Cincom Introduces Configuration Management Software for Microsoft Dynamics

Cincom's Sales and Product Configurator Helps Complex Manufacturers Create Effective Sales Configuration.

Worldwide software provider Cincom Systems (www.cincom.com/q2o) today introduces Cincom's Sales and Product Configurator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. With the new configuration, users of Microsoft Dynamics CRM can win more customers, while still being able to fulfill the orders accurately and on time.

Cincom's Sales and Product Configurator captures the product, services, and business knowledge needed for guided selling, complex product and sales configuration, and proposal management. It enables complex manufacturers to capture and deliver critical application, product, pricing, and process knowledge to the point of sale -- ensuring the optimal fit between the manufacturers' product offerings and customers' needs.

Manufacturers with engineer-to-order or configure-to-order products have successfully streamlined sales, design, and proposal processes by using Cincom to deliver critical product and sales knowledge to the point of sale and reduce "quote-to-cash" time significantly.

"Cincom is aggressively committed to expanding its channel program," says Gregor Newland, channel manager. "Microsoft Corp. industry partners are always on the lookout for software technologies that will benefit their clients, especially those that utilize the Microsoft Dynamics platform."

"Cincom's Sales and Product Configurator is a leader in flexibility and true knowledge management, and now this functionality is combined with the power of Microsoft," continues Newland. "This allows partners to better enable their clients to improve crucial front-office processes such as guided selling, product configuration, estimating and bidding, and quotation and proposal management."

Easy integration with Microsoft

To the end-user, the interoperability between the two products is seamless. Two simple buttons appear on the Microsoft toolbar marked "New Configured Opportunity Product" and "Reconfigure Opportunity Product." These buttons open a web-based version of Cincom's Sales and Product Configurator for Microsoft Dynamics and lists all of the products that can be configured. The "new" button adds a new product to an opportunity after going through Cincom's configuration application. The "reconfigure" button does the same but for a product that has already been configured at least once. Products configured in the Cincom's Sales and Product Configurator are stored and routed in the Microsoft Dynamics applications.

For more information about Cincom's Sales and Product Configurator and other solutions for complex manufacturers, visit www.cincom.com/q2o.

Gaining Market Share Key to Industry Survival

Improving quote-to-order process proven method

In the last 20 to 30 years, the focus in manufacturing has been on improving quality and efficiencies. How can we get better products out the door faster?

But trends have changed in recent years. The focus has shifted from how to build products more efficiently to a more effective approach to capturing market share.

For the first time in our history, supply is outpacing demand in many industries. Sales-per-employee is going up consistently. However, excess plant capacity is also going up, which means that while companies are more efficient and effective than ever in order to compete in the global market, there is more competition than ever competing for the same customer base.

It doesn’t matter how efficient you are if you can’t keep the customer base. Our industry’s focus needs to shift toward how you can gain market share.

One way to do this is to have your customers view you as easier to work with than your competitors. A simple strategy to accomplish that is by improving your quote-to-order process.

Improving quoting processes

According to analysts, complex manufacturers that address quote-to-order processes can cut delivery lead-times and order processing costs by 20 percent to 50 percent; improve product margins, product quality, and customer satisfaction; and reduce unplanned order changes.

Quote-to-order is not just important; some argue that it is the defining manufacturing business process of the 21^st century, the one that separates the winners from the losers. Streamlining the quote-to-order process within a complex engineered-products environment such as specialty vehicles or special machinery may be as critical to survival as outrunning an angry grizzly bear in the forest.

What we find common in complex manufacturing is that, what the customer wants, what the sales organization quotes, and what manufacturing builds – while they should be one and the same – are oftentimes vastly different. This situation causes a significant amount of upheaval and extra costs per order to get the customer what they want.

The more difficult it is to validate, process, design, source, and build an order, the more opportunities there are for error and for everyone – including the customer – to change the order. One company that sells more than 1,000 units per year has more than 200,000 changes.

At multiple levels, change orders are expensive, requiring time and resources to process while increasing the chance for errors. The cost of change skyrockets as it gets closer to delivery. This complicates build schedules, engineering, and manufacturing, and the total cost of change is seldom recovered with special prices. While some companies find changes profitable, the vast majority never fully recover the costs of change and see their margins erode.

Rather than shaping its business to the customer’s expectations, [complex manufacturers] train the customer to match the company’s limitations – a dangerous approach that a keen competitor will eventually exploit.

The difficult sales process

The problem starts with the sales process, when the features and options are selected and articulated by the customer. If the options selected are incompatible and dependent upon other options, customers end up with quotes that are invalid or functionally not optimal. This is exponentially made worse by manually turning invalid quotes into orders with invalid configurations leading to unexpected change orders, unanticipated schedule delays, unsatisfied product outcomes, and unforeseen price changes. Many managers dismiss these issues as unimportant or uncontrollable. World-class companies that want to stay ahead of the market are addressing these issues head-on.

What causes these broken processes?

• Winning the business is the first challenge.
• Validating orders is also difficult and time-consuming.
• Getting the design right in engineering.
• Scheduling the shop floor.
• Purchasing materials.
• Controlling inventory.

All of these events can be helped or harmed by the quote-to-order process. Your customers realize this, so they pay close attention to how easy you are to do business with. They know that your quote-to-order process is a reflection of your overall competence and that the easiest company to work with is probably the highest quality and most competitive.

Quote-to-order integrates the entire enterprise, linking

• sales and marketing
• contracts
• pricing
• engineering
• planning
• product development
• production
• supply chain
• inventory

Because quote-to-order shapes the customer experience, ignoring it or paying it less attention than it deserves can undermine your business. Yet many companies are oblivious to their situations. Rather than shaping their businesses to the customer’s expectations, they train the customer to match the company’s limitations – a dangerous approach that a keen competitor will eventually exploit.

Many companies can enjoy a significant business benefit by ensuring valid and accurate quote specifications, then electronically translating those specifications into the format needed by manufacturing and engineering – without having to re-key the information. One company stated in their annual shareholder meeting that its dealers are 80 percent more effective since improving its quote-to-order process. They also anticipate inventory turns increasing from the current level of five to something closer to eight or ten.

Other companies have experienced a 60 percent reduction in manufacturing while others reduced their order-entry error rate from double digits down to zero. By gaining access to the quotation before the quote is turned into an order and knowing the win/loss rate, companies are able to predict their revenue, costs, and purchased parts requirements before the orders are placed.

Today’s goal for complex manufacturers is to outpace the competition. Improving your quote-to-order process is a relatively easy first step in reaching this goal. Try it and your customers may just “thank you.”

By Jim Hessin, Cincom Systems

SMEs Making Profit in Economic Slowdown

While IT biggies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro etc. may face depressed profit margins in the wake of the recession, smaller IT firms and freelancers are on their way to become millionaires thanks to the online services market

The economic slowdown is repeating itself in the U.S. now, and companies are in the process of chopping off hundreds of jobs and cutting down employee salaries. Case in point – recent job cuts by IBM and TCS. TCS reportedly sacked over 500 employees, citing poor performance, and IBM is believed to have shown the door to more than 1,500 employees.

So, before any further frenzied move, many techies are quitting jobs to turn entrepreneurs in the hope to become freelance IT millionaires. And in this situation, the virtual work places like Elance.com, Rent-A-Coder, oDesk and GetAFreelancer.com, come to their rescue.

“We began our outsourcing business in 1998. We joined Elance in 2000 after we lost our main customer, 3COM, due to the recession in the U.S.,” commented Yuriy Bannov, founder and co-owner of Sibers, a programming and web development company located in Siberia. “At that time there were just five of us.” The company has completed over $1.1 million in Elance projects.

Xicom, Synapse, Transform are some the clients of Elance who have earned $2 million, $3 million and $450,000 respectively till date. In 2007, Elance had 150,000 projects posted worth $75 million and a million registered users.

“Small businesses are an important and growing driver of the U.S. economic growth and dynamism,” said Fabio Rosati, CEO, Elance.com. “As the costs associated with doing business globally continue to decrease, small businesses will make no distinction between domestic and international commerce.”

In a slow economic condition, opportunities are abound for such freelance contractors. Small and mid-sized businesses and individuals also prefer outsourcing work like designing a logo, website, maintenance of applications or websites and designing works, through such platforms.

The reasons are simple — there are no large companies willing to take small outsourcing tasks worth $2,000, $5,000 or $10,000. The other reasons are the rising rupee — which is forcing large and mid-sized companies to increase their billing rates to protect margins. Slowdown in hiring and salary hikes due to a slowdown in contracting of large projects is also a reason.

By Adyasha Sinha, Global Services

Datamonitor Publishes Contact Center Analysis

With the dynamics of the contact center industry, it is understandable that a variety of companies struggle to be successful in this area. Consumer demands continue to intensify and parent organizations apply consistent pressure to reduce costs.

At the same time, the global approach can seem more appealing while domestic customers are crying out to keep operations local. With so much to keep tabs on, it stands to reason that some just are not cut out for this industry.

To help keep organizations up-to-date on current happenings in the industry, Datamonitor has released its “2008 Trends to Watch: Contact Center Markets and Technologies.” In is report, Datamonitor analyzes the industry from a competitive and technology standpoint, providing insight into innovative strategies that work and what the future of the contact center holds for all players.

According to Datamonitor, economic indications show that 2008 will be a tough year for many on the financial front. The contact center projects that are likely to feel the impact are large infrastructure and architecture refresh initiatives. On the other hand, contact center technology remains the best lever for extracting more value from employees and make better use of customer data.

The report also indicates that the hosted contact center sector will reach prime time, while mid-market applications will flourish. Workforce optimization is expected to mushroom as enterprises increasingly turn chaos into predictability. In addition, partnership and channel strategies will be re-evaluated in order to initiate change.

Although contact centers operate as the front-end of many organizations throughout the world, they will find themselves facing the pinch as companies are seeking to reduce costs fast, while also demanding high service standards within the center.

This report has found that while service has been a key differentiator for a number of companies, how the organization manages and maintains its customer relationships will be of even more importance if an organization is to remain solvent and competitive. Unified Agent Desktop solutions will become more essential than ever for providing this level of competitive differentiation in the contact center.

By Dale Wolf, Perfect CEM

The Successful Customer Loyalty Mindset

The fact that so many CRM systems have been designed from the fixed mindset perspective, seeing intelligence about customers being predictable, supporting processes that are not flexible enough to allow either for tackling obstacles or allowing for negative customer feedback to percolate up an organizations' ranks needs to change.

After reading the book Mindset: The Psychology of Success by Dr. Carol S. Dweck, I began to wonder if her concepts of fixed versus growth mindsets were either accentuated or diminished when it came to customer relationship strategies enabled with SaaS-based applications.

The many benefits of the SaaS  platform -- including agility, updates across an entire customer base, and low barriers to user adoption made me curious. Could SaaS-based CRM applications, supporting customer loyalty strategies, be more effective at enabling growth mindsets in companies? I dug into this question and started to research it.

If you haven't read this book, I highly recommended it, and you can catch a clip of Dr. Dweck discussing the differences between the foundational concepts of her book here, courtesy of Guy Kawasaki's blog entry last year.

While there is an abundance of information on TCO (total cost of ownership) of SaaS versus licensed software, the closest area of research I found pertaining to productivity of SaaS users relative to licensed users was in the area of customer loyalty. One report I found that was particularly interesting on the topic of customer loyalty was from Accenture, titled "Seller Beware: The Curse of the Disloyal Customer."

Cultivating Customer Loyalty With a Growth Mindset

After extensively researching if either SaaS-based versus licensed applications foster a greater growth mindset, several key take-aways began to emerge, which are provided below:

• Creating processes that prize speed over completeness of response seem to be worthless from a customer loyalty standpoint. Now this process cuts across both SaaS-based and licensed CRM apps, yet the approach SaaS-based vendors are taking to create a more "one and done" approach is paying off based on both conversations with a friend who is CIO of a financial services firm. While he resisted SaaS-based CRM, the traditional licensed applications had been designed to look first for efficiency and speed of response -- which in the end had no bearing on customer loyalty. Completeness of response and closure did. His CRM system had been build to rack up metrics that showed people "working hard," yet there was no closure on the customer side.

  Putting this into the context of fixed versus growth mindsets, it was clear that when efficiency alone was the priority when a CRM system was designed that it was easier to avoid challenges, ignore criticism from customers (as there was no metric to measure that) and see interactions as a nuisance to be quickly alleviated. All the signs of a closed mindset, CRM systems designed like this do not foster and encourage learning, only competition between sales and service reps. The result is that a closed mindset alienates more customers and the company eventually loses more repeat business as a result.

• Building growth mindsets into customer interactions leads to higher loyalty. One of the foundational points of the book is the differentiation of a fixed versus growth mindset. It occurred to me as I re-read the book that so many CRM systems are designed to specifically align with a fixed mindset mentality in all phases of the sales cycle through the customer retention and loyalty phases as well. Dr. Dweck makes the point that it is not in the winning or losing of life's challenges, but in the learning from them.

  To read an excellent overview of how learning figures into creating a growth mindset, this article from Stanford Magazine is worth reading. The point being that from a CRM standpoint if learning becomes the goal -- learning how to better serve customers, how to gain greater levels of loyalty -- and not the fixed mindset goal of just ticking off metrics, then greater success comes with time.

• Making customer-facing strategies more about learning and less about the high-pressure up-sell or cross-sell is critical. When CRM systems have been designed from a closed mindset the entire customer contact effort is about up-sell and cross-sell, not necessarily about learning how to better engage with and serve the customer in the future. Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs are becoming pervasive in organizations that have a growth mindset and are willing to listen to their customers, even if it means facing bigger challenges and setbacks than if the customers had been ignored.
• Loyalty strategies must go hunting for challenges and setbacks to grow. What is the most valuable take-away from Dr. Dweck's book is that a person only grows by going out and looking for challenges to overcome and master, and that only by facing down big challenges can any significant growth ever happen. She contends that by doing this a growth mindset can be achieved. It's the same with the research completed on customer loyalty; the companies that went out looking for what was wrong with their customer loyalty programs were able to achieve the most. Arrogantly assuming all is OK lead to disaster. In speaking with CIOs in the financial services industry and also in the manufacturing industry, this became abundantly clear.

The fact that so many CRM systems have been designed from the fixed mindset perspective, seeing intelligence about customers being predictable, supporting processes that are not flexible enough to allow either for tackling obstacles or allowing for negative customer feedback to percolate up an organizations' ranks needs to change. Sure, there are those organizations whose cultures are so infused with a growth mindset that their customer-facing strategies, including the loyalty programs, reflect that. The differentiation of fixed versus growth mindsets however has a major impact on the long-term success or failure of customer loyalty programs

Once any company changes from a fixed to growth mindset, their ability to better seek out and respond to challenges is going to be accentuated using SaaS-based applications.

Bottom line: The speed of deployment, low barriers to user adoption, ability to customize applications and ability to tie in negative feedback from customers which are essential for growth shows that SaaS-based platforms have the potential to nurture growth mindsets of the long term.

Source - Louis Columbus, CRM News

The Asian Internet Cable Story

Ship Anchors Rip Up Cable – and Rip Into The Economy

Is the Internet a potential enemy weapon? A chunk of South Asia's booming economy relies on the Internet. In this article, we’ll take a look at the role the Internet is playing in these economies and how they have suffered with disrupted cables.

Yes, it could have been a ship's anchor as a few unconfirmed reports suggest, however, it's possibly too large of an incident to be a coincidence. But are we taking it too far by roving our suspicious senses to miscreants that may be?

While all of that may be true, it is best for us to wake up–us who are in the countries that are building the blocks of their economy by using the Internet as our magic wand— to information assimilation and dissipation. What has caused people to raise question is the fact that these numerous breaks (numbers vary between four to seven) have only affected the Gulf and India and have caused sizeable commotion. Those breaks have affected more than 85-million Internet users in India, Pakistan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Sudan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. But it seems to have had no effect on internet users in other countries. This has raised serious questions about our intellectual strength and even security, or it could be an indication that we are not doing enough to protect our infrastructure.

Reports say that it was anchors of ships crossing the seas that caused the disruption. But sources also say that records during the time that the cables broke show no marine traffic in most of these regions. Since most cables that have been cut lay next to certain specific nations, it is probably not simply a case of infrastructure or economy. More so it is because reports of ships’ anchors cutting cables under the sea have not been established so far.

Under such a scenario, we want to be cautious about where we could be headed if an incident could disrupt business for days and if our intelligence is not equipped enough to manage a sabotage of this magnitude.

Millions of jobs are being outsourced to Indian shores, and bright lads of the country are picking up opportunities with arms wide open. Is this trend creating enemies for the economy? Are there potential enemies trying to create hurdles or even pack up the systems for us, so that we will not be able to grab a bit of the global economical pie?

The biggest bearers of this threat, therefore, could be the outsourcing industry. The Indian BPO/ITeS industry depends purely on connectivity, and when the support of this backbone is withdrawn at any point, the breakdown is unfathomable.

I still remember the day of chaos at a UK call centre when we were informed about a connectivity outage for the entire day and the anticipated losses that were incurred, not discounting the battering the image of the company got.

Outsourcing generates streams of revenue and jobs for the Indian youth. They and the whole India shining story can be severely affected with serious repercussions that an incident like this can create. With the fall of the dollar, the struggle is hard enough. Add to it the commotion of technical faults or mishaps, and we have the recipe for a collapse.

Even if we spare the outsourcing industry for a moment, there are numerous other places where cables being cut can disrupt business. The exchanges will take a definite hit, as we recently witnessed. The banking system will go for a toss, and billions will be lost in simply managing the damage thereof.

According to Nasscom figures, Indian software and services exports could be earning $60 billion by 2009-2010. With possibilities like this, it is difficult for the industry to take such heat over so many days.

It’s best if we wake up and smell the smoke. Even if we are to believe that some natural or marine issues are to blame, all of us who depend on the internet minute by minute also need to secure it from all potential threats. It was a blessing that Indian companies were able to avoid the crisis using alternate land and satellite solutions. Even in the future, large companies with well-developed backup plans for disaster recovery and continuity might not be affected that much—vis-à-vis companies that do not have the adequate infrastructure for support. But it is a sign that is jeering us to improve or update our infrastructure. Maybe our infrastructure is not fit enough to undertake natural or manmade calamities of these kinds.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India is already in discussions with the three primary owners of undersea cables in India—Bharti, Reliance Communications and Tata-managed VSNL—to set up some sort of a mechanism to make our communication network more hard-wearing. What companies need to do is look at this issue with a microscope.

If we look at the corporate scenario that suffers here and needs an immediate solution, one possibility emerges. What went wrong this time and needs urgent attention is the synergy that Internet Service Providers can create if they work in tandem. It would be a good idea for them to come together to create a synergy that allows them to cooperate in such times when either could be the tormented party. At the same time, the end-consumer will be served better, which is the end requirements of all providers anyway.

Anything or everything, from e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, and virtual operation theater, can stop in a split second. It is undoubtedly a “potential disaster without any war or weapon” and we cannot wait for that to happen.

Extended Sales Cycles Hurting Custom Manufacturers : Study

Survey shows few salespeople can sell without assistance

The average salesperson selling custom build-to-order and engineer-to-order manufacturing products can sell without engineering or IT assistance only 25 percent of the time or less. This is according to a research report released today by software maker Cincom Systems (www.cincom.com/q2o). In fact, sales managers surveyed for the report said that fewer than 10 percent of their sales forces can sell customized products without assistance more than 75 percent of the time.

“Best Practices in Sales Effectiveness for Build-to-Order Products” (http://www.cincom.com/salesreport) discusses the findings of a report from a sales perspective on the state of mass-customization and build-to-order practices.

Close to 15 percent of the sales managers surveyed said it took their sales cycle more than 18 days between qualifying a customer and validating an opportunity. This compared to half the sales managers that said it took them less than two days, with the remaining 35 percent somewhere in the middle.

“Companies that needed … more than 18 days of elapsed time to complete [sales steps] are likely to find themselves at a competitive disadvantage,” writes Jim Wilson, Cincom Program Director and author of the report. “Companies that can complete any of these steps … with a day or less of elapsed time can easily outperform their competition.”

To further compound this problem, 25 percent of sales managers report that engineering team members with expertise in custom manufacturing products are nearing retirement. This means that soon the experts that salespeople rely on will no longer be readily accessible.

IT Priorities Don’t Address Sales Issues

Many of these sales issues could be met with a knowledge-management system. However in a separate IT survey conducted by Cincom, knowledge management ranked last in priority with only 34 percent of IT managers ranking it as “important” or “very important.”

“The implication is that the knowledge required to sell customized products is not being effectively transferred to the field and customer. This is not surprising given the lack of strategic investment in front-office processes and systems,” writes Wilson.

Cincom Systems targeted the survey at senior sales executives, mostly at the vice president level, at 900 manufacturers of complex industrial, electrical and transportation equipment and systems.

For a copy of the report, please visit www.cincom.com/salesreport.

India set to become $8.1 Billion IT Market by 2011: Study

India would remain the fastest-growing IT services country in Asia-Pacific till 2011 and become an $8.1-billion market by then, according to a report by Springboard Research. China will hold on to its position as the largest market in the region at $15.6-billion, the report adds.

Despite its lead over India, China will not be a major competitor for offshore service delivery, especially for English language requirements—as skill levels, quality, culture and governance are all more suited to India, the study added. It also predicted that challenges in accessing and retaining IT skills will accelerate the shift to external services providers, as enterprises will struggle to retain in-house key individuals and skill sets.

The report says that India and China IT services markets will be $4.86-billion and $10.9-billion, respectively, in 2008.
By 2011, the Indian market will be just behind Asean and Korea in size, and is likely to overtake them by 2012, the report said. “In some respects, this is a surprise, and some expected that the Indian market would grow even more rapidly. India is still fragmented and a long way from market maturity. Most local services providers, aside from the worthy headline grabbers such as Tata, IBM and Wipro, operate from a city or state with a narrow capability range,” it added.

The IT services market in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) will grow from $37.5-billion in 2007 to $55.9-billion in 2011. “The Asia Pacific IT services market is arguably the global leader in terms of growth, supplemented with a mix of mature and emerging markets,” said Springboard Research vice-president of services research Phil Hassey.

Source - The Economic Times

Americans seek employment in India

Robert Durbin was looking nervous when he went to the India Visa services centre in Manhattan this past week.
With a professional degree in Information Technology from New York University last year, Durbin has been desperately looking for a job for the past six months; but unsuccessful so far, primarily because US companies these days have been cutting jobs rather than recruiting new people.

After months of job search, the only place Durbin received a job offer was from a Bangalore-based IT major this month. ''I am here to apply for my work visa to India,'' Durbin told NDTV.com, standing outside the India Visa Services Centre in Manhattan, to which the Indian Embassy and Consulates have outsourced visa-processing system.

Durbin, requesting his identity not be disclosed till he joins the job in Bangalore next month, said he was nervous as he did not know if he will get the work visa or not. ''I hope, I will,'' he said, as he went inside to submit his applications. It will take another couple of days before he knows if his application has been approved.

Without referring to this particular case, P S Sasi Kumar, who handles the visa section at the Indian Consulate in New York told NDTV.com that normally most of the applications for work visas are being approved. Of late, the Consulate in New York has been experiencing a steady flow of such applications seeking work visa.

Though, India might still not be a hot destination for foreigners like the US is for Indians for jobs, Kumar said applications for work visa has been gradually increasing. From what used to be a rare category of visas a couple of years ago, hardly a day passes when the Consulate in New York does not receive at least one such application in this regard.
In the past two years, the New York Consulate has issued work visa to more than 900 people. In 2006 the New York Consulate issued 335 employment visas while in 2007, more than 430 employment visas were issued. If the trend of the first three months is of any indication, 2008 could well break all previous records. It is a couple of applications every day, Kumar said.

While New York tops the list, the three other Indian consulates in the US - in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago - and the Indian Embassy in Washington have also seen quite a number of applications for work visa.

Figures made available indicated the Indian Embassy in Washington issued about 300 work visas in past two years, while Houston Consulate down South issued nearly 100; indicating India is gradually emerging as employment destination for the Americans as job opportunities in the US has increasingly been shrinking in past two years.

This is widely being attributed to the recent economic recession here which has resulted in job loss in thousands, wherein US multinationals have shifted their work oversees mainly to countries like India and China.

While no official survey of applications for work visa has been done, Kumar said most of the requests for employment visas are either in the IT sector or aviation; reflecting the job opportunities in these two sectors. In aviation sector it is mainly professional pilots who have been applying for work visas.

Other visa categories
Statistics made available to NDTV.com by the Indian Embassy in Washington DC indicated a significant jump in the visas being issued. Tourist and business visas are the most popular visa categories. For instance, the San Francisco Consulate in 2007 issued as many as 108,301 compared to 61,725 in 2003.

The Houston Consulate, down South, issued 42,465 tourist visas in 2007 against 32,849 in 2003. The Indian Embassy in Washington issued 32,471 tourist visas in 2007, while 25,369 visas were issued in the year 2003.
The New York Consulate, being located in the financial capital of the world, issued more than 24,000 business visas in the year 2007, while the previous year it was a little over 20,000.

Outsourcing of visa services
Visa services were outsourced in the US last year, given the sudden increase in the volume of applications in this regard and the small staff at the Indian Embassy and Consulates deployed in this regard.

Initial report indicates that outsourcing of visa services - an initiative of the Indian Ambassador to the US, Ronen Sen - has ended the frustrating long wait for the seekers of Indian visas in the US.

Source: Lalit K Jha, NDTV

Improving Customer Satisfaction through Documents

In the face of growing competitive and economic pressures, organizations of all kinds are paying much more attention to satisfying their customers. Whether for-profit or nonprofit, any organization must fulfill customer expectations in order to be successful. Customer satisfaction is vital to the ongoing viability of any organization and ultimately provides measure of system management performance.

Customer satisfaction is vital to the ongoing viability of any organization and ultimately provides measure of system management performance.

For most commercial organizations, customer satisfaction represents the degree to which a product or service meets their customer's expectations. The factors driving satisfaction among car buyers, for example, are tangible and clear. Price, features and quality top the list. Even among service organizations, where “products” may be more emotional or psychological, conditions that spur customer satisfaction are still self-evident. Hotel day-spa operators, for example, strive to provide professional service, in a pleasant manner, to create "customer delight."

For some organizations, stimulating customer satisfaction is not as straightforward. Some organizations do not provide a commercial product, per se, and the service provided is less corporeal than that of most service organizations, the factors that influence the satisfaction of customers are much less distinct. How can managers improve the satisfaction of their customers? What “products and services” influence customer satisfaction? Where can management find opportunity to better meet the expectations of customers and other stakeholders?

One area of opportunity may be found in customer documents. Customer correspondence in the form of letters and statements, applications and notifications, beneficiary forms and prospectus booklets all combine to represent the face of any organization. Indeed, for most customers, documents compose much, if not all, of the product they receive and are the only tangible evidence of the service provided. As a result, documents have great scope and importance due to their direct influence on customer satisfaction. By improving the accuracy and quality of key customer documents, managers are likely to make significant improvements to the performance of their system overall, and take strides to ensure the continued satisfaction of their customers.

For most customers, documents are the product: the only tangible evidence of the service provided.

This paper will focus on customer satisfaction and the important role that customer-facing documents play in the overall satisfaction of customers. According to some surveys, organizations within all industries and sizes are all striving to improve their document systems. The key to success, however, may lie in the ability of managers to ensure that infrastructure improvements, specifically those that impact document communications, ultimately bolster customer satisfaction.

Documents drive Satisfaction

While electronic communications are growing, printed documents remain the primary means by which organizations communicate with their customers. Surveys indicate that nearly 90% of all communications between an organization and its customers are in the form of printed documents – general correspondence, applications and registrations, and beneficiary forms. As a result, printed documents represent the most important, if not the only, touch points available between organizations and their customers. Indeed, for most organizations, documents are the product; the only tangible evidence of the services provided. Despite the pivotal role documents play in customer service, most organizations still struggle with the process of creating and revising customer documents with most projects taking days, if not weeks, to complete. This, combined with the prevailing concerns over data accuracy, integration and control, and the manual rework and assembly of documents, suggests that now may be an opportune time for managers to initiate document system upgrades to enable a more accurate and agile document workflow.

While improving document systems and processes seems to be a “no-brainer” given the impact on customer satisfaction, many organizations struggle to find the sponsorship needed for document system-specific improvements. Even with the growing desire to bolster customer service, document systems are often overlooked in the large strategic planning associated with information system upgrades and enhancements. In addition, many organizations feel that transferring document communications management and production from IT to business users is an important initiative; the underlying sentiment perhaps being that business areas will be more fruitful in advocating for document system specific enhancements.

The Investment Implications of Customer Documents

Let’s face it, information technology investments are expensive. Projects, especially those surrounding core applications, routinely reach multi-million dollar proportions. Whatever the price tag, however 100% of the investment made to upgrade ultimately gets manifested into a document. Customer documents like statements, letters, applications and notifications literally represent the final “product” of any organization. Despite their importance in customer care, however, customer documents are often an afterthought during information system infrastructure planning; the implications of these vital touch points overshadowed by the scope of the bigger technology initiative. But regardless of the extent of state-of-the-art systems put into play, if infrastructure enhancements do not account for the implications of customer documents any technology investments made will not be fully realized.

Examining this example of a customer purchasing a new car will illustrate the implication of customer documents. The new vehicle is the result of considerable investment by the car manufacturer and comes fully equipped with a host of modern performance features. Soon after the purchase, however, the key breaks in the ignition and leaves the new owner stranded. A tow truck is called, because the key to the ignition is the only interface available to the customer who, despite the state-of-the-art features under the hood, quickly becomes dissatisfied with the quality of his purchase. Inferior car keys eroded customer satisfaction. Investments made by the car manufacturer missed this important customer interface.

Just like keys to a car, documents represent the only interface customers have with organizations. The danger for organizations is to invest heavily into infrastructure enhancements and overlook the documents that are ultimately output from the system. If this important customer interface is broken, customers perceive that their “product” is broken.

Poor documents can lead to dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction in turn reflects poorly on the performance of the organization in the eyes of management and more importantly, customers. With competitive options available at the click of a mouse, customers can quickly “voice” their dissatisfaction with their experience.

Organizations must not become complacent when it comes to customer satisfaction. Consider the state of the phone industry prior to deregulation. With few exceptions, large telecom companies were not focused on customer satisfaction. Telecom customers had few options and competition was literally non-existent. Since deregulation, a war is being waged over customer satisfaction in the telecom industry. Organizations may want to consider the high cost of landing new customers versus the high profitability of a loyal customer base and reflect upon current information technology infrastructure strategy.

A Strategic Approach

Customer satisfaction is vital to the ongoing viability of any organization and ultimately provides measure of performance. Customer documents represent very important touch points that greatly influence the satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, of customers. Indeed, for many organizations documents are the product: the only tangible output of the relationship with their customers. As such, customer documents should be regarded with the same strategic focus and priority given to other important information infrastructure enhancements.

By adopting a more strategic approach to customer documents organizations will find fruitful opportunity to improve customer satisfaction.

By adopting a more strategic approach to customer documents organizations will find fruitful opportunity to improve customer satisfaction. While evaluating the technological and administrative aspects of core application enhancements consider the ultimate product of those systems: customer documents.

• How will system upgrades interact with and improve customer documents?
• Will enhancements enable greater accuracy and control of customer documents?
• What opportunities exist to bolster relationships with customers and ensure their ongoing satisfaction through documents?

Advances in document and information technology, along with the prevalent goal among organizations to improve customer documents, suggest that now may be an opportune time for system managers to move forward with document system improvements. A variety of automation and management solutions are available for a fraction of the expense spent on enterprise application upgrades. The key for “document strategy” advocates, however, will be to successfully include document system enhancements in the overall scope of infrastructure improvement plans. Information system managers must foster the sponsorship needed to include document systems as a line item in RFP efforts and embrace customer documents in the process of system enhancement. This endorsement can be found by delving more closely in to the relationship between customer documents and customer satisfaction. Oorganizations are in position to ensure that their customer documents ultimately do their part to improve and maintain customer satisfaction.

How to Be a Customer Experience Standout

It’s no coincidence that a number of the companies delivering an unmatched customer experience are among the newest. Relative newcomers such as Amazon and Prudential’s youth-leaning Egg brand in Britain have been able to start from ground zero with modern technology and no institutional legacies. These companies know very clearly who they are and who they are trying to serve, and clearly communicate that both to the marketplace and to their own employees.

“Building that brand platform means articulating a promise to customers that makes very evident what they can expect from you, and why they should come to you,” says customer experience expert Shaun Smith of Shaun Smith + co (www.shaunsmithco.com.) But building a customer experience around safe objectives or simply doing business the way it has always been done is unlikely to score points and create lasting value. Aggressive goals and unique offerings will differentiate you and create memorable experiences. Amazon nearly went bust trying to source one million titles – but Amazon wanted to be the place where you could get any book. It was a proposition that could be communicated to the marketplace, and it became a successful one.

In the contact center, that means doing more than simply meeting last year’s service levels or attaining an industry average. It means creating a distinctive experience the customer cannot duplicate anywhere else. “If your processes adopt a cookie-cutter approach and people are forced to adhere to a system, it takes away any of the personality and personalization there could be,” Smith says. That is where so many companies shortchange the customer experience by tying it to conventional wisdom “best practices,” which place too much emphasis on sameness and assumes customers want to be treated the same no matter where they may take their business. In fact, Smith believes that “in the absence of a clearly articulated strategy, copying other companies’ best practices is bad practice.”

Rather than focusing energy on devising rigid processes and procedures, Smith advocates spending the lion’s share of research time on determining who your best customers are and identifying ways to create a captivating experience for them. “That’s not what most companies do – most organizations have a very loose understanding of their customers and what they’re after, but they have very tight control over the processes,” he says. “The very best brands – the ones who have the most enthusiastic customers – are very tight about who their customers are, what they value, and most importantly, what the brand promises. They can then afford to be looser about procedures, giving employees more freedom to deliver that promise in the best way for that particular customer. If you make it so cookie-cutter that you reduce it to a mechanistic experience for customer and employee both, it leads to turnover – you create the problem you were trying to avoid.”

Customers take notice when they receive an experience that is clearly not delivered by the book. Smith cites a service interaction between smoothie-maker Innocent Drinks and a customer whose discarded bottle fermented in a trash can and exploded all over his office cubicle. Any responsible company could have simply sent him a free coupon. A curmudgeonly company could have simply cited that its drinks are meant to be kept cold and that fermentation is an obvious side effect. Innocent not only responded with a case of free drinks, but sent the customer a personalized message chastising his “very badly behaved smoothie for re-decorating his office,” putting a smile on a regrettable situation and creating a memorable customer experience. This raises another important issue and that is tone of voice. The best brands have a tone of voice that they use to communicate to customers in a way that is also differentiated. Google has one; so do Apple, The Geek Squad, and Southwest – and they are all different. Unless the call center reflects that tone of voice, you might just as well outsource it and trust the experience to luck.

Performance metrics can be used to determine which agents are best delivering your brand message. Coordinated desktop applications also make it possible for agents to take the best possible action to resolve each customer encounter, in a way that can be tracked and executed on by the rest of the organization. Put simply, there’s no point in having aggressive agents willing to do anything to get the job done if they cannot clearly record the results of a call or ensure that it is acted upon through immediate communication with all responsible parties throughout the entire organization.

Note that creating a sublime customer experience expressly does not mean that you must execute on each and every dimension at a higher service or satisfaction rating than your competitors. “If Southwest Airlines were to do a customer service survey, they might find that to improve Southwest, they should offer food and advance seating, and transfer baggage. But if they did all of that, they would go out of business or at the very least cease to create a great customer experience for their most profitable customers!” Smith says. “For Southwest customers, what’s of value to them are the speed, frequency, and low cost of service.” It is a powerful reminder that satisfaction ratings and customer experience are not necessarily directly correlated. A superior experience need not score a perfect 10 in all avenues of performance if those attributes are of lower importance to the target customers – but you had better be scoring 10 on those that are. The proper technology helps to identify and consistently measure the key customer-centric metrics.

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Customer Experience Happens in the Contact Center, With Insights From Shaun Smith." Go to www.cincom.com/shaunsmith to download the complete white paper or to view a webcast titled "See, Feel, Think, Do - Creating Breakthrough Ideas to Deliver the Perfect Customer Experience," in which Shaun Smith presents a lively discussion on how to build great customer experiences.

Indian offshoring firms raise rates; costs often hidden

For years, Indian offshore providers have dealt with rising wages, talent wars and the escalating cost of real estate on their native soil. Despite the increasing cost of doing business, however, India's offshoring industry has managed to hold the line on rates for its Western customers.

More on offshoring

But that's all changing, according to a report from analyst Stephanie Moore, who covers the offshore industry at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.

As the rupee appreciates against the dollar, the pound and the Euro, Indian providers are beginning to charge their customers more, Moore reports in "Understanding Indian Providers' Margin Defense Tactics."

While hourly rates have increased only minimally, "important price increases are often embedded elsewhere," Moore contends, advising CIOs to pay close attention to contracts as they come up for renewal.

"Embedded" price hikes show up in the following areas: redefining what constitutes a workweek, relying more heavily on inflation clauses and higher-cost-of-living adjustments, including clauses allowing for currency inflation and charging more for travel and "substantially more" for on-site rates, which tends to get less scrutiny than the offshore rates. That last item can add up even when the worker ratio is 80% offshore to 20% onshore. Staff members sent by a provider to a customer site already command higher pay than the provider's offshore workers.

A week's worth of work

Kashyap Kompella, advisor, global service delivery at Technology Partners International Inc. (TPI), an independent sourcing advisory firm headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, said his firm is definitely seeing more belt-tightening measures among the Indian providers.

Service providers are "trimming the fat by eliminating nonperforming employees," Kompella said. And he concurred with Moore that providers are also becoming more conscious of the number of hours an employee works. "They want to ensure that they are not giving away free hours like in the past." So managers are being asked to keep track of all the unbillable hours their teams spend on client work. Some providers have always charged for 8.75 or 8.8 hours per day, Kompella said. Now, more and more are asking for the 10% extra.

"By the way, it is not just the Indian providers who are doing this," Kompella said. "The foreign IT services firms operating in India have also started doing the same."

All that said, TPI has not seen a clear trend emerging yet regarding rates for Western customers. "Some providers have been able to get some small price increases when the contracts come up for renewal, while others have not been able to get any increases," Kompella said.

The redefinition of the workweek represents an interesting shift in how Indian providers are valuing work. In the past, Indian providers customarily billed clients for a set number of hours per week (40-45 hours), regardless of how many hours their salaried staff worked, Moore said. Now, however, providers are starting to either increase the number of hours counted as a week (from 40 to as high as 50 hours) or simply charging for the actual number of hours salaried staff members work.

India, back on the agenda

Indian providers are not standing still in the face of a U.S. meltdown. In the past, Indian providers have not focused on the opportunity in their own backyard, the local Indian market. "Mostly it was the multinational providers who were tapping the Indian market," Kompella said. But that, too, is changing, as margins erode with U.S. customers. "India is back on the agenda," he said, along with other parts of the globe. European markets, long resistant to offshoring, have warmed up to sending work overseas, but Europe "is still underpenetrated," and represents potential growth for Indian providers, Kompella said.

CIOs need to ask their providers point blank how they are dealing with inflationary pressures.

"As sourcing and vendor management experts attempt to engage and negotiate with Indian service firms, it is important to make sure that these providers are at least trying to minimize the impact of inflationary pressures," Moore said.

The tactics used by the most adaptable of the Indian providers to minimize the impact of inflationary pressures include using tools to automate tasks that could be done manually by their billable employees; streamlining their methodologies in order to deliver value to the customer more quickly; investing millions of dollars in employee training to keep the pipeline of capable, efficient staff primed; building "reusable" code to cut development time; and offering outcome-based contracts, where customers hire the provider to deliver a service, for a price, instead of paying by the hour.

G.K. Prasanna, senior vice president, technology infrastructure services at Wipro Ltd., said the impact of the U.S. slowdown was constrained for most of 2007. That may well change in a recession, but Wipro has taken steps to "rationalize costs," including finding customers in new parts of the globe, such as Europe and Australia, and sending its work to cheaper cities in its own country and cheaper countries. Much of its business process outsourcing is done in the Philippines; Romania is a stronghold for infrastructure services, and Wipro has sent engineering work to China for a while, he said.

Operating margins are under pressure on both sides of the oceans, Prasanna noted. "It's not just India; the same applies to everybody else," he said, which means that Indian pricing, even under inflationary pressure, remains an attractive option for companies looking to cut costs.

"Pricing is an important point in companies choosing us, and we have no illusions about it. So as much as possible, we try to keep that part of the equation stable."

Let us know what you think about the story; email: Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer

Source - SearchCIO

Happy and Colourful Holi

Wishing you all the reader of this site a very Happy and Colourful Holi. May this Holi bring all happiness and joy for you and your loved once.

What is Holi? Click for Answer

Successful Customer Experience Really Does Happen in the Contact Center

Customer experience, and by extension the ongoing business relationship with any customer, lives and dies at the point of contact. All the glossy advertising in the world cannot compensate for a consistently weak experience. “Surveys find that only 26 percent of a purchase decision is influenced by advertising. By far the factors more frequently cited are personal experience and referrals,” says customer experience expert Shaun Smith of Shaun Smith + co, former Head of Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing Training for British Airways and more recently, VP of Customer Experience for the Forum Corporation.

Ideally, advertising serves to establish a promise and an expectation for a unique and appealing customer experience, which is then confirmed and reinforced every single time the customer touches the organization. That puts the contact center on the hook, yet uniquely placed, to sustain the customer experience regardless of changes elsewhere in the organization.

The best customer experiences are delivered by companies that have so deeply embedded their brand message and customer priorities in their DNA that each and every agent can present the best the company has to offer. They create self-sustaining customer communities that are so focused on their interaction with each other that they m

ay even forgive the occasional mishap, and see it as an opportunity to actively engage with the company and make improvements because they believe their patronage is truly valued.

No Barriers – Customer Experience Permeates

Achieving that goal requires a customer-service commitment that completely denies the existence of barriers. The customer experience will surely break down if the different communities that make up an organization do not understand the role they must play to build and maintain it. This means paying more than lip service to the concept of customer centricity – it requires aligning the internal organizations that provide the “care and feeding” of customers to achieve the same goal – building and maintaining the environment that provides the right service to the right customers and creates value for those customers they cannot get anywhere else. “Really strong brands have marketing, customer service, and human resources all working as one around a common agenda, which is the customer experience,” Smith says.

Marketing’s contribution is the articulation and refinement of the brand promise, using advertising and outreach to communicate the virtues of doing business with your company and setting it apart from competitors and pretenders. The customer service organization must be prepared, on a monthly, daily, weekly, and hourly basis, to deliver on that promise to customers, with the right training, systems, and most importantly, management support to make the right decisions by each and every caller.

Human Resource’s role in this process cannot be overlooked. Look at the global market for customer-service personnel as an opportunity, rather than a negative. HR should focus on bringing people into the organization that will be a natural fit for the customer experience, who can believe in the company’s brand mission, and who will use every tool and opportunity at their disposal to preserve that experience whenever possible.

Technology can help. A unified desktop that provides a 360-degree of the customer enables every person with the entire organization to share the same common view of all customer experiences. Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, the Executive Suite, and so on, can all share a common view and extract exactly the insight to help the organization support and deliver the promises made or requests extended.

Summary

The contact center’s role in a customer experience management strategy cannot be underestimated. Consumers perceive that a company’s ability to respond to a problem or request has a higher influence on an excellent experience than any other attribute, as shown in Figure 1. That puts the contact center ever-more front and center in creating that experience – consistently, intentionally, but in a manner that is differentiated and adds value.

Your customer experience can never be better than the people you place on the end of every telephone call, e-mail, or web chat, and the quality of the technology they rely on. Only they have the unique opportunity to strengthen your relationships every time a customer reaches out, and that can only happen if they are given the tools and trust to make every contact the right contact. “It is about having people who like people, who have personalities, and are willing to engage with customers and get beyond the form-filling,” Smith says. “You need a working environment where people are naturally curious and interested in doing business with your customers – not where they are driven by management to pick up the phone within three rings every time.”

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Customer Experience Happens in the Contact Center, With Insights From Shaun Smith." Go to www.cincom.com/shaunsmith to download the complete white paper or to view a webcast titled "See, Feel, Think, Do - Creating Breakthrough Ideas to Deliver the Perfect Customer Experience," in which Shaun Smith presents a lively discussion on how to build great customer experiences.

Technorati Tags: Customer Experince,CRM,Contact Centre

Cloud Computing`s Sunny Future

"The Big Switch" author Nicholas Carr asks why Google, Salesforce and Microsoft are having success in utility computing now, 50 years after IBM introduced the model with its mainframes.

Drawing parallels between the evolution of the electrical grid and computing grid models, the pundit who shocked the high-tech world by claiming IT doesn't matter summarized his latest book in his keynote at the Search Engine Strategies 2008 show here March 18.

Nicholas Carr drilled into theories from his latest book "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google."

Among the highlights is that the world will move from packaged software downloaded from a CD to cloud computing, or applications enabled by the Internet supported by the vendors who create them. Carr, pointing to successful SAAS offerings from Google, Salesforce.com and Amazon, noted this is happening already.

"If we could move to shared systems rather than private ones, we could dramatically reduce the capital that goes into computing, that goes into IT and release it throughout the economy for much more beneficial purposes," Carr said. "We are finally at the verge of deploying computing centrally as, in effect, a utility over the network."

Cloud computing allows businesses to save money by offloading or outsourcing part or all of their IT operations to vendors providing the applications or software infrastructure. Even so, cloud purveyors must employ tremendous amounts of power to fuel their customers' applications.

To wit, Carr showed a picture of one of Google's multiple cooling facilities, which draws cold water from the Columbia River in The Dalles, Ore., to cool a server farm the size of a football field packed with "at least tens if not hundreds of thousands of server computers."

"We don't know because Google is, probably for good reason, quite quiet about what actually goes on in these great data centers," Carr said, before adding as a joke, "probably animal sacrifices." Meanwhile, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon and Salesforce.com are making similar data center investments to support cloud computing.

Are We 50 Years Too Late?

Why is this happening now, considering that IBM leveraged its first mainframes as utility computers back in the 1960s?

Carr said the explosion in new power-hungry applications and the power to enable them via virtualization, or running multiple operating systems on a single physical machine, underpin the build out of utility computing systems.

For example, in addition to leveraging Linux to power its servers, Google uses the open-source XEN software to virtualize its MapReduce and File System infrastructure.

Moreover, Carr said the network computing effect, which Google's Eric Schmidt forecast as far back as 1993 when he was CTO at Sun Microsystems, is such that the capacity of the network is catching up to the power of the computer.

These means IT managers can deploy computing power, data storage or applications from one location (data center) over a grid to thousands or millions of people. Quoting Sun's slogan, Carr said, "The network is the computer."

This evolution to a personalized grid in the Web 2.0 has spawned numerous opportunities for application vendors such as Salesforce.com, SAAS collaboration provider Workday, as well as Amazon and 3Tera, which are providing computing and storage services to customers over the Web for a monthly fee.

HP announced its own cloud effort March 17, he added.

So, what is the comparison between the electrical grid and the computer grid as we know them today? Carr said the comparisons exist in the economic model; both are general purpose technologies with unlimited options for innovation and application.

These network or grid-driven technologies scale tremendously, driving down costs.

Source - By Clint Boulton, eWeek

Welcome to Marketers' Hangout Zone

Once upon a time, the college katta or the nearby chai stall was the main hangout for college students across India. They haven’t disappeared completely and continue to provide asylum to collegians killing time before a lecture or taking a break from getting educated. What’s changed is the choice of places to hang out.

From local chai stalls to movie theatres, it’s moved to fast food chains, pizza outlets and cafes. But as the need to connect with the target segment, particularly the youth, becomes imperative, even brands are plunging headlong into providing a more evolved hangout experience. Marketers of brands in as diverse segments as tea, coffee and wines to banking, cold beverages and consumer electronics are busy chalking out ‘lounges’ which make a cool, hep and happening statement.

Some of the brands that have been experimenting with this format include Nescafe, Tata Tea, Smirnoff, Microsoft Xbox, Chateau Indage, Coca-Cola , Citibank and Amul. While the outlets may differ in size and staff, branding efforts in each store make them unique. Xbox lounges for example are present in both stand-alone and shop-in-shop formats , spread over an area of 300 to 500 sq ft. Chateau Indage’s Ivy has different sizes for urban and rural markets.

While stores in urban areas are spread over 800 sq ft, Ivys in rural markets are over a 1,200 sq ft, which would definitely burn a hole in the pocket, if transposed to a metro setting. Vikrant Chougule, MD, Indage Hotels Group admits real estate to be a concern, “In urban areas, real estate is a hindrance, but isn’t much of a problem in rural. Because of the costs we try and stay away from high street locations. We are okay with being in a quiet neighbourhood because people who like wine will find us irrespective of the location.”

Xbox, on the other hand, depends more on the shop-in-shop format, for which it has tied up with The Mobile Store. Explaining the rationale behind Xbox lounges, Ashim Mathur, national marketing manager, entertainment & devices division, Microsoft India says, “Xbox requires people to touch and feel the product, a lounge helps them see and experience it. We have well-trained staff at the lounge who help answer queries and doubts consumers have about games, accessories and console.” This format helps Xbox address real-estate concerns as well.

“The profile of customers who visit The Mobile Store and those who like to look at our products are quite similar, the interiors and ambience of the stores gel well with what we want,” explains Mathur on the choice of The Mobile Store as a partner.

Coca-Cola’s Red Lounge outlets operate on a franchise model and therefore don’t require investments to be made in real estate. Discussing the format , Venkatesh Kini, VP-Marketing , Coca-Cola India says, “The Red Lounge is located within a mall and is a place where the youth can watch TV, play video games, surf the net, chat and also experience the whole range of Coca-Cola products.”
For Nescafe, the concept of Cafe Nescafe evolved some years ago when, anticipating the changing customer lifestyle, they decided to pioneer out of home consumption for coffee in an organised manner. “It exists in two formats ,” explains G G Pillai, business manager, OOH Nestle, “we first understand the needs of the consumer at the location and then decide whether it should be a full range Cafe Nescafe that provides a wide variety of speciality coffees , teas or soups, or a scaled down ‘coffee corner’ , located within stores or restaurants, targeting takeaways.”

Amidst all the outlets that have changed the tea-drinking habit of the nation, comes Tata Tea’s ambitious project Chai Unchai to promote tea as an equally cool beverage. Sangeeta Talwar, ED-marketing , Tata Tea says, “Chai Unchai fills a gap between the huge unorganised segment comprising tea shops or dhabas, and the premium priced tea houses. The focus is on providing a space for youth which provides a memorable and exciting ‘adda’ experience.”

And there are signs that even categories like banking are looking to jazz up the entire experience, via business centres . Citibank for example has opened Citigold Business Centre at select branches for its high-value Citigold customers . The centre has a state-of-the-art meeting room, where customers can use facilities to remain connected with office or home even as banking transactions takes place.

Rahul Soota, head — retail banking, Citibank India, says, “This service helps strengthen Citigold’s promise of exemplary service and connecting better with our clients, which in turn has a positive rub-off on the Citi brand due to positive word-of-mouth and experience sharing among customers.”

One advantage these outlets offer is undivided customer attention. “The number of consumers who order wine is encouraging ,” says Chougule, “Although there are no concrete figures, about 70 percent-80 percent tables order wine in the evenings and 30 percent of the tables order wine during lunch, even if it is port-wine .” Ivy, says Chougule, also enables the company to promote wine culture in India: “Once you are in, the décor gets you to try something and most of the times the customer ends up ordering wine.”

Ivy has presence across eight locations in both urban and rural areas and has plans to set up 34 outlets by March 2009 across the country. Amul parlours as they are called are present on campuses of Infosys, Wipro, IIM-A , IIT-B , Somnath temple, Dwarka temple, Metro rail and Gujarat rail. Spread over 150-200 sq ft, Amul is targeting a figure of 10,000 parlours by 2010. Elaborating on the parlours, BM Vyas, MD, Amul says, “Our idea of opening the parlours is to be independent. We want to directly reach the customers and eliminate the middleman.”

Cafe Coffee Day is one of the foremost players in providing experience using outlets as a platform. Shyamala Deshpande , senior general manager, Cafe Coffee Day offers a word of advice for all the brands, “Apart from the products and services, it is important to concentrate on the look and feel. Café Coffee Day creates a very relaxing environment complete with comfortable chairs and sofas. Also from time to time, Café Coffee Day brings to its customers offerings by way of interesting alliances with likeminded brands.” CCD’s success comes from the first mover advantage that they have in a space which was relatively untapped until their entry.

None of the brands have invested in marketing or advertising their outlet but are relying largely on the brandpull for their success. Says Kini of Coca-Cola , “We are looking at rolling out a range of above- and below-the-line initiatives locally within Pune and Bangalore to create a buzz and traffic to Red Lounges. Being located in malls we manage to attract high footfalls especially from the youth who are looking for a hangout destination with friends.”

Source - Preethi Chamikutty, The Economic Times

Web of many dimensions

As intelligent as the human, as responsive and as understanding. Web 3.0 is likely to be something most of us have not even imagined. And yet, it is going to be something we are all going to create!

STORY COMING SOON!

Lean ERP Is Best Practice in Industrial Manufacturing

Aberdeen Report Offers Roadmap for Best-in-Class ERP

Despite the fact that half of best-in-class industrial machinery and components manufacturing companies have a rigorous commitment to lean manufacturing strategies and processes, 25 percent of these companies were classified as average or lagging in their lean manufacturing efforts, according to a recent research study completed by Aberdeen and Cincom Systems. According to the jointly published report, "ERP in Industrial Machinery and components"  (www.cincom.com/industrialerp), it's clear that the majority of industrial manufacturing companies aren't getting the greatest benefits possible from their lean manufacturing strategies and processes. The report cites that 33 percent of industrial manufacturing firms had not realized the full potential of their lean manufacturing strategies and processes.

In the report, Aberdeen offers a roadmap for industrial machinery and components manufacturing firms seeking to attain higher levels of organic revenue growth while balancing the need to improve customer response times through best-in-class use of enterprise resource planning (ERP).

Download this report to learn:

• The best practices of lean manufacturing leaders in the industrial machinery and components industry
• How to classify your company (best-in-class, average or laggard)
• Which ERP component technologies enable a higher level of lean manufacturing process and strategy execution success

To download "ERP in Industrial Machinery and Components," visit (www.cincom.com/industrialerp).

Hardware 2.0

Quite recently the term Web2.0 is all over the place and it seems that everyone wants to get over this bandwagon. Though I shouldn't be complaining as I am in the queue to get onto the web2.0, web3.0, web4.0 and so on. These are surely new and exciting times\tools for the marketers.

Well I can go on and on over the Web 2.0 however has selected the topic of Hardware 2.0, hence need to keep the focus onto the same. A good example of Hardware 2.0 could be iPhone, and with the Apple release of an SDK for the iPhone and iPod touch, we can expect more and more application that we can be used on iPhone. Though not being an analyst, I will not be able to justify the new paradigm shift in the Hardware business. However with visible trends seen in the case of the Web's of the world surely foresee a new dimension to the hardware and its business as well.  Conceptually it will create a dimensional shift from what and how we know our hardware today.      

We all know how the "Soft" has changed over the years; however can we say the same on the "hard" side. Though this encourages me to think that aren't we to much focus on diversifying in the software and not that much about on the hardware side. Is it to "hard".

The software side has gone and is expected to go through the hyperdisruption however I am yet to see this happening in the hardware side.

With the introduction of the Apple iPhone, and my friend being kind enough to let me see the features of it has forced me to think that we have gone through so much of development in the software, telecommunication, mobile technology however are we still living in the same age of enterprise "hard" automation. Can we we expect it to change? 

Things like Google, Salesforce, Appexchange, Mashup, so on has changed the way we compute today even at an enterprise level. The thing I would like to imagine is, can we move in direction on Hardware "hyperdisruption".  I have been hearing now and then the cloud computing, however still do not know that will it enable an enterprise level disruption.

SMB, SME, "target the small", seems to be the flavor of all enterprise targeted sales. But sometime I do wonder that are the companies gear to understand the implication that the SMB sector entails. I may be talking specific to the Indian domestic market, with not even a single person in the name of an IT department in an SME organization that I have visited or known. Please do not take me wrong, I am talking about companies with annual revenue of $30 millions sustaining the IT on single free email. Then we talk about things like online\on-demand application and we conveniently assume that the organizations we are targeting will have T1 lines with redundancy, backup, etc, etc.

Not going much in detail would like to put the question to wonderful people who have been kind enough to read this post -

• Can we imagine that we will be able to have single "hard" server that will allow us to have or "add to cart" application(s) that are only one time downloadable, application that suits our requirements, at the time when we require, and we do not want to worry about an integration, and also not to worry about the having T1 redundant net lines?
• Switch on & off application as per our requirements.
• Ability to create hardware that does not require a power connection and runs on power from the network cables as phone lines does (conceptually).
• Not to worry about backup, maintenance, etc. as that will build in by the hardware provider who providing you the servers.
• Can we imagine Hard 2.0, Hard 3.0, so on?

The answer is a probable "YES".

Build-operate-transfer outsourcing catches on

Some firms are opting to buy the development team from vendors rather than terminate or extend the contract

In February, data storage firm Network Appliance Systems India Pvt. Ltd, or NetApp, “bought” 30 engineers from partner Symphony Services Corp. India Pvt. Ltd which builds software products or parts of them for it.

With this, NetApp joined a growing list of companies that includes Dendrite International Inc. and Oracle Corp. which have exercised the transfer option or buying out people from their partners in a so-called build-operate-transfer, or BOT, deal.

Vikram Shah, president of NettApp India, said the takeover was necessary as the work being handled by the team at Symphony became critical to the company’s business. “It was more of a strategic decision when we felt that the application integration project (that was outsourced to Symphony) has become vital for us,” Shah said.

In last two years, cos as Oracle, SAP have bought development teams from outsourced firms

Traditionally, firms such as Dendrite and Oracle sign deals with India-based product development firms which set up dedicated development teams for them, run the operations for a specified period (usually three-five years), and eventually transfer the teams to them. But it’s only now that the T-factor in BOT is gaining momentum. Depending on the terms of the deal, the vendor is compensated for the transfer as it entails loss of revenue and employee resources.

“As outsourcing deals struck some three-four years earlier come up for renewals, we see more such transfers,” said Pari Natarajan, chief executive of Zinnov Management Consulting Pvt. Ltd, a research and consulting firm that advises clients on their product development outsourcing strategy.

In the past 18-24 months, firms such as Dendrite, SAP AG and Oracle have bought development teams from outsourced development partners. In early 2007, Dendrite took over a team of 325 engineers from its development partner Aztec Software Ltd after it decided to set up its captive development centre in Bangalore.

Dendrite was subsequently acquired by French firm Cegedim SA in May 2007.

Following its acquisition by SAP in 2006, Business Objects bought over a team of 300 from Ness Technologies Inc., which runs a 2,700-engineer development operations in India. In 2007, Ness started transferring a team of more than 100 engineers to Oracle after it acquired Portal Software.

Shashank Samant, head of North American operations for Ness, said transfers happen when clients think they are going to save more money by taking over the teams or when they feel they are losing control over core operations. Mergers and acquisitions are another reason for transfers, Samant added. He said Ness has done some six transfers in the past five years, the latest being to Portal Software.

For NetApp, the recent transfer marks the first time it has taken over a team from a vendor and integrated it into itself. Instead of terminating or extending the contract, “we felt it was better to buy the team,” Shah said, thus saving time and investment in re-building a new team that would have “slowed us down”.

However, NetApp continues to outsource its software development to Symphony and half a dozen other Indian vendors. “Our engagement with Symphony continues, as they have a large outsource team of 60 people in Pune working for NetApp,” Shah said. The pricing details for the transfer have not been disclosed.

Ajay Kela, chief operating officer and managing director of Symphony Services, denied that NetApp had bought a team from the company.

The BOT delivery option provides all benefits of a fully outsourced service and additional benefits, such as a complete control over billing, a faster learning curve through on-the-job training, and access to expertise, skills, innovation and technologies that would not otherwise be available.

“Earlier, the BOT model helped firms mitigate the risk of setting up operations in India, but now, after they have reached a maturity level in their operations here, they are taking over the teams rather than continue with the outsourcing arrangement,” said Chandramouli C.S., engagement manager, advisory services, Zinnov.

Typically, the client is billed between $3,700 and $4,500 a month for every outsourced engineer of the vendor. Depending on the nature of the contract, the transfer is priced on a “sliding” scale, according to Chandramouli. If the team is transferred after two years of the contract period, the client has to pay approximately three months’ salary per employee. After three years, this comes down to an average of two months’ salary. “It could be that after four years of the contract period, the vendor has to transfer the team for free,” Chandramouli explained.

BOT also gives customers an opportunity to get an offshore development centre built to suit their needs. They also have access to a set of dedicated personnel who are hired and trained in collaboration with the client. The staged process helps the client evaluate the risks involved and check the feasibility before investing in a full fledged manner.

On the flip side, BOT deals could involve a sudden loss of revenues and resources for vendors. After the Dendrite deal, Aztec has not signed any BOT contracts as such deals bring in an element of uncertainty in revenue cycles, said V. Sundarajan, the company’s chief financial officer. Dendrite accounted for 10% of Aztec’s revenues when the transfer happened and the vendor’s growth was impacted.

“Last year, only 20% of our contracts signed were based on BOT model compared to four years ago when almost all deals were BOT model. However, larger companies have increased outsourcing to OPDs like us, and we expect majority of contracts that will come up for renewals will not be based on BOT model,” Kela added.

However, the model continues to attract some vendors and clients. “We signed six new deals last quarter on BOT model,” said Samant.

And even Aztec’s Sundarajan said that structuring these deals better could make them more attractive to companies, even those such as his that have been previously stung by them. “We are open to look at such deals if the terms are good and the transfers are well planned,” Sundarajan added.

Source - Malovika Rao and Vishwanath Kulkarni, LiveMint

The Enterprise 2.0 Vision

Open source, SaaS, SOA, offshoring, Web 2.0 and other emerging technologies and models are reshaping the future of corporate computing.

One of the hardest things for organizations to do is to retire old applications. Unlike hardware that tends to be replaced on a regular cycle, old software sticks around way too long. It definitely over stays its welcome. I remember when I worked at John Hancock decades ago and watching as departments struggled to replace aging systems. While they were ready and willing to make the change, they often didn’t know precisely how these old systems worked. The developers never documented what they wrote and those people had retired years earlier.

Now you would think that the problem had gone away. In reality, the problem got worse with the advent of client/server computing where there was less structure applied to the development process. I came across a very old article I wrote back in 1996 that talked about a lot of those issues (please ignore the picture). Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, web based development came along. Instead of having a few hundred developers, the web brought the advent of thousands of developers all provide changes and updates to applications. We are now at a cross roads that is quite unique.

While we still have many aging applications that cannot be easily updated, we also have the need to move to Web 2.0 to create Rich Internet applications (RIA). Web 2.0 offers a way to dramatically transform the user experience. Organizations are looking to this approach to development to make access to knowledge and information much more immediate and intuitive than ever before. But the transition isn’t easy.

I got thinking a lot about the transition from client/server applications and old web based applications when I met with Nexaweb a few weeks ago. The company has been around since 2000 and specializes in the Web 2.0 space. While there has been a lot of hype around Web 2.0 it actually is a very pragmatic technology infrastructure. While I think that a lot of customers assume that you can just approach Web 2.0 as though it were a simple web application. The reality is quite different. In fact, good Web 2.0 applications have to be well architected. What I liked about what Nexaweb is doing is their approach to application modernization with a Web 2.0 spin. In essence, Nexaweb is focused on modernization of aging client/server applications by providing tooling that documents the existing code. It is designed to identify bad code and provides a tool to generate a model driven architecture. Like any good consulting organization, Nexaweb has leveraged best practices used to help its consulting clients move old applications to Web 2.0. Nexaweb is selling a set of productivity tools that can generate a model driven architecture. It is intended to generate code as part of this process. The company claims that it can reduce the cost of transforming old code by as much as 70 percent.

The new product called Nexaweb’s Enterprise Web Suite including a UML modeling tool, a reporting tool that identifies repetitive processes, and code that is no longer used. Clearly, Nexaweb isn’t the only company taking advantage of modeling tools and an architectural approach. But the fact that the company is focused on helping companies transform their aging client/server applications into modular, service oriented approach is a step forward. It is one of the set of companies focused on not just updating applications by transforming into Web 2.0. What stands out is the fact that Nexaweb seems to be combining application transformation into business services (can you say Service Oriented Architectures). However, I must add that IBM has been on this track for quite a few years. Through its industry models, IBM has been helping companies transform its aging areapplications into industry specific business services. In addition, Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Air are adding a new level of sophistication to the momentum. WaveMaker, that I discussed in an earlier entry is making a contribution as well.

The trend is clear and it is good for customers. We are finally seeing software companies providing a path to moving code into the new world that is based on reusable, modular services that are architected. The next stage in the movement towards a service oriented architecture is applying this approach to the new generation of Web 2.0. Let me add a disclaimer — this isn’t magic. There is hard work here. None of these approaches or tools are automatic. They give customers a head start but there is hard work to be done. The alternative is to hold your breath and hope that things don’t break too quickly. There are so many promises of easy solutions to hard problems. There are solutions and tools that take the drudgery out of leaving legacy applications behind. But there is worthwhile hard work that really has to be done.

Judith Hurwitz is president of Hurwitz & Associates This piece originally appeared in her blog.

Shaun Smith's Top Ten Tips for Deploying CEM

This week Shaun Smith posted an article on CustomerThink titled, “Top Ten Tips for Deploying CEM .”

As Shaun points out, execution is the often the hardest part of creating a branded customer experience.  That’s because you must mobilize employees at all levels and align competing agendas, functions and executives.

Drawing on his experience with leading brands across the globe, Shaun has observed a number of mistakes that are all too common in so many failed initiatives.  In this article, Shaun outlines ways to avoid these pitfalls when implementing your own customer experience initiative.  Here are his “Top Ten Tips” for success:

1. Successful deployment requires the active and continuing involvement of leadership
2. Ensuring cross-functional ownership is vital
3. Focus on your most strategically important customers
4. Find out what these customers truly value
5. Design CEM before installing CRM systems
6. Use customer experience to retain customers rather than attempting to lock-in them in through so called loyalty cards
7. Deploy customer experience before allowing your agency to communicate the proposition
8. Provide ‘branded’ training to ensure that employees all understand the brand story
9. Measure the customer experience and align performance KPI’s with it
10. Sustain deployment through measuring customer experience rather than customer satisfaction

Shaun expands on each of these points with his own insights and examples of successful organizations that follow these tips.  So if you want to join these winners, make sure you read and follow Shaun’s advice in “Top Ten Tips for Deploying CEM."