Technology As Innovator

Abstract

This article gives a guide on how to make profits from an enterprise’s Customer Supports function. Two advanced business opportunities are discussed. It also describes the impact of technology, process and strategy in the business renovation.

Customer Support: From the traditionally cost sector…

Customer Support function has long been considered a cost to business, as it rarely brings more values.

Well, is it the case? If it is accused to not bring values, is it possible that they did not attempt to get value from it?

…To getting golds back from the star-fruits quezacotl

“Vietnamese folklore goes that once upon a time, a man was very annoyed by a strange large bird eating the star-fruits in his garden. He tried to trap the creature and when he succeeded, the bird offered to carry him to a gold island to be released. The man became prosperous with the gold he picked from the isle after then.”

You can get a high Return on your Investment into Customer Support.

Many entrepreneurs know that good customer support is what makes customer happy and thus more willing to buy more and/or spread the good words. Customer Support has been recognized as a PR tool rather than.

Customer Support can be exploited to:

• Increase customer satisfaction
• Develop customer loyalty
• Make the current customers spread the good word: the famous word-of-mouth marketing technique
• Build a community of customers
• Enhance the brand of the enterprise

Now, let’s push it further than that.

(1) Customer Support to increase employee satisfaction

Employee satisfaction is an intangible value of any enterprise. In real life, business development and employee growth is generally mutual exclusive. A way to solve the dilemma will be discussed.

(2) Customer Support as competing Strategy

Becoming the first in the industry requires good Strategies. Maintaining the position requires better Strategies. With the rapid flourishment of the knowledge economy, technology has come in place to revolutionize strategic planning. More on strategies coming next…

How? The five steps

1. Just read

Before actually doing it, it’s advisable that you explore what need done in order to achieve your goal. This article’s got it all for you from a very high level view.

2. Automate it

Employees who do the Customer Supports are agents with specific customer management and troubleshooting skills.

Agents’ tasks are repetitive and require a high level of concentration and accuracy. On the other side, managers want to be updated periodically and recurrently without having to micro-manage. This can put a lot of pressure both employees and team leaders.

Ultimately, now that we are setting the business objective very high (remember all the items covered above?), it would be next to chaos if all things are done manually.

The work must be automated. It is then agents are provided with tools to complete their works, checklists so as not to miss any item and instant support when they need it. Managers receive reports, statistics and figures to analyze and make decisions. Furthermore, automation saves man-hours so the firm may concentrate on developing the most talented workers. Eventually, automation frees all levels from tedious and repetitive works to spend more time on thinking how to improve the process.

A system should be in place to do the harder works so that people can work smarter.

3. Establish a process to support it

For any system or workflow to work properly, the process must be modified to support it.

Process has to be defined so as to gradually switching from paper works to entering and obtaining information from the systems installed.

Re-defining the process is the next investment an enterprise has to spend. However, the Return on Investment shall be well worth it. With automation in place, costs of some processes themselves will be cut down significantly.

For example, it used to take at least 15 minutes to search for a file of a customer in a heap of documents. Now it takes maximum 15 seconds to get all information of that customer by searching in database. That makes it 32 times faster!

So far, Statement (2) has been explained.

4. Mean to really support it

When the system and the process has been in place is the time for training and changing the habit of users. Training effectively has been difficult enough, making a change is even more.

It requires high commitment and strong confidence from Board of Management to request, encourage and motivate employees into the new environment.

Eventually, only if the change is seen as the key strategy to compete will all of its potentials be unlocked. Nothing is more powerful than union between all attending parties, strategies, processes and the product.

5. Let the whole world know

Just what are you waiting for? Let the whole world know
that you’re different,
that you have leaped ahead of all your competitors,
that your customers will be served the best way possible.

Life Business prospect has never been as bright.

Case Study

Suppose you’re the owner of an electronics retailing chain.

You may want to know the level of satisfaction of your customer. You will conduct a survey using Customer Relationship Management System (CRM). Since most of your market segments use the Internet regularly, it is easier to release the survey in electronic format.

To ensure that the survey is done correctly, you may want to arrange your agents to help/guide your (potential) customers through the survey. How do you know if your agents are doing well? Start the Quality Monitoring (QM) System. It will track the interaction between you agents and customers, be the media text chats, audio or video. After saving the interaction, you can always review and remark the performance of any specific agents.

Oh! Some agents are not doing as well as you expected. What will you do? It’s suggested that you review their skill set and portfolio in the Human Resource Management System (HRMS) to make judgment on how to grow them to the required level.

After obtaining the information on the agents, you may want to send them to Training. Today, training doesn’t have to be formal classes with costly instructors from outside. For your information, thousands - I mean hundreds of thousands - training courses, from business to technical, from soft skills to customer management, have been packaged in the form of e-Learning, delivered to your PC, and always ready to launch.

After the training, expect “Wow!” expressions from your beloved customers!

Now that your employees receive adequate feedback of their performance and personalized training addressing their gaps. Their productivity and loyalty will increase proportionally. Happier agents, happier customers too. By the way, has this solved the problem (1) listed above?

The whole process covered above should always be put under supervision. Thank goodness, software can do the micro-tracking for you. With information collected, it is time for Information Analytics power to shine. You can ‘teach’ the software to ‘know’ your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and it will compare the actual performance against your goals to produce conclusion, warnings and predictions.

At the very end of the process, Reports only need to be generated for You to know everything you want, with as few key hits as you want.

Notes

Please note that while I described this scenario for Customer Support only, similar approach can be used on a wide range of business functions: sales to production management, delivery to marketing. Software can be much more powerful if you know how to exploit them.

The case above involves several systems/modules. Theoretically, CRM and HRM systems are typical of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems; Quality Monitoring, Training, KPI are typical of Workforce Optimization Systems.

Conclusion

It can be concluded that from my analysis, Customer Support should no longer be considered a cost. Instead, it brings more opportunities if it is used the right way, is supported with functional systems and appropriate processes and is lead by a clear strategy.

Acknowledgment

with special thanks to:

Gideon Schipper, Business Analyst Manager, First Consulting Group Vietnam

Minh Nguyen, Business Analyst, First Consulting Group Vietnam

Phuc Nguyen, ASEAN System Manager, Procter & Gamble

RUP the Star

Rational Unified Process has been one of the most successful iterative processes. It is also one of the firsts to encourage UML as the universal language. With problems of traditional software development methods identified and diagnosed, RUP arises to solve them. From one perspective, RUP is an effort to manage projects by effectively dealing with failure symptoms.

The world is not enough

Looking from the business perspective, one project in a software development company is one business unit. Though bearing specific characteristics, it follows common principles of every business department. It receives from resource management and provides feedback, it employs its own budget and maintains production plan. Something seems missing. RUP serves as a development process; it is contained within the boundary of software development. Organizational aspects, enterprise management and strategy are not looked into.

Moreover, post-deployment system maintenance and support is critical and it has not been described in RUP. Additionally, systems don’t last forever; they need to be replaced. How to decompose and let a system retire also requires a clear process.

Enterprise Unified Process covers these concerns.

EUP extends RUP

Enterprise Unified Process is an extension of RUP. It is created by Scott W. Ambler from IBM Agile Development. From RUP, EUP adds 2 phases and 7 disciplines

Two phases

1. Production phase offers assistance to end users by clarifying queries, resolving production issues by root-cause analysis and applying fixes for dealing with change requests

2. Retirement phase provides guideline on decommission the product

Seven disciplines

1. Enterprise Business Modeling The artifact - enterprise models - distinguishes the relationship between business process, domain process, enterprise activities, functional entities and functional operations. The difference between EUP Enterprise Business Modeling and RUP Business Modeling is that EBM targets goals and vision of the enterprise.

2. Portfolio Management Portfolio and Program management maintain systems inventory snapshots. They build up data for overall efficiency and effectiveness of diversified software projects management, and help scheduling software implementation in a more strategic fashion. Duplication in functionality is eliminated.

3. Enterprise Architecture Enterprise-level Architecture promoted consistency across the entire organization. The impact is on multiple systems for both the present and the future. Enterprise Architects cast their efforts into building a foundation for future enterprise efforts. It is easily seen that the difference between enterprise architecture and application architecture is on scope.

4. Strategic Reuse Reusing software assets ranges from source code, frameworks to strategic approach to similar accounts. The scope being firm-wide makes it very different from reuse within one application.

5. People Management Due to its particular characteristics, HR management and recruitment in the IT industry faces a lot of difficulties. EUP promotes more focus on HR strategies, where organizing, monitoring, coaching and motivating are all standardized to ensure and improve collaboration.

6. Enterprise Administration Network administration, Facilities administration, Information administration and Security administration are universal across all enterprise. In order to generate consistently effective supports and environment to development, all are to be standardized in the enterprise management process.

7. Software Process Improvement Processes need improvement, and even the activities to improve the process are themselves process.

Benefits of EUP

1. Reducing IT costs. Implementing a strategic approach to reuse for the enterprise can significantly reducing your cost of developing software. Just having an enterprise view of architecture will lead to fewer ‘stovepipe’ applications, which are costly to develop and maintain.
2. Improved IT/business alignment. By improving your enterprise business modeling efforts you improve your understanding of the overall business and thereby increase the chances that you will build systems that reflect their true needs. With a portfolio/program management approach to choosing projects you prioritize and then execute projects based on business needs, thereby improving alignment with the business.
3. Improved business planning. Improved enterprise business modeling has the advantage that it provides insight into your overall business needs and vision, insight that can be used by your executives to manage and guide your organization.
4. Higher quality. Reusing software can lead to higher quality, as reusing an already tested component can lead to fewer defects. Leveraging enterprise architectural solutions that have been tested and proved to work ensure that applications built upon those architectures will improve in quality.
5. Improved IT planning and governance. By implementing the portfolio management discipline, you can obtain a better understanding of and control of your software portfolio by recognizing programs, or families of related products. This can lead to better strategic planning and elimination of overlapping requirements in different systems.
6. Improved levels of service. By understanding the ‘big picture’ through enterprise business modeling and enterprise architecture you are able to identify opportunities to take a systems approach to development which looks at the entire picture, not just the IT aspects of a project. For example, a project team should strive to improve the business process as well as (re)build an application for their end users.
7. Greater adaptability. By having an effective approach to enterprise IT issues you will be able to react to changes within your marketplace, such as new legislation or new competition, more effectively because you will have a better understanding of the potential impact of those changes and a consistent way of addressing them.
8. Reducing time to deliver systems. An improved enterprise-level software process will reduce your overall time to deliver systems for several reasons. First, an improved portfolio management approach enables you to identify projects which are more likely to succeed, reducing the change of late and/or cancelled projects. Second, an effective enterprise architecture strategy enables you to work to a common platform, reducing the learning curve of project teams. Third, improved reuse increases your development velocity by enabling you to take advantage of existing assents instead of creating systems from scratch each time.
9. Increased end user productivity. By integrating operations and support into your software lifecycle, you are better able to enhance your end users usage of your system and to respond to their feedback. End user requests for fixes and enhancements are automatically included in the requirements for new releases of systems and ensure that their needs don’t slip through the cracks.
10. Increased developer activity. With an effective approach to enterprise administration, developers can gain the technical resources that they need, such as workstations and network logon IDs easily. This enables them to focus on their jobs, developing working software, and not on trying to get access to resources.
11. Higher return on investment. By leveraging enterprise efforts such as an enterprise approach to architecture and a strategic reuse program, you can reduce costs and speed up development time, realizing a significant increase on ROI.

A glance over the high stance

Initial observation gives the impression that what EUP has to offer are nothing new. Tasks described in Enterprise Business Modeling are named differently and are usually done by Sales, Portfolio Management is crucial to achieve wiki(CMM) level 4, any company has their HR, Properties, IT departments. The problem is that the collaboration is loose and they are standardized very differently from one another. EUP does very well the synthesis job to focus on the omni-picture. It requires very high level management to involve, lead, share the business vision and have it made practical. EUP does have good foundation and reputation of RUP. One good thing is that it is an extension, not a replacement of the still evolving, state-of-the-art RUP.

One important thing to notice, EUP is no magic wand. There has been warning about applying RUP as-a-whole may lead to cumbersome project failure. New EUP disciplines promote even more sophisticated collaboration between desultory departments. Sophistication leads to impediments. The total cost of utilizing EUP may well exceed the sum of costs from single business units.

Reference & Acknowledgement

• Scott W. Ambler, Introduction to the Enterprise Unified Process
• Frans Faase, The answers by Rational Unified Process
• Craig Larman, Philippe Kruchten, Kurt Bittner, How to Fail with Rational Unified Process: Seven Steps to Pain and Suffering
• Sterling Hoffman, Extending the Rational Unified Process: From RUP to EUP
• Gideon Schipper

Game theory

Game theory describes situations where multiple players make decisions in an attempt to maximize their returns.

Schelling point

A Schelling point (also called focal point) is a solution that people will tend to use in the absence of communication, because it seems natural, special or relevant to them.

Consider a simple example: two people unable to communicate with each other are each shown a panel of four squares and asked to select one; if and only if they both select the same one, they will each receive a prize. Three of the squares are blue and one is red. Assuming they each know nothing about the other player, but that they each do want to win the prize, then they will, reasonably, both choose the red square. Of course, the red square is not in a sense a better square; they could win by both choosing any square. And it is the “right” square to select only if a player can be sure that the other player has selected it; but by hypothesis neither can. It is the most salient, the most notable square, though, and lacking any other one most people will choose it, and this will in fact (often) work.

My version of Schelling point

A classic question was asked: “You will meet someone. Who will you meet, at where, an when?”. I sent the question via an Instant Messenger.

I shall announce my results when more replies have been received.

What’s your answer to the above question?