Asia is ready to buy! Are you ready to sell? Remove the barriers for successful ventures

Is the Asian Market lucrative enough for s/w and consulting providers? Price, Culture and Imitation are causing heartburns to most of us. [Read Bog- Is it worth doing business in APAC?]

Price: For years, Asia could not afford US rates for Services and Enterprise s/w. Consequently businesses did not buy mission critical s/w and limited their investments to greenfield projects.

In the Asia of 2007, wages and infrastructure costs have sky-rocketed, real estate is rare and expensive, and outsourcing is no longer the ‘cheaper’ option. Only recently, the booming economies have allowed businesses to invest into strategic projects (such as Knowledge Management and CRM). Such investments include valuable consulting services required to maximize ROI and enable best practices.

Asia is ready to buy! Are you ready to sell? Read-on.

Culture: Communication and Cultural barriers are often the source of evaporating margins.

Understanding the culture of our Asian partners, and getting their ‘buy-in’ to best practices, are a key ingredients for success. Asians have analytical minds, in need of hard evidence and proof. (this not that different to doing business in Missouri -the ‘Show Me’ state). My advice? Take the time to build the relationship needed to become a trusted adviser. Be honest and straight to the point. Speak the facts. Explain in cause-effect language. Be respectful and patient.

Imitation. The persistent stereotype about Asia is that companies imitate rather than innovate.

The product imitation mentality is evaporating while focus is shifting to customer experience and service. [Read: Innovasia Survey - top 3 reasons affecting customer choice are: a) 44% Customer experience b) 41% product c) 15% pricing.] S/W vendors in the Customer Services space have a unique opportunity to sell enterprise level s/w with relatively low risk for imitation. The value of enterprise s/w is only unleashed with best practice deployments. Best practice is hard to imitate as it is derived from years of experience in deploying top notch customer service centers. Sell 'value' not just s/w. Sell value as the combination of services, experience and technology.

Is it worth doing business in APAC? Most believe ASIA is not an attractive market for Consulting Services and S/W vendors

Many US-based s/w vendors, do not sell in APAC markets. Three reasons for the lack of interest; Price, Culture, Imitation.

Price: For years, Asia could not afford US rates for Services and Enterprise s/w. As a result, many companies did not sell to Asia. Consequently businesses did not buy mission critical s/w and limited their investments into greenfield projects. The effectiveness of these greenfield projects is low, because they luck the best-practices required to unleash their true potential.

Culture: Communication barriers are often the source of ‘expectation gaps’; a major concern even for the most skillful project manager. If ‘expectation gaps’ are a threat to consulting margins, the ‘quality regardless the usage’ mentality is taking consulting gigs straight into the red. One of my Project Managers complained: “They put the Porsche into first gear and drove it 120 miles/hr without changing gears! Of course it will break; it was never built for that kind of driving. Interesting analogy but it gets the point across. When I asked why we have deviated from ‘best-practice’ I was abruptly reminded that the hard-nosed strong-minded business owner would not take any advise.

Imitation. The Asia stereotype is that companies imitate rather than innovate (Worth noting: Japan did much to dispel this inaccurate label in the last decade). However, the perception has intensified with outsourcing and the new wave of Internet sites in Asia are that often seem to be imitations of those in the West.

Asia is ready to buy! Are you ready to sell? Read my next blog how to overcome these barriers .

Stratos Davlos to Speak at European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning

Contact center knowledge management pioneer to showcase case study on GE’s use of its knowledge management solution for efficient problem resolution and field visit avoidance.

Go to: http://www.pr.com/press-release/16359

The Strategic Value of Knowledge Management

KM is much more than a content source for the contact center.


Knowledge Management (KM) is a poor name for a powerful concept. Names aside, what it stands for is the ability to easily and continuously capture, organize, and make available actionable know-how within an organization. When implemented with the right objectives, process clarification, and people incentives, it unleashes process efficiencies, business model flexibility, market insights, and customer loyalty.

Contact centers and customer service organizations provide some of the best examples of successful KM application. However, KM also has irrefutable value beyond the contact center.

To measure the value of KM beyond the contact center, let's first understand the value that KM brings in the contact center. The first-order benefits of KM in a contact center are measurable, improved agent productivity and reduced agent training time. The second-order benefits of KM are far more significant and strategic, and are mostly reaped by teams beyond the contact center. Here are some examples:

Customer loyalty: KM sharply reduces the need for escalation within a contact center. A large software company saw its technical support escalations drop by 13 percent after it implemented KM. While there is a direct cost benefit of reduced escalation, there is a more strategic impact on customer satisfaction, too. Not surprisingly, the same company saw an 8 percent increase in the "agent informed" score in customer surveys. As consumers we all remember positive service experiences, rare as they are, and reward providers of consistent, accurate service. This translates to repeat business and enduring customer loyalty for companies.

Service model flexibility: KM allows the company to capture the knowledge essential for best practice-based business operation and make it available to all employees and customers, as well as outsourced contact center agents. A large wireless provider implemented KM with the express purpose of reducing the cost of outsourced customer care. Having implemented KM, the provider was able to put out its customer care business to open bid, driving down the cost of its service operation by 20 percent. By eliminating the switching cost of domain knowledge from the equation, the client was able to achieve higher operating efficiencies. In another case, a financial services company deployed KM to accelerate the postmerger resource rationalization across two large customer care teams covering multiple products by empowering agents with service domain knowledge across products of the merged entities.

Market insight: Customer feedback is notoriously difficult to gather and authenticate. Focus groups tend to suffer from the "Hawthorne effect," and market research can be dangerously tilted by its very design and origin. The one place where customers really say what they think of your products and what they want from you is when they ask you for help. Customer service interactions, then, are the mother lode of market insight. Unfortunately, most customer interactions are captured in contact centers as "resolution codes." It is hard to derive trends from a dozen or so resolution codes. Knowledge-powered Web sites and contact centers enable the business to capture the customer's dialogue with your organization, which can be easily mined for churn and upsell points using the analytics capability of KM solutions, resulting in lower customer turnover and higher wallet share of individual customers.

Continuous improvement with learning KM solutions: Without KM, most companies suffer from the "Yoda" effect. Given a situation, there is always some "Yoda" in the company who can best address it. Unfortunately, the "Yoda" is not as easy to spot as in "Star Wars." A well-defined and enforced process to suggest, review, and capture knowledge is an invaluable strategic benefit of a KM system. This closed-loop process fuels continuous learning within the organization, that is hard to replicate by competitors.

While some of these strategic, enterprisewide benefits of KM may not be easy to measure at an operational level, they translate to unique competitive advantage in an environment of increasing product commoditization. Company leaders and senior managers need to keep this mind as they look for ways to increase the value of contact center interactions with customers.

Improving Contact Center Agent Performance: Put The Horse Before The Cart!

Contact centers are at the forefront of customer interactions, and even CEOs are starting to see contact centers as strategic to business growth and performance. However, contact center managers are under constant pressure to control costs while improving service quality and customer experience. Agent salaries constitute more than 60% of contact center operational costs and, therefore, agent productivity is always on the radar screen of contact center executives.

The Agent Productivity Challenge

As every contact center manager knows, enhancing agent productivity is not easy. Common barriers include: Constant agent churn. Unrelenting introduction of new products due to commoditization and compression of product lifecycles. Rising costs of keeping knowledgeable agents.

Pressure to use outsourced agents who know little about the company’s products and services. Ongoing consolidation of contact centers across company divisions and products. Mergers and acquisitions-rampant in the last few years-that require agents to answer questions about products and services that span the merging businesses.

Solutions

Assessing tools to improve productivity in agent service, however, can be a bewildering experience. Popular solutions for improving contact center staff performance are workforce management, monitoring, agent training, and knowledge-enabled interaction management tools. They can be classified into two groups: Pre and post-interaction tools: Workforce management tools primarily help in forecasting service demand and scheduling agents. Monitoring or quality management tools help managers listen to, record, and evaluate agent-customer interactions. Training tools help educate agents about products, services, and interaction skills. Interaction management tools: Knowledge-enabled interaction management tools help agents quickly find answers to customer questions and also up-sell or cross-sell.

So Where Should The Contact Manager Begin?

Address the effectiveness and efficiencies of interactions first, before looking at other areas. Here is why. Knowledge-enabled interaction tools address the root cause of poor agent performance: agents’ inability to answer customer questions, solve problems, or carry out contextual selling activities. That inability comes from their lack of knowledge about the business’ products, services, and best practices. After all, what is the point of scheduling or supervising agents well, when agents are not equipped to handle the interaction satisfactorily? That’s addressing the superficial issue while ignoring the fundamental flaw.

Choosing A Knowledge Tool For Your Agents

Consider the following criteria when evaluating knowledge management solutions to enable customer interactions: Does the solution support interactions across multiple channels and access methods-phone, email, web chat, and web self-service? Does it provide flexible and configurable access methods to content? Does it support search, folder-browse, and dialog-based guided help to increase the productivity of agents of varying competence levels? For instance, novice agents will find a dialog-based problem resolution process easier to use than a complicated search with hundreds of hits. A one-size-fits-all approach to content access is not the optimal approach to knowledge-enabling agents. Will the solution allow you to leverage existing knowledge content and transactional information without having to engage in expensive and time-consuming integration projects? Does it provide adaptive content management tools to monitor content effectiveness and automatically trigger tasks to modify, add, or delete content? Most importantly, does it let agents and other users submit content and feedback? Such tools are critical for optimizing content performance while controlling maintenance costs. Is the solution based on a common platform for multichannel content management for increased service consistency across channels and reduced total cost of ownership? Choosing the right solution for knowledge-enabled interaction management will address the root cause of poor agent performance. It’s important to optimize the quality of interactions by arming agents with common multichannel knowledge content and flexible ways to access the content, before optimizing pre- and post-interaction activities in a contact center.