How IT Supports the Business (often without our realising)...

Hi,

Some months ago I was on a flight sitting besides the owner of an SME who develop various IT solutions for niche markets. We started to chat and the conversation flowed into my in-flight neighbor discussing his company’s organisation structure and his consideration of the different business units.

‘I always take care of my Sales people’, he confided rather brashly, ‘they make me money’ – well that left me pondering for a while some days after we parted.

All the often we see today, IT being viewed by many as an overhead, a cost-centre. Sometimes to the extent of being nothing more than a ‘necessary evil’! There are those who fail to understand why IT budgets keep growing and what IT do anyway.

Hence it would be prudent to devote this blog post to go over some of the areas where IT supports businesses today. This generic or high level overview illustrates how pervasive IT has become. Such that all-the-often, you’re not even aware that the service you’re using was provided and was being supported by IT!

In this exemplar, consider a typical, medium to large-sized organisation & how IT facilitates and supports the business processes upon which it relies:

• The employee comes into work and switches on their PC or laptop; it boots up with access to the company intranet and portal, along with access to the business email and office productivity applications.
• The sales staff have a number of channels to reach out to customers such as shops, on-line sales and a mobile sales teams; IT provides electronic systems for automating the capture process, following sales and at the backend, generating management reports. IT provide a Customer Care system where each customer’s purchases and communications are logged diligently. Follow up calls with the customer are faster and smoother as the salesperson can access historical information. This ensures improved customer satisfaction and improves retention as the customer feels the company pay more attention to her personal needs.
• Executive management use an IT supported system for corporate KPI delivery, meanwhile the Projects units use a collaborative project control system for checking against agreed milestones and deliverables.
• Marketing use social networking to help raise brand awareness and receive analytical data from IT to help analyse customer trends. In addition, the Marketing department use the company website for describing the company’s products and services.
• The Finance department use applications hosted within the IT environment which enable effective budgeting and accounting. Invoice administration and payments are supervised using an application which interfaces with the company email system, for sending automatic notification reminders to the respective people.
• Contracts and Procurement use an application which governs the lifecycle of the relationship with vendors. Potential vendors can register through a secure web interface and submit quotations and communicate thru this system. The whole system resides incidentally in a Data Centre managed by IT.
• Business communications with corporate bodies used to be taken care of thru email, but these are now followed using an automated system which has some powerful search and tracking capability.
• HR handle employee services using a workflow tool that handles everything from training requests to providing an information portal for staff to access their salary information and so on. The Administration unit have rolled ERP modules using the same solution for directing requests for business trips and also to manage medical claims.
• IT provide a Help Desk which acts as the single point of contact for staff facing issues related to IT services and also provide first-line support to the retail outlets and the mobile sales force who are now working nationwide, so need diligent remote support.

These scenarios are just a handful from many which could be used to demonstrate how IT has penetrated every part of our corporate jungle today. As the famous adage goes, ‘once IT stops, the business stops’.

Within IT, we need to take the time out to be ambassadors of the value we bring today; this is an area where investing more is no longer a luxury.

Regards,

Musab Qureshi

Amazon.Com - wearing the Customer Hat... Part 2...

Hi,

One of the things which can help improve customer service is complaining (I should try this in other areas of life!). Seriously though, what's being referred to here is - that there are too many people who receive poor service, and simply due to the stressful process of complaining, they just walk away. They forsake their rights as consumers, as customers and at the same time, the problem doesn't get noticed by the right people and continues to persist.

My first life-lesson in complaining about a product or service happened around the age of 14. I was munching away on a packet of Peanut M&Ms, and came across a freak one; somehow it that had ended up with a strange combination of green with turquoise. It was just the one from the whole pack. But I'd eaten enough of these (not necessarily a good thing!) to remember the Customer Service information printed on the back of the pack.

So putting together a complaint letter to the confectionery manufacturer, I prepared the Freepost envelope & plodded along to the closest pillar box.

To be honest, I didn't really expect anything to happen (it was a first experience doing this). So it came as a pleasant surprise when an apology letter arrived from the company, and that bundled generously with gift vouchers amounting to the value of around 15 packs of M&Ms!

For many of us, perhaps its due to past experience with poor service quality or an 'I can't be bothered' attitude, whatever the reason, all-the-often we don't bother to complain. And guess what this leads to? Yes, you got it, even poorer service.

Let me now glimpse over some of the areas where I believe Amazon can improve the customer experience.

1. Provide local storage

One of the factors contributing to the cost for customers in a number of countries is the courier charge (your DHLs). Every item must be individually packaged and sent off from a limited number of storage warehouses. The UK Amazon warehouse for example, is based in Swansea, South Wales (incidentally where I lived for most of my life!).

If Amazon were to identify globally dispersed hotspots where certain products are greatest in demand, they could establish smaller, local depots covering defined catchment areas. This could be restricted to high-demand items. The logistical processes would be more refined and the cost saving can be passed on to the customer. Amazon would gain a competitive edge in remote markets where often lucrative and untapped options remain latent.

2. More than 1-click

One of the features offered by Amazon is the '1-click' order process - seems like a really neat idea and it can be for many people. You'll come across this for example when ordering an e-Book from the Kindle Store. Simply click the button one-time and the order is placed, your bank account is charged, and the e-book download is triggered automatically. All thru a single click.

It shows how powerful technology can be, since a fair number of complex business and IT processes work in synergy in order to facilitate this.

For myself, I'd like to have at least a confirmation after the button is clicked. A sort of 'Are you sure (Y/N)' message. That little step gives one time to think, before placing the final order.

Of course there are order cancellation processes, but I'd still like that step as a check before committing to spend hard earned money on a particular transaction.

3. Greater diversity

Highlighted in my former post, there is ample scope to improving the range of products Amazon can offer. They have the business model in place to support a wider spectrum of products than currently available. Continued exponential growth of the Internet only serves to increase the opportunities available to Amazon.

Managing product quality is more difficult with resellers, so widening their own offerings would make the shopping experience more interesting and reliable at the same time.

4. Researching Customer Needs

Expending effort to discover your customer's needs is an extremely powerful tool which helps to gauge what products and services are greatest in demand; you're more likely to achieve a decent sales target, marketing tartan in Scotland, rather than in Malaysia.

So having an intimate understanding of the customer needs and the gaps in a particular market allows you to develop a unique offering for which the demand can great.

There are a number of perspectives around this; consider for example the weather - so in the summer, the demand for portable Air Conditioners will increase. Whereas in the Autumn-time, the demand for garden rakes will increase.

I hope these posts will provide some interesting food for thought.

Regards,

Musab Qureshi