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.

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.