News, Views & Reviews on Digital Process Automation, BPM, Performance Management & IT industry trends
CRM is not just about dealing with customer touchpoints and automating them. It’s about your internal processes relating to sales, marketing and service and aligning them to your revenue objectives and those of your customers
This article was originally published on Forbes India Blogs and has been lightly edited This year, the number of smartphones, tablets and connected devices is expected to cross 7 billion – that will mean more connected devices than there are human beings on earth. With more and more people owning smart gadgets, these devices are going to have an increasingly bigger influence on our communication patterns, online habits and of course, our buying habits, and globally, organisations are trying…
You might find this funny, and maybe even somewhat disjointed in logic, but the IT industry after all these years, is now going through its teen years and it appears to have all the makings of ‘teenage’ as we know it. Even if 2014 is only its second year, the anxiety, the tension is all very visible. Cloud, Mobile, Social, internet-of-things, – look at it anyway you like, there is a writing on the wall that the extent of change…
Updated and republished. Craig Reid posted a great write-up about customer on-boarding this week that I think is a good read covering some of the usual issues plaguing the old customer on-boarding process. I am repeatedly surprised when I learn about how badly organizations – fairly large ones at that – handle customer on-boarding. If on-boarding is as important as it might seem, judging from the vehemence with which they agree it is, how come it turned out such a mess?…
Even as the enterprise IT landscape evolved over the past decades, markets, economy, and technology forces have affected key considerations that dominate and influence annual IT budgets. The nature and the unique mix of these forces, in any given year, have correspondingly triggered a rather unique set of influencers shaping IT budgets. We saw the wave of ‘seamless’ enterprise thinking; then the idea of an extended enterprise arose. Next was data-intelligence, followed by compliance, and then there was E2.0….
Last week work beamed me to Chennai in Southern India, a city where I was born and had also spent a large part of my childhood. Work has taken me to Chennai often and I am usually booked at a hotel that is not far from where I lived as a kid. The hotel has a lot of nostalgia value for me, for, among other things, it has a swimming pool where I spent a few hours every evening through my…
When we are at the receiving end of poor customer service, it unfailingly ticks us off. Being champions of process only makes it a little more painful because even while we go through a first-hand experience of poor customer service –- be it over the phone or a counter –- we are also immediately able to see beneath the surface and understand why things are likely going wrong. Now, on a theoretical plane, you might think that this ability…
I read this rather interesting piece on Knowledge@Wharton, titled Is Business-centric Social Networking a Revolution — or a Ruse? The Article discusses Social Networking adoption in the enterprise. Overall it is a pretty interesting read, and the article quotes IDC research that predicts that “the global market for social platforms will jump from $630 million in 2011 to $1.86 billion by 2014.” I don’t know about you, but to me it is a huge surprise. The market is actually…
How will social BPM affect your customer? The possibilities that Social concepts lend to BPM are interesting. Doug Mow used the the right words – Today’s social media reality makes the customer a very influential source of word of mouth pressure both positive and negative. I think the use of the word Influential is very important to note. There has been much said about how Social Media will impact traditional methods of managing functions that involve customer interactions with the…
Updated. A few weeks back, this post of Dr.Natalie provoked several threads of thought on the growing influence of Social Media in business. Besides the obvious benefits of Social Media in Marketing, the biggest benefit from applying Social Media in business is arguably from the customer service function. Twitter for example allows customers to interact with individuals in the customer service functions, establishing several one-on-one communication threads directly. Assuming the agents are sufficiently trained and use the medium effectively, the…
An endless number and combinations of technologies are available for organizations to use, woo and win customers and then keep them happy. There is even a spate of emerging technologies – like Enterprise 2.0, that is going to be immensely valuable in this. But, exactly how valuable? Like I had discussed in one of my earlier posts(Click:The Corrotion of Competitive Advantage), all these technologies are available equally to all players. But, obviously the same technologies or combination of technologies produce…
There is an exercise common to IT service companies that is so very critical that its importance can never be over-emphasised. It brings together the best effort of people from different departments, different roles, different levels and can make a big difference to the course an organization takes. And then there is an activity that is a terrible waste of time, so much so that it can completely drain away and collosally waste weeks or months of collective hard work…
The failure rate of software implementations involving CRM has always been a cause of concern for both vendors as well as buyers. What makes a CRM implementation successful? How can an organization ensure ROI beyond expectations? In tough markets, how can organizaitons be sure to impact topline throught investments in CRM?