At Covanta we look at customer experience as the foundation of our competitive advantage. So in all the systems that we work on and all the business changes we make from sales to operations, we ask ourselves the same question: How do we make our customers’ interaction with Covanta easier? That extends from our online customer portals to the way customers interact with us at our plants. In IT and across the company, we think that is the primary way to deepen relationships.
Within IT, customer experience is part of our operating culture. Everyone knows that this is a primary focus, in part because I think we’re beyond the whole IT being aligned to the customer movement. Of course you have to be aligned, right? But from the way that we deploy systems to the choices we make in technology, we really look and spend time on how easy it is to use something, train on something and deal with our support function.
This cultural intent is formalized in our IT strategy. Our number one goal is improve our customers’ experience when doing business with Covanta, and the benefit is increased revenue and retention by making it easier to do business with our company. Granted, that’s not always the cheapest solution. But whatever the solution is, it has to be more focused on value and less on the money or some other old metric.
In terms of technologies we use, Covanta is very hands-on. Of course, we have the usual marketing efforts that include website metrics and an annual customer survey, but the company’s culture on the sales and relationship side is very hands-on, and we deal with a lot of municipalities, which makes that a requirement. It is the hands-on, shaking-your-hand kind of thing that we spend a lot of time on, making sure that we really know what our customers want. There’s a lot of culture to it.
So if you are talking to someone at a high-tech company, they’re going to give you a different perspective, that customers are quite capable of figuring out all this fancy, detailed information online, but a lot of companies are still very relationship-oriented with customers, and Covanta is one of those businesses.
Stuart Kippelman is the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Covanta, a world leader in waste-to-energy and renewable energy projects. He is responsible for the global vision, strategy and operations of Covanta's IT organization. As a valued member of executive management, Stuart is responsible for the global vision, strategy and operations of Covanta's IT organization. Stuart is a dynamic business and technology executive who has spearheaded the creation of new product applications and breakthrough initiatives focused on improving revenue generation, business efficiencies and employee productivity. He has been on the forefront of technology innovation, successfully leveraging technology to solve some of the company's toughest businesses challenges.
