Quick thought: where is the money in social networking?

Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, will not make the big bucks just from advertizing. They will make money by selling diaries! Think about it; members are recording their lives on these sites. The math is simple. $30/diary x 1B members x 50% attached rate =  $15B

StreetSmart: Don’t Fall for Vendor-Centric ROI Tales.

No one learns how to navigate a dangerous neighborhood in the safety of a classroom. Likewise, you won't become street savvy when you let a Vendor ‘Sell’ you a ‘Free’ ROI study. By no means, take the freebee! Beware! Vendors often tailor ‘Free’ ROI assessment studies to capabilities bound by limitations of their technology. These Vendor-Centric studies can limit the true potential of the business.

 

Tip: Before you put your career and reputation on the line, read the Complete Guide to Call Center ROI, scrutinize the ‘Free’ findings and make your own judgment. Own it!

 

In the Customer-Service business, return on investment (ROI) for Knowledge Management Solutions is typically determined by calculations on cost-savings/cost-avoidance basis. There is a great opportunity to achieve a significant ROI by generating revenue while servicing customers. Cost-savings/cost-avoidance based ROI usually results to a much harder sale and in most cases a longer budget approval cycle.

 

While most of the emphasis of the calculations is suggested on very specific performance metrics, suitable for a throughput-centric call center, very few calculations take into account the evolution of a call center from throughput-centric environment to a quality-centric and ultimately customer-centric profit center. As business strategies change to adapt to the economic environment, Customer-Service should also be aligned accordingly to meet new strategic goals.

 

This paper intends is to expose ROI calculations from the Customer-Service-Business point of view as opposed to Solution–Centric limited view. The paper will further discuss different types of technologies currently available in the market and evaluate their ability to meet the requirements of highly demanding modern Customer Service Business.

 

Click here to receive a FREE Complete Guide to Call Center ROI.

5 minute Recipe: Knowledge-Base Vendor Evaluation

A good knowledgebase yields operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction। The faster you or your customer finds information the bigger the benefits. So, you’ve done your homework, you understand the ROI, secured the budget and made a conscious decision to purchase a Knowledge Base Solution. Time to evaluate product features; zoom in, this is important.

Tip: If you have a budget, don’t allow vendors waste your time in producing the obvious ROI calculation. Spend time in evaluating the technology


Search
A ‘Vanilla’ requirement: Spell tolerant, keyword search. They all have it, and if they don’t, drop them off the list. Give extra credit to the vendor that offers out-of-the-box keyword to synonym matching. It will be a life saver down the road.

Natural Language Processing (NLP); very effective for end-users (Self-Service). You don’t need it in call centers; phone based agents don’t have time to type complete sentences. Don’t waste their time.

Tip: Some vendors claim they have NLP simply because they can tokenize text and stem keywords. This so called morphological analysis is not adequate. Look for ability to resolve ambiguity and understand intend. Beware of hidden requirements to create extensive taxonomies and manual corpus annotation.

Browse
The ability to browse groups of articles organized in topic-subtopic hierarchies is a simple and effective way to locate information. Never choose a product that doesn’t have the capability even if you are convinced you don’t need it; your users expect it.
Look for systems that automatically optimize topic-subtopics trees. If the vendor doesn’t have an automatic capability, confirm they have consultants that can do the job.

Tip: folder-subfolders created by authors are rarely useful to an end-user. Look for the capability of decoupling topic-subtopic trees from author taxonomies.

DFAQ
Dynamically generated FAQs is not just a ranking of articles based on frequency they were used.  DFAQ is the automatic compilation of end-user questions and their corresponding answer derived from the Knowledgebase. The ranking algorithm should be overridable and must include a time decay factor to reduce the importance of old FAQs.

Tip: my clients find it extremely effective when the DFAQ list is contextual. DFAQ Context can be derived from the selected topic, the search query or the sequence of pages viewed. Look for the vendor that can demonstrate it as an out-of-the-box feature.

Key ingredients for an intelligent Knowledgebase

A paradigm shift necessary to fuel KnowledgeBase 2.0 concepts.

The neglect of the obvious has been fatal to the development of scientific thought. The false conception of an intelligent knowledgebase as a means of “reading your mind” in my opinion largely vitiated the practical approach to intelligence. The view set forth in my next blog is merely academic: Key ingredients for an intelligent Knowledgebase

1. Proactively engage by monitoring my activity on the website thus intercepting my requests for assisted service
2. Adapt to my level of expertise, channel of interaction (cellphone, website, IVR) and locality
3. Learn and harvest the community knowledge
4. Inform and notify about its usefulness, performance and areas of improvement

Can Call Centers benefit from a Cynefin-framework for Decision making?

<Coming soon!>

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 .