Key Findings
Business leaders often regard cost optimization as an exercise in immediate cost reduction directed equally at all resources or units.
Resistance to change, competing incentives, urgency, and isolated optimization planning combine to impede the ability of functional leaders to support business objectives in the long term. Cost optimization is an opportunity to gain support for initiatives, prioritize future business benefits, and execute collaborative, organization comprehensive projects.
Successful cost optimization programs include many standard features, regardless of the function; leaders are engaging these features in a multipronged approach look at their own domain to determine how to support counterparts across the enterprise.
Recommendations - Customer service and support leaders guiding cost optimization efforts should:
Build an optimization strategy that incorporates long-term value and more immediate spend efficiency, with far-reaching implications for business objectives as well as spending.
Collaborate and build consensus among business leaders throughout the organization to identify objectives and ensure that stakeholders agree on the significance, justification, and impacts of optimization projects.
Include five steps in every cost optimization initiative: a benchmark for a baseline; identify key budget points to shield; identify noncritical areas where reduction should occur; determine the cost optimization approach; and communicate plans to stakeholders and lead the organization through the change
Source Gartner, Inc.