In covering customer service, I’ve divided the topic into the following three aspects:

• Get the Basics Right;
• Understand the Business of Customer Service; and
• Plan for the Future of Customer Service.

I just published a document, “How To Win Funding For Your Customer Service Project.” Forrester suggests that you standardize the process and template for a business case. We use the discipline Total Economic Impact to calculate the return on investment (ROI) for an initiative. I’m hearing from a lot of my clients that in order to get a project approved, they need to justify it.

I recently had an inquiry call from a vendor that wanted to know how best to standardize the business-justification process. This vendor has found that it can’t even get a meeting — or, if it does, then one of the first sales objections from the prospective client is, “What is the ROI of this solution?”

Hopefully this will help you in creating your business case. Think of four buckets:

1. benefits,
2. costs,
3. risks, and
4. the other advantages that a particular solution offers for the future.

Forrester calls this “last-buck flexibility.” One of the most difficult parts of writing a business case is understanding the metrics you’ll use to describe the benefits and assigning value to them.

Questions for You:

• Are you finding that you need to have a business case to justify the changes you want to make to customer service, or to other departments?
• What are executives asking for?
• What are you struggling with?

Please add a comment here to let me know how what issues you’re dealing with.

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff is a senior analyst at Forrester Research, covering customer service and social media. She is often asked to share her opinions on TV and radio and in print in BusinessWeek, The New York Times, and many other major publications. She regularly blogs at The Forrester Blog for Business Process & Applications Professionals, where this blogpost originally appeared. She can be found on Twitter at @DrNatalie.