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.