Customer-Driven Quality at Purdue University. The company was recognized for outstanding service to its global health industry customers, including students, professionals and institutions in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry.

About Wolters Kluwer

Wolters Kluwer is a leading global information services and publishing company. The company provides products and services for professionals in the health, tax, accounting, corporate, financial services, legal and regulatory sectors. Wolters Kluwer has annual revenue of $4.9 billion (2008 figures), employs approximately 20,000 people worldwide and maintains operations across Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Wolters Kluwer is headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Its shares are quoted on the Euronext Amsterdam (WKL) and are included in the AEX and Euronext 100 indices.

Wolters Kluwer is The Professional's First Choice for information, tools, and solutions that help professionals make their most critical decisions effectively and improve their productivity. Utilizing the latest technologies, Wolters Kluwer ensures that its customers have the solutions they need, when they need them, and in the media best suited to their requirements. 

Their range of information products encompasses print and electronic formats, and specialize in creating integrated, embedded, end-to-end solutions designed to improve customers' work processes.

About Wolters Kluwer Health

Wolters Kluwer Health is a leading provider of information for professionals and students in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry. Professionals and students have long relied on their textbooks, reference products, and journals. Their bibliographic, reference and pharmaceutical databases, drug information software, point-of-care tools, web-based information systems and online continuing education products also support the delivery of health information via interactive formats. Major brands include traditional publishers of medical and drug reference tools and textbooks, such as Lippincott Williams & Wilkins and Facts & Comparisons; electronic information providers, such as Ovid and UpToDate, Medi-Span and ProVation Medical; and pharmaceutical information providers like Adis International and Source.

For any organization dealing with service offerings, insights from customers form the basis of innovation and also lead to sustainable competitive advantage. A company can preach about its service quotient that is bundled with the offerings. But ensuring that it does the same, by employing tactical and strategic decisions that are in sync with the expectations from the customers, requires more effort than mere lip service. Customer is God for any organization; and more so for an organization that deals with delivering intangibles bundled with tangible offerings and more precisely, in service industries. Wolters Kluwer has kept up the promise of delivering high quality customer service by considering two components; namely the customers and their insights not only in tactical decisions but also in formulation of strategy, vision and innovation based on customer insight. This act is more than sufficient to induce the life time value of a customer.

Strategy & Vision

Wolters Kluwer’s vision is to deliver on their promise to be The Professional's First Choice in all that they do. Their deep customer insight enables them to create high-quality solutions that meet customers changing needs, improving efficiency and increasing productivity.

Wolters Kluwer’s strategy is to accelerate profitable growth through strategic actions and delivering enhanced value for their customers, investors, and employees.

Innovation

The organization’s commitment to innovation stems from Wolters Kluwer’s deep knowledge of customers' needs. At Wolters Kluwer, expert content comes together with technology and customer insight to drive innovation, making it the professional's first choice.

The organization’s major innovations based on the insights received from its customers are Cloud Computing, Vertical Search, Next-Generation Publishing, and Workflow Solutions. Cloud Computing deals with developing new models for delivering software applications through the internet. Cloud computing encompasses concepts such as hosted applications, Software as a Service (SaaS), and ASP. Vertical Search solutions expand and enhance search to help users find and use relevant and specialized information with speed and precision. Content + Traffic + Interaction = the Next Generation of publishing. Consumers interact with authors and editors to co-create content and when it comes to Workflow Solutions, it automates work processes by facilitating a set of tasks necessary for professionals to complete a given procedure.

The two important parameters that attribute to the competitive advantage of Wolters Kluwer are as follows:

Partner with customers

Customers are at the centre of what they do. They are continuously engaged in an ongoing exchange of expertise and ideas with customers about their work. This value-adding partnership is fundamental to meeting their commitment to the customers they serve, globally and locally. Deep knowledge of their professional workflows and the ability to apply emerging technologies to make them more efficient, productive, and provide the best service to their own clients is what sets them apart. It is this superior customer insight which lies at the heart of their competitive advantage.

Customer insight at Wolters Kluwer

Wolters Kluwer works with a company-wide program around customer insight, which was aligned with the introduction of the company’s strategy to accelerate profitable growth. The company is fully dedicated to achieve a state where the voice of the customer is prominent in all product life stages, having deep knowledge of customers, being able to anticipate new market needs, and creating differentiation through superior customer insight. The customer insight program is unique to their products, culture, and expertise, representing Wolters Kluwer’s best and offers a continuous cycle of improvement in innovation, development, and management to support our strategy to accelerate profitable growth.

Conclusion

For any company that is operating in services industry, having a strategy which is customer-centric is imperative. Involvement of customers at every stage of tactical decision-making, which Wolters Kluwer has portrayed through its customer insight-based innovation, is the height of customer focus. Listening to the customers all the time and altering one’s tactics is a tedious affair, because of the variations in service delivery brought in by the sheer number of employees who are at the delivery end. Being alert to the latent needs of the customers helps an organization not only in its growth phase, but also during the recessionary phase of the business cycle. Wolters Kluwer, has thus got it right by incorporating customer as one of its operating elements, and embodies the service excellence that an organization can achieve.