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 at $630 million this year?  But how? Perhaps I am just not clued in. Maybe I will go read up that release by IDC to understand those numbers better. But, on the other hand, to be sure, there are social business tools available as of date.

Today, creating effective social networking applications for the enterprise space is still a work in progress. Salesforce.com in February launched a social business tool called Chatter.com that is an extension of the company’s cloud-based customer relationship management software. In many respects, Chatter.com — which was promoted by Salesforce with ads that aired during the Super Bowl — mimics Facebook and Twitter in allowing employees to share profiles, comment on projects and “follow” colleagues as well as corporate business processes such as invoices and sales proposals. In December, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, the most visible champion of social business, described Chatter as being like “your business is Tweeting you.”

From a BPM perspective, we have ourselves been talking about various approaches to integrating Social Media into our process execution  – not because it is a must-do according to some hype-cycle,  but because of the natural synergies we see in fusing Social Media & Networking paradigms to achieve more effective employee collaboration and therefore employee empowerment and effectiveness.  In fact, many of the shortcomings of viewing all processes as a linear sequence of activities could be overcome.

However if you have been following the social media scene and some of the trends, you may not necessary agree with the whole article. I winced when I read this part –

Because young people increasingly rely on Facebook and Twitter to communicate in their personal lives, employers must bring similar tools to those workers, experts say.

I am not sure which experts have been quoted, but that’s certainly not expert view. This has been one of the most ridiculous myths of Social Media.

Over a year back I wrote a post (Social Media, The Stage is Being Set for BPM) on how with serious quantitative research, some of the myths associated with social media adoption are being shattered. I had quoted a survey by Neilson that suggested that over two-thirds of those on Social Media comprised of folks upwards of 25 years of age.

This whole ‘Millennial’ logic is just unfounded and, to put it kinder words, it’s just a lot of bovine output. I recall reading Scott Francis and Sandy Kemsley reacting to this with as much aggravation.

In fact the first comment at the end of this article blew the fuse and set me off on this post. Sift through the rest of the comments, and you will see reactions from the non-millennial.

And now, tell me. How many of those who you know or engage with on Social Media – be it LInked-in, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever else, fall under that ‘millennial’ band? Or younger than 22? Or even 24?

Right. That’s what I thought.

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

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 organization – customer service, for example.

Peter’s question, therefore, whether Social BPM will put the customer in charge is, thought provoking, in a tangential sense (exactly how it was meant to be ).

But, IMHO, the idea of a social enabled customer facing BPM application is really not about ‘putting the customer in charge’. In fact it should not be that. Now this may seem blasphemous, but stay with me for a minute more.

Social is but a channel of interaction. Just as the telephone and toll-free numbers are. Customer service, for example, on Social Media and BPM provide a new channel to reach support. But what makes this channel so important is that it additionally also gives the power of word-of-mouth to the customer – which means each customer experience you generate, good or bad, could be known to the world. And therefore it calls for lot of thought and preparation before you open this very important channel.

But no matter what any new technology or technology paradigm brings to Customer Service, its impact will only be on one or more of the following aspects of customer interaction -

• – Ease with which customers can reach the organization,
• – The actual nature and experience of customer-organization touch-points, &
• – The approach adopted towards actual fulfilment of customer need.

Behind each of these is a machinery whose basics remain more or less the same – regardless of which technology you use and how you leverage it.

In the end though how effectively the actual fulfilment is done will be most critical – and to do that you need to be the boss and in total control of what goes on there and how effectively.

So the point is that the customer role in CS on SM and BPM is very influential, but that is not to be confused with who needs to be in charge.

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

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 communication style can be personal and can bring about a feeling that one is interacting with another individual genuinely eager to help and not to some impersonal customer service machinery driven by rigid structures and processes.

However, most other channels of customer interaction – Phone, Email, etc are typically integrated with applications – and that helps in maintaining SLAs, TATs and monitoring metrics on service requests. One caveat of using Social Media in Customer Service is that agents may get too involved in specific requests that their ability to multi-task and quickly close calls can be compromised. The other caveat is that maintaining and monitoring CS metrics may be compromised. Of course one might say that every request triggered over Twitter would be logged by the service agent, but that’s allowing a manual gap to creep into your CS function.

Therefore, in addition to aligning Social Media to people, benefits can be taken a notch further by aligning them to applications.

Prof. Dr. Michael Rosemann writes about bringing BPM and Twitter together in this interesting post on the Aris Community Blog(also read Sandy Kemsley’s commentary on the post).

Dr. Rosemann’s post talks about how Twitter can be used in three ways – follow processes – that is to have updates provided when changes to processes are made; have Processes follow you – in situations for example when you go on leave and substitute needs to be assigned; and finally use Twitter at an instance level as an alerts and notifications channel.

In all these cases, Twitter can be immensely useful. However, Twitter is used as a delivery channel or as a medium of output.

As an input channel into BPM, the potential of Twitter can be further exploited –

1. Trigger new process instances, for example a customer service instance. When a customer sends a Twitter message, an instance of a Service Request is triggered. A whole lot of status updates can be maintained by using pre-defined keywords in the messages sent by the CS representative owning the call, perhaps using a proprietary service. This becomes very meaningful in keeping the sanity of customer service requests and in treating all requests on par regardless of the channel your customer may choose to communicate.
2. Elementary Requests (those that can pack all related input info in under 140 characters of course!) for Approvals, authorizations, notification-wait type of activities, etc can be sent and received via Twitter. Once the approval/authorization/go ahead is received, the process instance would move on. Today many BPMS use an email approval functionality – and twitter can also be another channel.
3. Querying for status – these could be internal or external, related to delivery of finished goods, serviced items, status of processing requests and so on. Users would need to quote a specific order number, ticket number or other such unique code that would fetch the data. However these need not be necessarily a BPM linked functionality

Anymore you can think of?

Update: Ultimus, a BPM vendor on the Gartner Magic Quadrant,  announces that the feature was recently included in its product.

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

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 different impacts on different organizations.

So the very crucial question we are back to is, given the same products, solutions and vendors, what really gives one company a higher return in value over another ?

To what extent can these technologies really value–add to you — be it in terms of costs, efficiency, TATs, Customer delight etc.?

Off-the-cuff, one could say it is largely influenced by

• How foolproof your choice of technology is, given the context of your business, industry and organizational ecosystem (culture, technology etc.)
• How well your organization is able to pick the right vendors
• How well you are able to exploit vendors, their skills and align their delivery objectives to your own larger objectives.
• And, of course, how well you are able to collaborate with vendors and internal stakeholders to drive results.

A few days ago, I realized that at the end of the day, the extent of success and efficacy of technology, solutions, projects, need not always be rooted in strategy and such macro level blah. For, you can have the most well thought-out strategically-crafted-to-the-last-detail technology implementation, and it can still all go up in a poof.

I think it boils down finally to one basic ingredient – The density of smart, involved people you have that are managing the details and delivery of each project.

A recent experience of mine re-enforced this very fundamental, yet incredibly crucial aspect that can make or break that elusive value you are looking for.

Let me explain.

Two years ago, I had taken a health insurance policy that is due for renewal end of this month.

As with most insurance players, this company seems to have adopted a plethora of technology to ensure service is dispensed to customers across multiple delivery channels. That would include mailers, emails, call centers, Text Messaging and Agents.

And so, as the date for the renewal of my health policy approached, all channels cranked up into action and I started receiving couriers, snail mails, emails…and phone calls.

The experience I went through seemed to be putting each channel to the test on the very fundamentals for which they were built to exist. Read on…

Call Centres – Ad-hoc Calling and Bad Coordination

While in the middle of a discussion at work on Thursday, a sweet voice on the phone told me about the due date and the renewal.

“Oh yes! Yeah. That’s right. But…OK, but…..err …” and finally when I could get a word in, I said” Can you give me a call this evening after 7? Not 7? Err…oh. No 10 am tomorrow is not good for me. How about Saturday? OK thanks!”

The sweet voice apparently forgot to call me on Saturday, and I had things to do, so the day just went by.

Then the barrage started. A pack of hounds was unleashed on me. I ran. I tried to hide. I even tried to turn off and hide my phone. But they just wouldn’t let up.

It started with 2 calls a day, then 4 and then yesterday I received 9 calls – every one of them timed badly. Not all their fault, but bad timing nonetheless, but the calls went something like this.

Teleagent: Hello sir, I am calling from EagerTechonlogyAdopter insurance company…

Me: Yes hi. Can we speak later please, I am in the middle of something….

I was not getting annoyed with the Insurer. Yet. Because all this time, I was only annoyed at my own inability to spare reasonable time to do what needed to be done.

But as the calls kept coming, I began noticing something else. There were no more sweet voices. The people who were calling me changed each time and the ‘quality’ of the caller began to dramatically fall. By that, I mean speaking style, diction and command over the language, phone etiquette, etc.

When I finally did manage to take the call yesterday evening, the quality of the agent had fallen so bad that he could hardly speak English and was generously peppering his sentences with Hindi. But I didn’t mind that. I had decided by then to go ahead with the renewal. And so we continued talking and the teleagent was taking details from me to make the renewal over the phone.

And then came the moment of hesitation and my interest in doing this renewal crumbled.

“Can I have your credit card number sar?”

Posed with such a question I was coming to terms with a risky proposition. Is it safe to give your credit card number over the phone? How do I know this person is actually calling from the insurance company? How do I know that even if he was employed with them, he wouldn’t misuse my card number?

I thanked the agent abruptly and ended the call. I decided that if I have to give such details I would rather call the number provided by the insurance company on their site or in the letter they had sent by courier.

Text Messages – Technology delivering confusion

Few minutes later I got an SMS alert from the same insurer. Here is the message

A stitch in time saves nine. Your health policy 999999 is due for renewal in 5 days Renew INSTANTLY, call now 18009ABC9999. Toll Free.

Great coincidence! Perfect timing!

But alas, the message that was sent to me came to my GSM phone. And it is common knowledge GSM phones don’t support 1800 numbers. I didn’t have any MTNL or BSNL numbers to rush to. So that was a wasted message.

I let that moment of committing to a business go by because I thought that I wouldn’t be able to call from my GSM phone.

But guess what? I was wrong.

Two days later in a fit of desperation, I just irrationaly called the 1800 number from my GSM phone, and surprise of all surprises, it did go through!

The immediate impulse of action that the message prompted me to could have been exploited with a content worded thus

A stitch in time saves nine. Your health policy 999999 is due for renewal in 5 days Renew INSTANTLY, call  18009ABC9999. Now you can call from your GSM phone too! Toll Free.

The Means or The End?

So here is the story of an insurance company that has had its retail customer retention strategy seemingly well defined, and top of the line technology aligned to support it, but both obviously falling apart at some points where there is human participation.

Smart People: Not Always An HR Issue

The system or process must not absolve the doers of the opportunity or their responsibility to think. In fact it should facilitate it. When that happens, the zombies transform into smart people. The objectives of the thinkers will then be less of a challenge to align with the objectives of the doers.

If you are not going to produce high number of smart people among the doers, then the mission of the strategists is never aligned to the mission of the doers, no matter how well your process is designed. You can talk endlessly of process and establishing controls and approvals and reviews, but at the end of the day, if the doers are not going single-mindedly towards your mission, then, well, that is a problem.

Take the content of the SMS. There is only an extent to which technology adoption, or managing business processes can do. It cannot tell you what content to put in the Text message. Technology adoption is not going to give you great returns if the content in your SMS message is misleading or false.  If the content is crafted with the fundamental objectives firmly in mind, chances are that it will more often than not, produce desireable results.

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

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 and effort of several key resources. It can mildly exacerbate differences among teams and magnify overlap of ownership and can cause temptation to indulge in some toe-stepping.

The ironic thing is although both these seem diagonally opposite, they can still be describing the same activity

Responding to RFPs.

Weeks, sometimes months of effort goes into it. Document after document is formatted, version upon version is consolidated, architecture after architecture is drawn up.

And if you win the deal, it was all worth it. If you don’t, you sigh and move on.

Perhaps this is not as unique to IT companies as I have made it sound. It happens in Manufacturing as well as other industries – almost any industry that has a B2B revenue model.

Nonetheless, in the IT industry there may be at least one significant difference – more often than not, the team that gets together to respond to an RFP may be different each time. Solution architects, Domain Experts, technical architects, subject matter experts, account managers – are all spread across different Vertical Domains, CoEs and Technology Practices. Each RFP demands a unique mix of these resources.

What effort goes into this and how much of it is unproductive? Or productive?

lets say 6 people from the middle management  get involved in making one RFP. For this discussion, let us not include in this 6 the usual Sales Manager, Account Manager or Sales support and coordination people who usually also get involved in each proposal.

These 6 people  typically taking about two weeks to complete their part of the RFP, so we are talking about 480 person hours. Thats roughtly $12,000 of billable time at an average resource cost of $25 per hour.

Ask your sales, what their conversion has been – if it is 8:1, it means one proposal wins for every 8 lost.

That means you have to make 9 proposals or respond to 9 RFPs to crack one deal.

What all that says, is you invest rougly $108,000 to close one deal. And this does not include sales and marketing effort and expenses, tele support and other sales costs. Ok, and another thing,  I am not going to get petty and include infrastructure cost from all the conference calls, discussions, white boarding sessions and anything else that goes into responding to one RFP.

Thats a lot of money to close one account. Or to put it differently, thats a lot of money to lose 8 accounts.

Question that seems to be more important right now to me is, who is paying for it? whose budget does this pre-sales cost come off? it certainly does not come off the sales cost, because sales is not paying this money. It certainly is not  a cost that can be billed to any customer.

If you are from Manufacturing or the BFSI segment, I may not be very off mark when I say that the people who respond to RFPs are more often than not, the same, But still some of the points that I am trying to make may still be relevant to your industry.

But what are your thoughts?  Do we look at this as a necessary evil that must be taken in the right spirit – read philosophically – or should we get palpitations and try to find means to minimise this?

And finally, if you are a prospective buyer, a client, a customer, how would you react if you had to pay  vendors (actuals would do) for responding to RFPs? How much would you be willing to pay??

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.

In most implementation engagements, the key aspects of strategic thinking, solution design and delivery are typically sliced apart in silos involving resources with different skills, causing lack of synergy ultimately resulting in the loss of a huge opportunity to unlock value from an implementation. While almost any software implementation has this shortcoming, in a CRM implementation, these silos exacerbate the causes of failure even more, and further render these implementations more operational in nature.

CRM projects demand a not-so-apparent duality of perspective. While maintaining a well planned external view, CRM implementations should also ensure that organizations are able to also look inward to address internal processes and drive them towards more efficiency.

The entire relationship management process has to be an efficient orchestra of inward and outward looking processes, both driven by the twin objectives of revenue profitability to the organization and value benefits to the customer.

If cognizance of this duality is lacking, the core purpose of the CRM exercise is undermined.On the other hand, if the duality is effectively addressed, you have organizational processes aligning brilliantly to create significant value benefits.

Providing such value benefits to customers in implementation situations could result in customers who go beyond being happy – because you end up delivering value that may even be beyond defined deliverables.

Your Revenue Function needs more attention!

In most organizations, the revenue generation function, despite being one of the most important, is still one of the least organized. And what is interesting is that just a little bit of screw-tightening can have a ripple of positive effects.

Lets take a look at how re-aligning a single aspect of the sales management process can lead to a series of positive effects on subsequent events in the revenue cycle – thereby facilitating improved efficiency of sales efforts leading to improved revenue performance.

A holistic plan – the fundamental need

Organizations have to understand what makes them effective in generating demand and revenue, and of course, what limits their effectiveness. Many organizations, unfortunately, focus on various effectiveness parameters such as closure skills while neglecting efficiency. When revenue realization becomes a concern, organizations are tempted to make investments in marketing, training etc. these may include buying prospect databases, training on effective negotiating, closure skills, etc; printing fresh collaterals and so on. These are all at best, ‘point solutions’, while the need of the hour could be to look at ways to improve underlying sources of dysfunction.

The challenge to sales managers is in viewing sales processes from a holistic perspective. Organizations need strong processes that allow the various players in sales and marketing to work together to meet common objectives and sales managers have to first understand how the right processes and technology make them efficient.

Surprisingly, in many organizations, sales and marketing typically have the least mature processes compared to product development, finance and accounting, service and support and other functions.

Defining The Sales Process

Typical Sales Force Automation allows consolidation of sales pipeline information such as activities and opportunities and allows sales managers a view of what is being done by sales people to achieve targets. Unfortunately this expectation from an SFA implementation would not only limit the potential of the solution to improve internal processes and even revenue, but could be the very reason why an implementation could fail. Sales Tools must not be seen as reporting tools. Sales people are very reluctant to share information and implementations that are insensitive to this psychology are almost sure to fail.

Revenue and Profitability must be King, Not the customer!

One of the most widely quoted ‘truths’ in any industry is that the Customer is King. It is a statement with such profound implications, that debating it would amount to blasphemy. But lets take that point as an argument. Organizations need to understand and acknowledge first that if there is only one purpose to relationship with any customer, that one purpose cannot be ‘Make customer feel like King’. Instead it would quite simply be “make a profit”. The relationship occurred in the first place because the organization saw a revenue opportunity and the customer saw a value. Therefore an organization will benefit the most when it acquires only those customers that can help it achieve its revenue growth plan – which means the cost of acquiring, cost of keeping, cost of growing should all contribute positively to that growth plan.Such a carefully selected basket of customers are the ones you should treat like a king. And here starts the process definition basics of the inward looking aspects of CRM.

Aligning processes to strategic objectives

Indeed this key philosophy would help in defining the entire scope of the CRM gamut, going back as early as the lead generation stage – defining criteria to pick leads of a certain type.Lead Management and criteria definition are not any radical shift in thinking. These have been age-old and are perfected by many organisations. But how effectively do we have existing, familiar processes synchronized to boardroom strategy?Infosys, to take a simple example, announced recently that it would chase large sized-deals. When such decisions are taken, is there a mechanism to translate it into effective action? Here lies the true challenge. Considering that revenue results lag effort, processes have to be agile enough to be able to help translate boardroom strategy into quick action on the field.

The first step would be evolving criteria to define a typical profile of a customer. These criteria when applied for selection of leads & prospects ensures that accounts of a certain pre-determined type and quality are chosen to direct sales efforts at. With this step we address the organizational strategy to serve customers of a particular profile. Examples of criteria could be as simple as the following – customers with revenue between $0.5 to $0.75 billion, customers who prefer engagement contracts for minimum of 2 years, customers where we have already made at least two other service offerings amounting to $200,000 and so on. Of course, depending on the sales plan, context, products/services, more complex criteria can be defined.

Lets take a peek at the fall-out of such a process approach and its positive influence many aspects of revenue generation.

Sales success or failure is a result of how effectively sales time is utilized by sales people. If the target prospect criteria also includes parameters that would help sales easily gauge relative prospect priorities, then effort will be directed at the prospects that are most likely to close. This would go a long way in making optimal use of his available selling time – and would indeed help in better conversion rates. Examples of such criteria could be – Customers with current year plant modernization budget more than $1m, rating the customer on the criticality of the need, and so on.

We have now seen how boardroom strategy can be translated effectively to

1. Ensure the quality of customers is consistent
2. Make sales process itself more effective because it has actually defined the type of prospects sales people deal with. Lesser drops, higher lead-to-conversion ratios.
3. Further, give scope for better adoption: a tool that helps a sales person better prioritize his time and effort, and eventually helps him with more success is bound to be seen more favorably too. Further, as an ongoing process, if organizations can fine-tune various target prospect criteria, they could be in better control of parameters such as lead conversion, duration in the pipeline, sales involvement, effective cross and up selling, etc, all of which allow the sales team to make more effective use of their time. Of course, one very agreeable outcome is that Sales Managers will be more confident now of their forecasts.

And we haven’t even done anything yet that demands any special additional effort from the sales people!

People, Process and Technology : In-synch

Improving adoption through such tools therefore has to be achieved by empowering the sales people; helping them become more effective and by removing barriers to effective selling. Typical barriers occur because of dysfunctional processes. A process-oriented approach ensures that all related business processes are aligned to both strategic as well as sales objectives. The effort to improve sales effectiveness can lead to more revenue opportunities; better marketing effectiveness, shorter sales cycles and several similar goals.

And the starting point to designing such a process is an enterprise view of how an organization attracts and draws effectively on customer interactions to effectively drive revenue activities. Access to the right information at the right time drives effective internal processes that maximize sales opportunities. And this can happen when people, process, technology and information are all aligned to strategic objectives.

The role of technology in most situations CRM is more about realizing an opportunity cost. An organization could anyway reasonably manage without such a tool. But when implemented properly, the right CRM product has the potential to give benefits that can surpass expectations immensely because it impacts the very core of an organizations growth engine – revenue.

Opportunities for product and services companies

The need for technology implementations to positively impact business processes has been acknowledged widely. Technology vendors are talking to customers more about business strategy and policies, business models, process methodologies, etc., and less on technology and platforms. Customers are also looking for value differentiators, opportunities to increase margins, reduce costs and so on.

The opportunity cost of re-aligning and improving underlying processes, though undefined, could be more significant than many organisations might imagine. That chunk of additional revenue that comes simply by better alignment of processes, people and information stares as an opportunity right in the face of every organization and waits to get noticed and grabbed. Indeed, this can be a very tempting initiative to any organization. By helping customers realize that, tremendous value far beyond expectations can be added. With enough successes and demonstrable capability to indeed add quantifiable revenue improvements to customers, there is a definite option to link the delivery-pricing model to a percentage of revenue improvement realized by the customers.

©2012 Bouncing Thoughts. All Rights Reserved.