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.

Preparing for the new customer!

Today we are living in the world of engagement. CMOs need to throw away their MBA text books and concepts and adopt new marketing techniques to suit the “new age customer”. The other up CMOs sleeve is – they required to establish a brand that’s resilient to the changing times and create customer experience that gets better with every interaction in today’s digital economy.

This new customer has greater expectations, requires higher control and engages more actively with brands. These customers have new social channels to express their opinions and can easily do so through their smart phones. Peer, review/validation and communication is high on the agenda and they expect more ways to communicate and shop anytime, anywhere.

So what does this mean to the marketing mix? Over 60% of the marketing spend is going to be spent on the non-traditional digital content like social networks, blogs, mobile, etc. This signals the demise of the traditional CMO. What this means, it requires CMOs to educate themselves on the latest emerging tools and techniques of measuring the customer’s voice, satisfaction and also to understand in detail the disruptive influence of online platforms and channels on a customer’s purchase behaviour. That is by no means the be-all and end-all of the CMO’s role. This requires a radical shift in mindset. The CMO’s responsibility is to initiate and implement that change.

With this rise in customer-centric organizations, CMO and their teams are now the key enabler for organizations to work cohesively and to have an accurate read of customer behaviour. Customer support becomes an integral element in customer engagement and creating great customer satisfaction.

So successful enterprises who have crossed this chasm and become truly customer-oriented, have aligned customer experience and support to the CMOs. These are organizations of the future catering to the new age of the customer.

Supporting the connected customer

Deriving Value from Deeper Customer Insights

Excellent customer support has traditionally been the key to market success. Maintaining customer satisfaction levels would be the goal of any enterprise, specially a support organisation. But this is becoming an increasingly difficult task in a constantly connected world. While automated and connected systems and processes generate and accumulate mammoth amounts of customer data at every interaction point, not many tech support teams realise the value they are sitting on.

The tech support organisation of any enterprise is the biggest repository for customer data, and needs to learn how to store both structured and unstructured data to use it to their best advantage. In most cases, all that is required is awareness that this data bank can be a fertile ground for reaping intelligent insights. That can actually be the biggest market differentiator.

It is time that enterprises realise the value that this data can provide, with the help of the right analytics and Big data solutions. In the enterprise world today, it is this value that can be the keystone of superlative customer experience. An intelligent Big data strategy can play the most significant role in generating meaningful customer insights from these huge amounts of data. It has the capability to offer scale out, cost effective analytics framework, that adds the ability to ensure business strategies have strong data backup.

The biggest point of contention for the tech support teams and the primary reason why they do not recognise the business value for this data, because it is completely unstructured and comes from very disparate sources and the backend systems don’t have the intelligence needed to analyse the new data.

The Big data strategy needs to be based on the premise that its utility is for providing better customer service, so essentially CEM (Customer Experience management) needs to be the core layer of this strategy. The fact that this is a business strategy, with revenue implications, will ensure it is put to good use. However, there needs to also be an awareness that an analytics strategy is not merely about facts, figures and statistics. It has to do with intangibles that nevertheless add value to an engagement – excellence in agent performance and understanding customer behaviour, which build up to data collation. In order to be able to chart out an effective strategy for extracting meaningful insights not only from customer interaction content but also legacy data which is often concealed in silos, analytical tools are the best support. Since data flow is dynamic, and a constant, an analytical framework that uses a loosely coupled Big Data strategy is needed. What is needed is a clear technology layer that derives, sifts and structures data from myriad sources, and presents the right data for an efficient customer experience across all touchpoints.

Only an action driven, well supported Big Data strategy can ensure that this technology sits on a comfortable framework of customer support and will be able to offer enterprises maximum value from this data. For this, the support of a technology and strategy integrator, an intelligent partner to success is imperative.

 

Being a Service Provider in a Connected World

 

Being a Service Provider in this era of Connected World, entails delivering effective Customer Support. Effective customer support leads to Superlative Customer Experience. But this would require a 360° understanding of each customer which is easier said than done.

With an Analytics led Support Services, a support would be able to proactively provide this customer understanding

Customer Understanding -> High Attrition Risk -> Opportunity for Xsell/Upsell – > Repeat Caller, Repeat problem, High Value customer, Existing Customer Life time value -> Big Ticket Customer -> Customer Expectations -> Weekend/seasonal preferences -> Ethnicity/Demographics relativity to Customer behavior -> Customer lifecycle/interactions on various channels =Proactive monitoring/active to adaptive response based on VoC = Customer Loyalty

Thus the bottom-line implications of data mining and analytics is significant for any product/services enterprise. But the cost and complexity of setting up a data mining and analytics practice is a deal breaker for such enterprises.

Any support services provider with capability around the Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud service enablers can support and enable such enterprises by setting up their information management / Analytics, all at a fraction of regular time and costs of traditional solutions in the market. Thus, the desired understanding of the customer becomes a reality, so that such enterprises can start targeting the right customers for retention, sales & growth creating an impact on the bottom line.

 

Supporting the connected customer

Deriving Value from Deeper Customer Insights

Excellent customer support has traditionally been the key to market success. Maintaining customer satisfaction levels would be the goal of any enterprise, specially a support organisation. But this is becoming an increasingly difficult task in a constantly connected world. While automated and connected systems and processes generate and accumulate mammoth amounts of customer data at every interaction point, not many tech support teams realise the value they are sitting on.

The tech support organisation of any enterprise is the biggest repository for customer data, and needs to learn how to store both structured and unstructured data to use it to their best advantage. In most cases, all that is required is awareness that this data bank can be a fertile ground for reaping intelligent insights. That can actually be the biggest market differentiator.

It is time that enterprises realise the value that this data can provide, with the help of the right analytics and Big data solutions. In the enterprise world today, it is this value that can be the keystone of superlative customer experience. An intelligent Big data strategy can play the most significant role in generating meaningful customer insights from these huge amounts of data. It has the capability to offer scale out, cost effective analytics framework, that adds the ability to ensure business strategies have strong data backup.

The biggest point of contention for the tech support teams and the primary reason why they do not recognise the business value for this data, because it is completely unstructured and comes from very disparate sources and the backend systems don’t have the intelligence needed to analyse the new data.

The Big data strategy needs to be based on the premise that its utility is for providing better customer service, so essentially CEM (Customer Experience management) needs to be the core layer of this strategy. The fact that this is a business strategy, with revenue implications, will ensure it is put to good use.

However, there needs to also be an awareness that an analytics strategy is not merely about facts, figures and statistics. It has to do with intangibles that nevertheless add value to an engagement – excellence in agent performance and understanding customer behaviour, which build up to data collation. In order to be able to chart out an effective strategy for extracting meaningful insights not only from customer interaction content but also legacy data which is often concealed in silos, analytical tools are the best support. Since data flow is dynamic, and a constant, an analytical framework that uses a loosely coupled Big Data strategy is needed. What is needed is a clear technology layer that derives, sifts and structures data from myriad sources, and presents the right data for an efficient customer experience across all touchpoints.

Only an action driven, well supported Big Data strategy can ensure that this technology sits on a comfortable framework of customer support and will be able to offer enterprises maximum value from this data. For this, the support of a technology and strategy integrator, an intelligent partner to success is imperative.