Empirical Rationalism and Other Oxymora
Management
Keeping Pace With Agility
Feb 11th
With more and more discussion about customer co-creation, product development 2.0 and the inclusion of collaborative technologies into the CRM stack (CRM 2.0), it is important to understand how the adoption of these methods impacts the established business processes and the overall culture of the organization. Customer information flows through an organization on a prescribed basis, generally in “real-time”, “near-time” or on “scheduled” intervals. In some organizations, the customer’s expectation of action out-paces the reality of the information flow. Simply put, customers expect organizations to respond to demands faster than the established business practices allow. As organizations begin to look to new customer interaction models and technologies, they need to also take a step back and take a look at the entire business. Are the “scheduled” processes, such as once-a-year market research programs, adequate to capture the customer’s wants, needs and desires? Probably not in this brave new world. However, is “real-time” customer information important if it is going to take several months to address customer issues or incorporate new features into the product?
With the introduction of any new technologies into the organization, there generally needs to be a corresponding change in the business processes, work practices and corporate cultures to ensure success. It is no different with any of the “2.0″ initiatives (be it web, CRM or product development).
Hola, Mi Amigos. Habla Marketing?
Feb 7th
Skype thinks I speak Spanish (below). A mistake perhaps, but it does raise an interesting discussion point about the future of the marketing profession in an increasingly global market. In their 2007 predictions, IDC suggests that we will see a rise in local/regional software vendors onto the global scene (p.8). Although I don’t necessarily agree with their timing (i.e. this year), I think that it is inevitable that we’ll see the emergence and wide-spread adoption some powerful business technology from beyond the English speaking world over the next few years.
In the halcyon days of international marketing, there was a tendency toward the homogenization of the brand experience, whereby marketers tried to create a single unifying experience across the globe. As a result, we saw some classic, and often humorous, marketing blunders. However, marketers have since learned that creating a uniquely localized experience is far more effective. As a result, many products were developed in the home-country and later modified for local markets by local marketers. In general, home-country marketing execs had control over product development (and in some cases the entire product experience including pricing, bundling, etc) and local marketers had to take what they were given and adapt it to local markets (often with limited resources and confined by head-office guidelines). Over the past 15 years, we’ve proven that marketing is a distinctly local profession. With the rise of regional/local technology providers (not to mention the Chinese manufacturing powerhouses), it will be interesting to observe how the role of marketing changes when the US is no longer the “home-country”.
Smart Phones and Dumb Terminals
Feb 1st
There’s something definitely happening here… Tuesday’s WSJ cites an IDC report suggesting that world-wide shipments of dumb terminals will increase by 21.5% through 2010 (to six million units). As more and more software goes web-based and software-as-a-service, there is less and less need to keep data on the desktop. The benefits are such as reduced cost and increased security are obvious — even if you haven’t fully adopted SaaS. The article highlights one company that was able to replace 750 desktops for 1.2 million dollars. The PM on the project admits that it cost about the same as it would have for new PCs, but they’ll save money in lower hardware refresh rates (there were some additional advantages through server consolidation). The article also cites Gartner, suggesting that the savings can range between 10% and 40%. The downside of course is the decreased flexibility of reduced availability of some applications (i.e. potentially unsanctioned applications such as instant messaging). It should be interesting to watch this unfolds as SaaS increases in popularity and as the cost of “commodity” computing continues to rise with the roll-out of Vista and the new Office Professional.
In contrast, other reports on the rise of smart phones suggest an opposite, but potentially complementary trend. That is, more and more (personal and professional) data is findings its way onto smart devices (that can be more easily be lost stolen or otherwise damaged). If these trends continue, I think we’ll see a real stratification on the types of hardware that people use for business vs. what they use personally. If you can shop, social network, listen to music and organize photos using a lightweight, but powerful, smart phone, why bother taking the risk of doing it using company resources? On the flip side, why lug around a laptop if you can do what you need to for work through your smart-phone browser?
Use the Data/Information You Have!
Jan 29th
A funny thing happened to me last week…. my health insurance company called me on my cell phone to conduct a customer satisfaction survey with my two month old daughter. Now, first of all, they KNOW that my daughter is only 9 weeks old! After several calls to get the faulty billing and account information correct, they did in fact pay for her birth. Second, they KNOW that they were calling on a cell phone. I think it is pretty odd that they assumed that I would be interested in paying for the privilege of helping them improve their customer satisfaction. However, the fact that I was paying for the call aside, I did the survey. Another aside, after about 10 minutes, they got to the Ultimate Question (you know, the only question the you need to ask and measure?). Somewhere along the line, I think they missed the whole point of the customer satisfaction exercise…
Anyway, the whole experience got me thinking about using the information that you have within the business. There is an old adage the goes something along the lines that you can’t have wisdom without knowledge, knowledge without information and information without data. It seems to me that, in the quest to gain wisdom, more and more businesses are over-looking the data and information that already exists within the business. Knowledge of the customer — that is, synthesized and critically analyzed information derived from organizational data– is simply non-existent in many businesses. My experience with the company in question has been horrific. In fact, in the past year, there has been a problem with EVERY single on one of the claims that I filed. However, instead of inferring that they have a problem from the data that they have already have in their CRM system, they choose to collect more data! It’s easier to collect data than to act on it, particularly quantitative data. This tendency is endemic in a lot of businesses. As the problems get worse, management just drills deeper and deeper into data that ultimately has no meaning. Meanwhile, customers defect and profitability suffers.
Thoughts on Identifying and Exploiting Alternative Uses of Technology
Jan 26th
I was recently asked about how you would go about developing a process for determining and commercializing parallel uses of technology. That is, as a technology vendor you know that there are other uses for your products and technologies, but how do you commercially explore and exploit these alternative uses in a systematic way? My thoughts in a minute, but first a few stories…
Over the past few years, I have heard of some interesting uses for CRM technology. There was the college-age “playa” using the personal edition of a commercial grade CRM system as modern black book (complete with pipeline reports, alerts and escalations), the bunch of knee-breakers using CRM to track their extortion victims and the house of ill repute that used the one-to-many association between the account and contact entities to, ahem, track who serviced whom… But my all time favorite example, and the one that has relevance beyond the novelty value of the above stories, was the use of CRM to track black economic empowerment credits for businesses in South Africa. This is a very localized issue that would be beyond the scope of most software vendor’s localization and commercial plans. To address the market demands, a South African Value Added Reseller (VAR) had one of two choices: 1) develop the solution from scratch recreating much of the common functionality or 2) use the CRM system as a platform to develop their own solution. They choose option two and ultimately developed a solution that ended up looking much different than the CRM package that was originally shipped by the vendor.
