Marketing in the new world – Part II

As if dealing with the plethora of new age marketing paradigms wasn’t complex enough, marketers now have to grapple with another benchmark called DQ or Digital Quotient. DQ is nothing but a benchmark which determines how robust the company’s digital marketing strategy is and how it is implementing its information technology roadmap effectively. A company’s digital quotient (DQ) is a function of how well defined its long-term digital strategy is, its effectiveness in implementing that strategy, and the strength of its organizational infrastructure and IT. So if you aren’t thinking about DQ today, chances are your marketing is bereft of a very potent and catalytic process that could break or make you. In my journey in understanding how to quickly get on the road to building an effective digital quotient, here are a few thoughts that I have gathered along the way:

• Take that leap today: The Universal Customer Footprint is still some dreams away. If we wait for a streamlined framework to spring up, be able to consolidate all the data and actually be able to create very structured customer patterns, then it will take many years to put this together. Instead what I would recommend is taking small steps, what is the data required for that instance, can we access that from the digital initiatives we have ongoing currently? Does it throw up instances that we can collate?
• Monitor the journey: Eventually the customer’s journey has to integrate- i.e how do they access information, their buyer’s online preferences, their in-store experiences, all this will start overlapping over a period of time. The ability for the digital marketing arm of the enterprise to capture all the milestones in the journey means a very strong collaboration with the CIO and technology arm.
• Start small: It’s the best way to pick up gaps in strategy and execution, and also allows regional and central teams to sift through the maze of corporate policies, regional cultural nuances and preferences.
• Culture matters: I recently spoke to the global digital leader of a very well- known cosmetic brand who mentioned how they sell in Latam is radically different from Russia or India where the buying and paying preferences range from instalments to credit purchases for their very niche range of products. That also has a profound impact on the way you create your digital marketing and ecommerce strategies in country.
• Be Smart and Prioritize: Let’s get this one right. Tools and fancy systems can’t beat smart decisions, and a thought through process design that is aligned with the business imperatives.
• Get Leadership to adapt: See, digital won’t go away even if you wish for it. It’s not just another channel that you can tell the CMO to budget for. Its radical, its different, it has the potential to change the way we operate because it just means decisions are now more and more about data, more and more about dynamic customer preferences. And that means we don’t have too much time to sit back and allow the data to befuddle us.
• Enable Collaboration: It always was key to success- just that it has become mandatory now. How can channels interact, how can I create collaborative patterns for my product, regional, sales, delivery teams. Well, the problem just gets more complex because the data is getting complicated too. How can I enable information to flow faster, how do I create better cross functional collaboration. That is the key.

Let’s see how you build your DQ today!

Through the looking glass

The digital revolution has forever changed the balance of power, putting customers in control. They confuse us with their digital choices, tease us with their online preferences and flummox us with their ability to make instant buying decisions online. In the digital age, marketing initiatives must be backed by reams of relevant data about customers. Data that must correlate dynamic customer choices, map their digital choices and create digital heat maps almost instantly. Are CMOs equipped to run this fast with the dynamic landscapes? Big Data, Analytics, Cloud, Social Media – these words have ceased to be mere buzzwords and now find a huge mandate in the CMO’s playbook, as key to staying relevant. Age old media ratings have given way to unique digital footprints.

The CMO imperatives have changed around- how do you work with the CIO to determine what technologies you need to invest in now.? The CMO needs to find answers to these questions to continue to stay relevant.

So is technology here to stay? What does this mean us as CMOs? How do we brave this whole new world? How do we market in the technology era? For a marketer who straddled the pre digital era and is still unravelling the digital technology maze, I can tell you it pays to:

Be Aligned.

How closely the CMO is aligned to the larger business goals, determines to a large extent investments in marketing technologies that impact funnel management, employee productivity and customer connect. It is not a question of whether you need X technology or Y application. It all depends on the business objectives you are trying to achieve.

Be involved.

Many CMOs continue to focus on overall marketing budgets and leave the technology decisions to the CIO. Technology is imperative but not at the cost of understanding how our differently our customers respond to technology. For instance when our company’s agents, interact with our customer’s customers, the younger set consumers can readily accept non -invasive technology intrusions in their interactions, whereas some of our customers who are in the middle age bracket still prefer a voice based interactive communication with a real person behind the phone. Understand where your customers are. Understand how they like to be sold. That is critical and it brings me to another interesting aspect of selling in the digital era- culture

Know your audience.

Very often CMOs tend to get swayed by the glamour of new technologies or the latest “cool app” to have. While the age of the digital marketer means CMOs need to always be one step ahead as far as technology adoption goes, it cannot be at the cost of ignoring what our customers want. Different strata of internal and external customers use technology differently or respond to it differently. Often cultural preferences, choice of interaction channels and ease of technology adoption varies across a global customer base. It will be suicidal to paint them all with a single brushstroke. Different strokes for different folks is often the rule of the game provided CMOs have enough insights that their big data and social media engagement channels throw up.

Make the CIO your tech buddy.

Let me admit it – I am not the most up to date when it comes to the latest technology advancements. But I know my CIO certainly is. It pays to have a CIO on your side who understands your imperatives and is able and willing to help you navigate the maze of apps and infrastructure world to help you achieve your goals.

In this age of collaboration, CMOs who earlier worked closely with the CEO and CFOs must now make time and space for their latest ally- the CIO. Technology has become the looking glass through which CMOs view and gain many insights-customer behavior, preferences, choices, and of course the cost of providing those choices. Let us not allow technology to scare or scar us. Technology is what will help us get to that somewhere else. Let’s run.

Balancing Technology & Business

Recently, there has been a lot of ocean churning over whether it is the CIO or business that has control over technology spend. Much of this has been due to a wide gap between the promise and actual realization of business potential by technology. For a better part of the last half decade, CIOs have seen their budgets squeezed to the bare minimum, innovation initiatives sandboxed, very heavy cost cuts and micromanagement of IT departments. To add to this, new age digital technologies, including the big three of Cloud, Analytics and Mobility have given businesses more control over IT Department’s business and technical context.

But as to whether businesses simply do away with the CIO office, the answer is a resounding no. While businesses and end users are increasingly recommending and buying technology, they simply cannot handle complications beyond a certain point. Not to mention addressing inter-departmental dependencies and shared technologies.

Gartner predicted that by 2017, businesses will largely control the technology spend of an enterprise. However, CIOs are undisputed owners of a huge chunk of an enterprise’s technology resources, given the context above. Therefore, while the CIO will still control the IT spend for the immediate future; the above-mentioned factors have made it inevitable for CIOs to close the gap between the promise of technology and delivery by technology quickly.

The new business-led enterprise has thrown up some critical areas for the CIO to address. First, where businesses make a find of a particular technology that can be rolled out across the organization. Second, security around new technologies introduced into the organization. Third, the incubation and acceleration of technology ideas independent of businesses that are relevant to the larger enterprise. These, in addition to meeting all the current budgetary and headcount straitjackets dished out liberally by the enterprise to the CIO organization.

The new CIO organization of today will have to be a completely different animal to bring about the Technology-Business balance. It has to change from being largely a reactive Keep-The-Lights-On (KTLO) organization to being a proactive Driver-for-Growth organization. It must put into place processes to balance demand and supply, ensure enterprise agility, while keeping a tight vigil on business impact, risk management, and cost to serve. It must also prevent uncontrolled IT activity. And to do this, it has to evolve real world strategies – technologies, processes and practices, to meet future realities and expectations, and especially the increasing clamor for digital technologies. It must also make an effort to understand the requirements of businesses to achieve this balance. A prudent approach would be to initiate “Internal Partnerships” with businesses.

Clearly, the CIOs have their task cut out and a clear mandate on hand for what and how things have to be done. A good starting point for this would be to look at new technologies that could be brought in, getting rid of obsolete ones, modifying and continuing to use what can be used, and dumping random suggestions for the so called “New and Excellent” technologies. CIOs currently focusing on Integration, Orchestration of Information Technology, Information Systems to keep the lights on, have to quickly get in the Business Relationship Managers in their group to balance between Business and Technology.

Securing the winds of change

The current meteoric rise in BYOD (Bring You Own Device) has clearly shown that it is on the expected trajectory in the process of delivering on its promises of better innovation, mobility, finer work-life balance combined with significantly improved productivity. There is a clear and strong desire for BYOD programs, resulting from an increased BYOD mandate led by large enterprises. However, like any other new technology or process that is implemented, security has become a prime and critical aspect in implementing BYOD in any enterprise.

Inevitably, the onus of ensuring this security falls on IT, and specifically, on the CIO in every single organization that is adapting BYOD. This increasing pressure to manage and secure devices and data is having an impact across the IT organization, from Application Development to Support to Security and Compliance. In addition, there is a collateral effect on budgets and network performance as well. Till now however, much of apprehensions around costs, privacy and data security have been pushed under the carpet giving way to convenience instead. However, given the gaining momentum of BYOD in the enterprise, it is getting difficult to ignore these security concerns any longer.

IT organizations must pick up the mantle of balancing the benefits of BYOD with the onus of mitigating increased security threats. This must take into account the inherent users’ desire to choose their own device versus the CIO’s mandate to secure enterprise boundaries. Just beginning to get out of its nascence, some initial BYOD security aspects revolve around separate personal and company smartphones, and signing off of some privacy rights. However, this is simply insufficient.

In the last couple of years, new vendors for Mobile Device Management, or MDM, have been mushrooming across the globe. Millions of dollars has been invested in MDM start-ups. These vendors offer a huge choice of pre-packaged, integrated and standalone tools and solutions to manage sandboxed enterprise applications, corporate data containers and secure Web browser environments. While this has extended options of security, costs and technology to the IT organization, this very choice has led to confusion in the enterprise market, especially the CIO decisions.

The challenge of managing security for a BYOD environment is a massive one. Apart from costs, the CIO has to take into consideration multiple other aspects from the business perspective including Security Monitoring, Device Management and Vulnerability Management. It therefore becomes crucial to have a realistic, balanced and mature view in place to help evaluate and decide on the technology risk while taking all the above-mentioned factors into consideration. Specific policies help, but what enterprises need is a matured and stable partner who can ensure end to end security – preferably a Security Operations Centre…that can integrate MDM or security for BYOD mobile devices with the security strategy of the company.

Marketing in the new world

The marketing landscape has changed more over the last five years than it did over the last 50. Social media has crunched the change in marketing tools, systems and the whole playing field by about a century, it would seem and changed the communication industry beyond recognition.

No one can really claim to understand what social media is about. Today it is the biggest area of excitement, concern as well as awe. For marketing professionals, the new media is a paradox, great power but with great responsibility. Though it is merely a medium, the communication opportunities and insights it can potentially provide can make or break in equal measure. A couple of things deserve special mention in this new business paradigm.

Firstly, till a few years ago, messaging was completely dependent on what you wanted to tell the market. But social media has turned that upside down. Today, it is the customer who validates the message, decides the effect and reacts accordingly. In addition, social media gives the customer the ability to derive real time insights and even amplify those insights in the market. We marketers need to be extremely wary and quick on our toes. With negligible control over the effect of our messaging, there is no option of unreal information or overrated claims.

The biggest challenge facing marketers is- how do I give my client a personalised experience while offering the advantage that mass production creates?  Today, organisations that can effectively use social media to understand what the customers want and provide the exact fit are the successful ones. Increasing mobility has added real time knowledge sharing to the existing networks and the oceans of opinions is going larger through social media. This also warrants quick responses and quicker utilization of opportunities that are thrown up.   The individual’s group connectivity is another factor that marketers have to learn to utilise effectively.

Added to these is the fact that the new generation is wired for technology, making old communication techniques redundant. Theworldwide web has made the whole world a teeming marketplace where all the wares and their sellers are trying to outshout each other in a bid to be heard. In the meantime, this is also a hotbed of customer information, and in fact there are agencies that are using analytics applications to churn out data on what customers want.

There are newer tools to determine the customer preferences. Increasingly demanding preferences are being efficiently met. Tools that impart the ability to churn a lot of that information into actionable products are cutting a clear path through the chaos.

Technology thus helps make sense of the new upside down world, where customer is not only king but also the state, and sellers need to work on a completely gutted playing field.

How Big Data, smart Analytics is reducing subscribers’ churn

Today, even a small reduction in subscriber churn can result in millions worth of benefit for service providers. Studies have shown, acquiring new customers’ can cost up to five times more than satisfying and retaining existing customers.

In the past analyzing reasons why a customer has decided to stop being a customer used to be a straightforward task because the data was limited, but in the era of Big Data, a host of data dimensions are given due consideration that can no longer ‘just be ignored’, making it a much more complicated task. With Big Data, we can now gain deeper and more relevant insight into customer behavior, enabling companies to providing better customer service and increasing revenue significantly.

Aware of the potentially huge financial impact of subscriber churn, and the advantage of operating in an environment with abundant customer data, most of the providers traditionally, have invested in human capital and technological infrastructure to enable the use of this data to understand customer churn & tried to predict the same using predictive statistical modelling. The process and methodologies adopted reveal a right mix of variables to predict churn.

How then does big data help us in variable selection and transformation? Let’s visualize the unstructured big data. Visualizing the data takes fraction of time it would traditionally take to identify not so obvious events & patterns. Natural Language processing & Sentiment analysis can reveal consumer’s emotional gradient as expressed in speech, social media, emails and other unstructured forms of data. Employing big data techniques coupled with sharp business acumen, reveals event and even sequences that lead to churn, that in turn can be transformed into variables that feed back into our traditional models.

Integrating new data about customers from emerging contact points gives much more meaningful insights into customer behaviour that can in turn be tested and closely acted upon. These inputs not only give us more in-depth understanding of customer behaviour but also help incrementally update the methodologies for churn modelling while increasing accuracy of existing models that have been traditionally adopted.

The service providers can accurately predict on basis of customer behaviour, likelihood of the customer to churn, if they know which customers are at high risk of churn and when they will churn, they are able to design customized customer communication and treatment programs in a timely efficient manner

The New Marketing Dynamics- technology to the Rescue

With the social media looming larger than life on all marketing communication activities, everyone needs a hand with making messaging work. There are tools available that will perhaps take your marketing message to a better destination than before. These tools may not be able to harness the power of social media, but can certainly guide and direct on how to make it work in your favor.

The foremost parameter of a relevant marketing message is its ability to hit the right audience at the right spot. For this, the knowledge of customer requirement and market preferences is paramount. Fortunately, we do have tools and technologies that can help determine and track increasingly demanding customer preferences. These are technologies that help make sense of this new upside down playing field where the customer is not only the king, but also the state. And these tools that help marketing teams to cut a clear path through the chaos see the light ahead and make a beeline for it. Analytics and Big Data are the straw that marketing professionals in today’s business dynamics cling to, in order to find some semblance of sanity in the ocean of preferences out there. They help churn information into actionable products and services that will meet the demands of the discerning customer. Sellers today need to work in this completely gutted playing field and these tools are extremely handy in helping them float. And hopefully not become debris!

In these information overload times, a marketing team should target at actionables which are both part of marketing and sales. These are the activities where the new age technologies and tools can be of immense support, since messaging to elected customers is very critical. This is the best opportunity to make a message consistent across channels and message points – to clients, resources, stakeholders, analysts, and even potential vendors. For a message to make an impact, consistency is extremely critical, and this is a good strategy to maintain that.

However, the jackpot is far from being won. There are still a large number of gaps that ensure all data cannot translate into actionable points. There is still a slip that needs to be covered, and as a result, even with tools and technology to aid us, we are still some distance from driving social media and using its mammoth reach to touch a tangible goal. Along with technology, we still need a healthy mix of traditional marketing methods to drive our messaging decisions.

With limited help in the face of ever burgeoning social media functionalities, we need to clearly mark out our goals, targets and customer groups. We certainly cannot be everything to everyone, so it is a smart move to narrow down the field so the processes can be made specific to a particular goal and hence more efficient. Identifying target groups and creating messaging strategies for each, based on more specific data inputs about them, will be the smart way forward for marketing teams.

BYOD – Freedom and Responsibility

Mobility is a multi-faceted asset, but some of the value it adds may actually be a cause for concern, especially in terms of the fine balance between rights and freedom.

This would hold especially true when it is about mobility at the workplace. So one of the biggest challenges technology teams in any enterprise face, is how far to go and where to draw the line.

To ensure a good work-life balance, enterprises today are definitely allowing personal spaces to encroach onto the office time, and in many cases that is unavoidable- just as office work almost always takes up personal space as well. The flexibility to carry personal mobile devices at work will to some extent send out a message that the organisation does appreciate the concept of work-life balance. But while we do believe in allowing mobile devices at work, there are a number of issues that need to be resolved at the end of the day. Common knowledge is that security is a big issue with the Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) policy. But we believe the solution is not getting rid of it altogether, but actually setting processes and policies in place that will control the usage and definitely the malpractices or security risks.

The big concern that global companies face is that employees are averse that their personal devices are being monitored and controlled.

While security policies may be effective enough for the present, the proliferation of mobile applications in every sphere of activity leaves constantly evolving gaps in security. What then is our solution? Obviously, as a team that supports the IT and IT security policies of the organisation, we need to ensure complete awareness of the risks involved, and the procedures that will keep enterprise data safe, even in personal devices. They may go beyond the mobile phone or the laptop. The issue of all around holistic security is always a challenge. Enterprise control on corporate data residing in the mobile device will always be the requirement with a BYOD policy in place. But while enterprises have the potential to access personal data; they may not enforce scrutiny,  as a mark of trust.  It is time that employees also have a deeper insight about the balance of BYOD with their corporate responsibility, and a commitment to keeping enterprise data uncompromised. Every employee also needs to feel responsible for the security of corporate assets and information. We bank on this sensitivity, but keep policies in place.

That is the only way to truly have equilibrium between work-life balance, and the responsibility of enterprise security.

Ultimately, the balance has to be about responsible ownership, both by enterprises as well as employees. And in this, enterprises may be more inclined to have some clear policies in place…and also not be shy of enforcing them.

Evolving the model of next generation customer engagement

Who is the Boss? Customer is the Boss.

We hear this all the time. There is a lot of research on the topic of customer engagement but little has been done to adapt to the new ways of engagement using newer technology channels instead of the traditional old ways. This mindset will require a paradigm shift from the marketing, sales and support functions in any organization, to realign their actions and engagements around Engagement, Experience and Value.

Engagements must move from content-aware to context-aware models; services mindset will need to move from quantitative to qualitative experiences. All of this will result in moving to Volumetric to Value-metric customer engagement.

With this basic dynamics in place, we can clearly define three elements that identify differentiated delivery in the current dynamic and often volatile business environment.

A.  Customer engagement re-defined: The transition of communication means that the right type to touch connectivity and hereafter even virtual presence, has forced businesses to relook at how it interacts for every purpose. Simple communication is almost deceased, and when it does take place, it is in a whole environment of interactivity. There is a cluster of co-current communication taking place in the various means available at any given point in time between teams, between clients, and even between support and client organizations. The means of communication has changed irreversibly and unrecognizably, presumably for the better. The outcome of the whole new environment is that this universal interaction paradigm has created the need for context-aware engagement. Social media plays a very significant role in this brave new world of multi-tiered communication and interaction. The environment is almost defined by the various social media applications and thus sets the parameters for customer engagement as well. We need to be mindful of this.

B. Support purpose re-stated: The second element of significance is that a support center is not assessed in terms of numbers, issues resolved ,or services extended in tickets. Today, it is extremely important that the scope of the servicestransforms from being a quantitative cost center to a competitive and qualitative experience function. This move from quantity to quality is what will define the business metrics of efficiency going forward.

C. Volume vs. Value: Client organizations are today looking for better support for the same dollar. In a nutshell, organizations need to push the service process growth from being volumetric to value- metric. This transformation will also offer a tremendous window of opportunity that will present the support side of the client organizations, an opportunity to engage with the end consumer. Awareness of that end of the support will be a source of extremely valuable insights. Riding on this, the industry needs to introspect the current engagement models, redefine customer support and thus create the superlative experience for them.

The added advantage of this kind of mutually beneficial engagement is that it will help a new  operational  paradigm to emerge –  a support model  that adds value as it matures, and that should be the measure of a ‘superlative ’experience.

Smart business choices for better technology output

Mobility and its advantages need no more elaboration. As an integral part of an enterprise, mobile technologies need to be increasingly better, smarter and of course infinitely more efficient.

To keep them at the cutting edge of efficiency, performance testing has to be much crisper and cost effective than before. The traditional T&M models we discussed in my last blog may not be the best choice in the new scenario of much higher connectivity which leads to higher demands on efficiency. The way to go forward would be a new delivery model that ensures highest value per dollar of investment.

Most enterprises find it prudent to outsource the testing process, for various reasons, internal technology adoption challenges being one of them. Obviously the choice of the vendor then needs to be extremely smart. Today the outsourcing industry is maturing, but so are the customers. In the SLAs, greater focus is being placed on optimization and productivity improvement. It is no longer an intelligent or viable option to hire dedicated employees to perform development or testing in- house. These skills can be put to much better use for product innovation or even market studies.

Today, performance testing is not merely about the testing skills or outcomes, but about the cost it entails. Then the measurement of a good testing process is not merely the testing activity but also about how cost effective it is, so most successful organizations rely on a set of measures to bring down the overall cost of testing:

• Resource rationalization
• Sufficiently lean core team
• Alternatives for idle time
• Uniform process
• Test automation

Increasingly, the way to go for most enterprises is the pay-per-transaction, pay-per-use, and outcome based billing models. These not only help avoid high upfront investments, but also support in the new business motto – faster, better, cheaper. So the best possible price models for testing range from a fixed price per test case, to costs as per number of defects filed. While these models may not necessarily be lucrative in the short-term for service providers, they are definitely a better approach from a long-term perspective since they allow better resource utilization.

However, as with everything, these models too, come with their own set of challenges. Some operational challenges include the need to continuously monitor the delivery efficiencies and determine if they match with the demand. Enterprises will also need to constantly supervise the engagement to ensure the test objects are optimized, organized, and refined. This is a key deliverable because intellectual property is critical and so is archiving test ware, test data, and test infrastructure for knowledge management. Managing these challenges is critical to an organization’s long-term success.

Shifting sands of the mobility testing landscape

In the last few years, testing is finally getting to play the significant role it deserves in the product engineering process. An increasing focus on customer experience is making testing of products and services imperative. There is just too much competition out there to take your product lightly, and what you have to finally deliver should be perfect and flawless in every aspect. So the share of testing in IT budgets is slowly creeping up, and is with newer technology and delivery platforms expected to creep further and even faster.

The biggest share of spending and maximum focus of this newfound respect comes to mobility testing. With mobile devices becoming increasingly more versatile and powerful with added functionalities making them stronger and wider reaching as business tools, this domain is bound to witness phenomenal growth. With so many applications that now run on mobile devices, in so many versions, this attention is not surprising at all. Going forward, it will be important that all apps run on each of these platforms, devices and versions in order to achieve maximum coverage. And support organisations need to do it for delivery excellence, ultimately providing better customer experience.

Enterprises are now not just satisfied with functional efficiency any more, it is imperative to get maximum compatibility across all available platforms, resulting in better testing tools and technologies. Yes, testing, especially on mobility and mobile functionalities is big today, and in time, bound to get only bigger.

And with this growth will come exciting new models of delivery for superlative customer experience. The days of T& M models and resources delivery are almost over. In the field of testing, there are new dynamics globally, and these are set to start a new trend. Predictable spend is what more and more clients are looking at. Pay as you go and testing as a transaction is gaining more popularity. It not only offers flexibility with respect to pricing, but also better efficiencies and more timeline discipline. Thetransaction model is the new way to go…but more on that in my next blog.

Tech support and beyond

Technology has grown to more than the expectations of great visionaries. This has made the high-tech products baffling to the end-users. Hence the inevitability of Technical Support. “After-sales support” being the key factor in today’s reference driven business, to keep pace with the advancements, it is high time to move beyond the traditional technical support.

With the passage of time, the Support system is progressively gathering product knowledge. This rich resource can be used in multiple ways to deliver greater value to end-users.

This Infrastructure and product knowledge can be further leveraged by:

Insights from customer database helps in feeding the vital information like most used features, least used features, frequent failures etc.. back to product engineering team.

Interworking certification is one domain where there lately there is lot of focus. In the networked environment, the business solutions work with multiple partners’ products at the end customer site. In such situations, it is imperative that the interworking aspect is verified and tested. The demand for interworking certifications is growing every passing day, with new developments, and new players entering the field. Besides, the multi-platform support (mobile, desktop, tablet, cloud, etc.) increases the need.

For performing Interworking tests, the product knowledge of both the client’s solution and the partner’s product and solid grip on the technology are mandatory.

Proactive support will be the future of Technical support, where we attempt to fix the issues before the impact is realized. Systems are monitored all the time and based on the incidents, remedial actions are performed. Support process automation and Self-heal tools also play a major role here. TAC proximity is key for these value additions to serve their purposes.

Tech support organizations which see these opportunities and equip themselves better to “give back value to customer” can only win the race.

Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) – The Way We Solve Problems

To quote David Kay of DB Kay & Associates “KCS is not something we do in addition to solving problems. KCS is the way we solve problems.” Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) is a methodology and a set of practices and processes that focuses on knowledge as a key asset of the Support organization. Its premise is to capture, structure, and re-use support knowledge.

KCS seeks to:

• Create content as a by-product of solving problems. As support analysts capture information related to an incident, they create knowledge that can be reused within the support process by other support analysts as well as customers with access to a self-service knowledge base.
• Evolve content based on demand and usage. As people interact with the knowledge base within the incident management process, they must review it before delivering the knowledge to a customer. If they discover the need to correct or enhance the knowledge, they will fix it at that time or flag it for another person to fix. Under this model, knowledge is evolved just-in-time based on demand instead of just-in-case.
• Develop a knowledge base of an organization’s collective experience to-date. New knowledge capture within the incident management process is an experience resulting from one interaction. The knowledge has not been validated or verified beyond the initial incident. Thus the initial knowledge is not as trusted in this state, which is referred to as Draft knowledge. It is not until reuse occurs that trust is improved.
• Reward learning, collaboration, sharing and improving. The culture of the organization must change to recognize the value of an individual based on the knowledge they share.

Based on a recent analysis performed over support customers, we see exponentially at least 15% of customers demanding better Knowledge base, better content on articles, do it yourself kits, Self-help systems, and indexed knowledge bases for them to drill down into the solutions. Having KCS helps an organization fulfill these demands as well as improve performance and helps to obtain a competitive advantage. This includes higher productivity and higher resolution rates. KCS best practices have evolved after continuous exposure to a whole assortment of challenges addressing varied communities and supporting the end to end ecosystem of the support & service businesses. KCS will help transform your current support services by incorporating well-structured, balanced and proven processes, methods and systems.

Support for the Connected Home – Differentiator for Best techsupport

One in five adult American internet users already has a device at home that connects the physical environment to the Internet – Forrester Research

The Internet of Things is fast becoming a lifestyle reality, especially in the US. Connecting every space we live in – home, manufacturing floors, energy grids, healthcare facilities, and transportation systems – to the Internet, it epitomizes the influence of technology on daily life. The direct outcome of this ubiquitous connectivity is – more data, gathered from more places, more insights, with more options to increase efficiency and access. As the IoT takes over everyday living across the world, solution providers need to ensure that the consumer installation, adoption, and ongoing enablement experience are seamless and painless.

Increasingly, the concept of connected homes that the IoT facilitates, is taking center stage in enterprise strategy. With its acquisition of Nest in January, Google clearly signaled its interest in the area, while Microsoft’s deal with Insteon also suggests its interest in this space. Amazon has had a dedicated store for home-automation devices since last year. Not to be left behind, Apple is planning to announce a major push into the smart home with a software platform that will allow the iPhone to control internet-connected home devices.

Armed with social networking tools and functionalities that can alter the course of any business enterprise’s roadmap, consumers are now in a position to put increasing pressure on the market focus of connected home providers. They are now demanding greater ease of use, installation, and seamless mobile access. Interoperability will be the key differentiator because the connected home is an ecosystem play that merges hardware and software, functionalities and technologies. But the blurred lines where service standards are defined will drive a number of privacy and security concerns.

In this environment, a robust, efficient, and well structured support that can provide an answer to these demands (and questions not even asked yet), will be the winner.

So, support efficiencies will be required in three key competencies:

• Installation,
• Do-It-Yourselfers (self operated solutions for customers), and
• Broadband & Utility Services

The successful support provider will be one that ensures answers to ease of usage, installation, interoperability, and security questions on your connected home device or service. Agile support in these areas will be the differentiator in the tech-support market.

Being an early adopter of the connected home support solutions, CSS Corp has the competency to provide some indispensible efficiency in this space, across knowledge management, knowledge centered support, automated technology tools, social media, and premium/paid support.

This might just the kind of support enterprises venturing into the IoT for connected lifestyles may be looking for, to garner a market leadership position.

Delivering The Gold Standard Of Technical Support

What does it mean to “Deliver The Gold Standard Of Technical Support”?  Simply put it means that you are delivering Support that is the measuring standard that all others are striving to provide.  You are the best at Support and what you do in your technology space.  It does not matter if you are providing the Support in-house, or partially outsourced, or fully outsourced.  In this blog I will review some of the basic building blocks needed to work toward achieving and maintaining this standard.

First, there are four main pillars of focus that are critical when working toward this standard.  The four main pillars are

• Providing Best In Class Employee Satisfaction,
• Providing Best In Class Customer Satisfaction, which assures
• Best In Class Client Satisfaction, and finally
• you must have Best In Class Corporate Growth & Profitability. 

Focusing on these 4 key pillars and setting up an internal management structure that assures that you not only measure these key focus areas, but you also have a process management framework that assures you Analyze, Align, Assess, and take Action on these focus areas.  This will be your organization’s road map to The Gold Standard Of Technical Support.  In addition, to focus and a closed loop process management framework there must be a success trend.  What I mean by this is that all of these measurements must have a consistent improvement trend.  The goal would be to assure that you have at least one year of consistent performance on these four pillars.  You will have setbacks, but as long as you have a solid process management framework in place you can take proper corrective action.

So you might be wondering What is Best in Class Employee Satisfaction.  What this means is that you are actively tracking and improving (1) Absenteeism, (2) Attrition of Leadership & TSEs, and (3) have a formal Employee Satisfaction survey process in place.  The goals of these will be dependent on your location, skill-set of employees, and other variables.  However as long as you are tracking and improving these 3 metrics quarter over quarter you will have happy and satisfied employees.

So you might be wondering What is Best in Class Customer Satisfaction.  What this means is that you are surveying customers at a statistically valid sample size and are improving your customer experience quarter over quarter.  Most surveys vary in the number of questions, but usually have a 1 through 5 scoring system.  The breakout is typically 1 being very unsatisfied, 2 being unsatisfied, 3 being a neutral experience, 4 being satisfied, and 5 being very satisfied.  A typical goal would be to assure that 85% of your customers respond choosing 4 or 5.

So you might be wondering What is Best in Class Client Satisfaction.  First you need to be surveying your clients at least on a quarterly basis.  Second you need a system setup to log all day to day client dissatisfaction items that come up.  The dissatisfaction system should be automated where a Team Leader all the way up to an executive can log a case.  In addition you again need to be Analyzing, Aligning, Assessing, and taking Action on what you learn from the Client Satisfaction Survey and the Client Dissatisfaction data.

So you might be wondering What is Best in Class Corporate Growth & Profitability.  This is a bit more obvious.  To be a company providing the Gold Standard Of Technical Support your company must be growing and be comfortably profitable.  Your clients will be more than willing to pay a fair premium based on the high level of support they will be getting when you reach this standard.  The Gold Standard of Technical Support is definitely within your organizations reach if you follow the brief road map that I have outlined above.

Go the customer’s way

There is always a notion that states “the vision of a company reflects on its customer’s experience” and that is so true in today’s ever changing market. We all have our own experience’s that creates a good or bad impression and will reflect in our opinion about recommending a product or company. Every transaction will go a long way in determining our loyalty and how long we want to be associated with an enterprise, and more importantly how our customers value our service.

Today, the trend is changing all the time. In the dynamic world of customer service and support, companies are constantly evolving customer service skills to meet the demands that will enable them to be better and innovative than the competitors. On the other side of the fence, customers are much more aware of their requirements and demand faster results. In today’s world, options are limitless and that is why it is very essential to be the best and serve it well in the very first shot. It’s not always what you serve, but also how you serve!

The bridge that connects a customer and the company is the team behind the customer services. Although proper training is the key to building a stronger bridge, employees need to realize one fact that, every movement, every word uttered would reflect the organizations vision. One of the important keys to providing excellent customer service is to understand the specific requirements of each customer as it varies from one customer to another. This is when it becomes so much vital to go the customer’s way and the best way of doing it is to be in the customers’ shoes. The need to think beyond our cubicles is very vital. It is important to grab every opportunity of not just providing good customer service, but also reflect the etiquettes of the company in those services in every single transaction.

In today’s global enterprise and uniform technology, what sets one’s support organization apart from another? Well, cultural attitudes and ethnic beliefs for one. But it is imperative that solutions should go beyond all such cultural barriers to provide the solutions as the per the customer’s requirements. The approach needs to be different for different customers and that can be achieved by understanding the cultural differences. Geography has its own role to play and one needs to understand the difference. You serve the same to all but it differs in how you serve them? The approach needs to be different for different cultures.

Technology is the tool that sculptures businesses in the modern days and it is very important to use technology to its fullest so that the aim of providing the best customer service with superlative experiences can be achieved.

The focus is now on Quality…

Over the years every organization with a customer support DNA strived to give a superlative experience to its customers. However, the last five years we had a shift of focus. What’s changed, as is obvious with market interactions and the changing business landscapes, is the stressing of a cost focus in companies support organizations versus quality.

In my experience, five years ago amidst heavy business uncertainty and market doldrums, most organizations heavily focused on cost cutting. The mandate for support organizations was simple – cut costs. More service at less cost, more support with less resources, best shoring models…anything that meant savings, was the need of the hour. Only the fittest would survive, and only the most cost efficient were the fittest.

However, over the last year, the picture has changed. It is interesting to note how the mindset now continually swings away from cost consciousness to a renewed quality awareness. It is as if the market has woken up to the fact that at too tight cost and services, quality was severely compromised.

Now in an increasingly competitive market, no one is willing to compromise on quality or cutting corners, merely to get a cheaper solution. So if cost is not the only consideration, how will customers assess their support? What would be the most rational approach to measure if your support organization is doing a good job? Today, it is the equilibrium between cost and quality. CSS Corp recommends an approach to assess this balance. We call it the Balanced Scorecard approach.

Today a Balanced Scorecard approach has set the definition of how a support organization should be successful. Quality matters, and it must be balanced with cost and other variables to assure success.

One added new variable impacting support organizations is the increasing awareness and dominance of social media and communities in our delivery structures. From just a unilateral service system, we now have multiple support mediums. It is important to manage these emerging areas efficiently as well with the same Balanced Scorecard approach, all the while ensuring agility and integration between them. Clearly, today agility will take center stage in customer support activities, especially significant because of the complexity in the interplay between these channels. Technology will play a big part but we need to ensure that complexity in technology does not affect the agility in our service and customer experience. The Balanced Scorecard approach leaves no room for trip ups. It assures that your support organization is success.