Does anyone have experience with turning a shared services center into an actual business unit, particularly for a large organization in utilities & sanitation? Appreciate any tips/best practices or lessons learned you can share.

Hi! From my previous experiences I have learned a few things, let me share with you: 

Right from the start treat it like a startup/scaleup inside your company, not just a rebranded cost center (otherwise it will become a white elephant). Stablish a target like 10% cheaper and 10% better than market options (you don't have the client acquisition cost and know the client business already, and that is a great start)

1. Align the Basics:
- Define what services you'll sell and to whom. Prioritize what you have strong capabilities in, and what brings the highest value to the "client"
- Figure out your real costs - not just salaries, but technology, rent, management time, overhead, etc)
- Set prices that cover costs plus a reasonable margin based on benchmarking from "competitors"
- Create simple contracts that spell out in straightforward terms what you'll deliver and the expected SLAs
- Build a zero budget (don't get attached to legacy)

2. Run like a real business:
- Give the unit its own P&L responsibility
- Appoint a leader who thinks like a business owner, not an administrator
- Create a small board (3-5 people) with internal stakeholders to oversee it (ideally someone independent from the service sector could have a seat as well)

3. Foster the mindset (from cost center to value creation- not only profitable):
- Stop calling internal groups "captive customers" - they're now clients with choices
- Train your people to think commercially: efficiency, customer satisfaction, growth
- Reward based on business metrics (eg: cycle time, cost efficiency, SLAs/quality etc), not just task completion. Outline an incentives plan for employees at all levels (performance based)
- Allow the unit to say "no" to unprofitable work or at least have the open conversation with the parent company (e.g.: open up the income statement of unprofitable work and decide together)
- Always compare your performance against "competitors"
- Quarterly, run NPS surveys with your stakeholders/"client"

4. Common pitfalls in utilities
- Be careful with IT/data services, and invoicing/billing - utilities usually have strict compliance/regulatory needs
- Watch out for union issues when changing job roles

Hope it helps! best of luck in the endeavour, it is no small task! depende on how large is the group, likely you will need support from a consulting company to design and support implementation. These things can get quite political and will be good easy access benchmarking and structure conversations with hard minded stakeholders

IF I'm understanding you correctly, you want to create a revenue stream through your customer service (CS) group. I'll answer based on that assumption. I'll also assume this is either B2B or B2G. I'll also assume that your opportunities here are for cross-selling and up-selling.

First, you'll need to create a charter for the group and establish it as a P&L unit within your company. Income will be in the amount of cross-selling and up-selling revenue that can be directly attributed to them, and loss might be a customer churn rate or some other metric that's tied to revenue.

The people your service group is talking to are not likely to be the decision makers (DMs) for these things, so the customer POC can only influence the decision. The goal is for your CSRs to get the customer's DMs to have a conversation with the AE in your company who handles the account. Your CSRs need to be trained in how to handle these types of conversations, which sort of is and isn't a sales conversation.

In my experience, CS revenue is best attained through an actual Customer Success initiative. Customer Success is more than just reactively taking customer calls to answer questions and handle issues. Customer Success requires CSRs to understand the motives for why the customer purchased your goods/services in the first place, which in turn requires their having access to such information through the CRM.

I could go on, but I don't even know if this answers your original question. The bottom line is that you'll need to create a comprehensive business plan for the unit from scratch, and all that that entails. I hope that helps a bit.

I am not sure if I understand your question for the intent you may have.  However, in my experience, if I am turning a shared services org into business unit, I would operationalize everything we have. Have policies, procedures, org structure for core business (you need to decide what is your "business"), business support structure, COE (center of excellence) to implement best practices. I don't work in the utilities/sanitization sector so I don't have expertise to offer you there.