The Pin Factory

Most companies are still struggling to deploy VoIP, IP Contact Centers, and Multi-Channel technologies to create a more customer-centric service experience. Meanwhile, Social Media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, YouTube, etc.) is quickly “moving the cheese” again. Executives concerned about customer loyalty find themselves facing a torrent of unsolicited customer input from the web. The first step is to develop the goals and objectives of a Social Media Directorate within the Customer Care organization. Different than their Marketing brethren, this unit will be focused on the post-sale and up-sale world of customer care. While the goal is similar the tactics are different. Marketing groups are generally trying to generate an image of the brand for new customers that resonates with their goals as consumers, while the customer care unit is trying to maintain or improve customer loyalty. The goals will fall into the responsibility of four functional areas: SWOT Team, Crisis Management, Redirection Team, and Brand Support and Improvement.

There maybe examples of a Strong strategy that are elegantly simple, however it has been my experience that Weak strategies begin with over simplified value propositions that are drowned in superfluous analysis. Strong strategy finds its grace in a balance of goals not in brevity or simplicity. Balance requires investigation of multiple scenarios and a thoughtful decision-making process. A Strong strategy typically involves more than just one goal, for instance sales, revenue, and net income. Not just cost improvements. When a company engages in cost improvement strategies at the operational level to meet a budgetary target they typically end-up with weak strategies that can leave a negative impact on the whole organization. In the end a Strong strategy is one that is adaptable, because the organization knows exactly why it chose it, and for what reasons it will have to change in order to meet changing objectives.

A number of blogs suggest outsourcing and offshoring may have run its course as a sourcing strategy. Outsourcing has been with us since the beginning of time, and offshoring although a new term has been with us since sailing ships began to move commerce. Offshoring is a strategy often relied upon when the business strategy for the category is overly simplistic and focused only on cost reduction. A GOOD business strategy is rarely so monochromatic, and requires a more comprehensive set of goals and objectives including sales, revenue, net income as well as cost. However, offshoring without a clear strategy can lead organizations to mixed results and potentially great harm. The bottom-line is that we need transformation to drive strategic sourcing especially in categories considering offshoring.

While every situation is different there are times when Genesys takes the lead over Cisco and vice versa. Very generally, Genesys definitely wins the battle when integration of multiple hardware companies is the objective. n contrast, Cisco is a hardware company, and while Cisco can operate as a software umbrella over Avaya and Cisco platforms, Cisco excels when an organization has a large call center operation with a majority of hardware that is end of life. Additionally the Cisco Unified Communication and Unified Contact Center solutions are built upon the same basic building blocks, and as a result there are significant economies of scale created when the focus is initially IP Telephony with Cisco Unified Communication focused on the back-office and then transitions into a front-office, call center replacement with Unified Contact Center. The best advice is to begin with a comprehensive business requirement analysis with the objective of building a requirement plan and a high-level benefit analysis.

There is a lot of buzz in anticipation of the expected Spring 2010 launch of the Apple Tablet. Most of the buzz is focused on the user experience, but there are now enough threads about a revamped iTunes, eBooks, and IPTV, as well as the built-in web-cam and a price under $1000 is where the [...]

The promise of Cisco’s UCC environment to transform front-office contact center operations is tremendous, but organizational leaders often find the decision a difficult one to undertake given the required investment and the complexity of implementation project. Upgrading from non-IP to IP-based call center technology irrespective of the vendor is a daunting investment, but the value [...]

The 8 December, 2009 interview by Kai Ryssdal of Nancy Koehn of the Harvard Business School ended with the following:
RYSSDAL: So when we look back on this period, on 2008-2009, what lessons will we have learned? Will we have learned anything do you think?
KOEHN: I think we’ll have learned several things. One, that we are incredibly tightly connected. [...]

Apple’s Game Changer, Downloading Now is an article that appeared in the Sunday, 6 December 2009 edition of the New York Times. The article written by Jenna Wortham focuses on the success that Apple has had with the Apple iPhone App Store. She writes,
As the App Store evolves from a kitschy catalog of novelty applications [...]

Robert Dvorak posted this question on the WSJ community blog,
How real is “Cloud Computing” and how are large companies (>$1B revenues) adopting it? Which IT companies are most threatened by Cloud?
Cloud Computing in this case is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) referring to infrastructure delivered in a utility model. The utility model arises from the [...]