Oh’s and Woe’s – Identifying Innovations.

Innovation is the root of any business success; all business need to come up with something original and new. Even if the business model addresses traditional lines of ideas; the packaging, the application, the tuning being unique can still be an innovation. Today organizations get caught in the web of ROI, P&L and addressing ongoing PGM routines that innovation has become a negligible and in most cases a rejected case. Lets leave aside the ecosystem for nurturing innovations; these days organizations do not have the capability to differentiate between a successful innovation and a stale drummed up rhetoric. So dismal is the stance that everything that does a workflow with few colors is deemed as an innovation.

As business and organizations evolve, innovation is becoming a key driver of performance. Firms striving to maintain high rates of innovation need a continuous flow of new ideas. Innovation is like field that has to be set right; for the seeds of ideas from key personnel fall and sprout into a worthwhile result. The organization not only need the supportive environment where the birth of an idea happens; it also should be ready with the cradle and life support for the idea to evolve into an innovation.

Woe to the organizations that do not have the capability to differentiate. The breed of intellectuals are a rarity; their ideas and practices if leveraged and nurtured well can help build new channels of business expansions and value. Organizations that cannot innovate or build environments to breed innovation cannot survive in the market. Lets first look at how Innovations can be identified; what can actually be termed as Innovation?

 

Identifying Innovation:
Well, that’s what organizations struggle with. When you say organizations, we relate to the people in flesh and blood who hold offices that across the leadership stack. Innovation happens under the radar; unless your organization boasts of having the wherewithal of setting and managing an innovation management COE – center of excellence.

Lets now dive deep on how we can identify an innovation. With the many ways of identifying innovations the following DND approach can be one of the ways you can identify and value an Innovation.

DIFFUSION:
Diffusion is the way in which innovations spread, through market or non-market channels, from their first micro implementation to different consumers, countries, regions, sectors, markets, and firms. Without diffusion, an innovation will have no economic impact. We look at the diffusion in many aspects; we gauge using audience excitement, value generated, market segment addressed, market size, idea investment and ROI, value impact analysis.

NEW:
A product, process, marketing method, or organizational method can already have been implemented by other firms, but if it is new to the firm (or in case of products and processes: significantly improved), then it is an innovation for that firm. An innovation cannot be termed new if for example a product is purchased off shelf and implemented true to its features in a business practice to achieve the features therein and thereby terming it an innovation. NEW to the Organization, NEW to the Market.

DISRUPTIVE:
An innovation that creates ripples and impacts a market and thereby upsetting the existing norm and creating new value chains; change the structure of the market, create new markets, or render existing products obsolete. Disruptive innovation focuses on the impact of innovations as opposed to their novelty.

Effects of Successful Innovation [DND-E]:

* Increase or maintain market share
* Enter new markets
* Increase visibility or exposure for products
* Reduced time to respond to customer needs
* Achieve industry technical standards
* Reduce operating costs, increase margins
* Increase operational efficiency
* Improve communication and interaction among different business activities
* Increase sharing or transferring of knowledge with other organizations
* Increase the ability to adapt to different client demands
* Develop stronger relationships with customers

Copyright © cran.edge/@jesuvaliant @valiantblogs

Self Service Frameworks for Support

Self Service Frameworks

Self Service Frameworks

Self-service as a concept enables and empowers end users to solve their own IT problems, thereby allowing support organizations to gain efficiencies through a reduced incident and request workload. Self-service can be deployed in multiple variants [DIY, Decision Support, Tech Tree., etc.,] to suit the preferences of the audience. The audience should be empowered with the right “companion” tools and processes to support the self-service routines.

Knowledge delivery through self-service frameworks is far more complex than the routine functions offered in the Knowledge base. The function of accruing and storing the vast amounts of information into the accurate taxonomy, to be delivered via multiple web 2.0 tools is the core aspect that organizations have to deal with while evaluating the adoption of a self-service framework. It is also about learning how to manage the whole knowledge life-cycle of creation, nurturing, application, embedding, revising, retiring, leveraging and relearning to develop organizational learning, memory and performance.

For all organizations the core business objectives of introducing self-service framework are as follows.

• Empower customers with unprecedented control over their decisions, real-time access to solutions, driving more return visits and greater customer loyalty
• Stay open for business 24/7 around the world, while also providing cost-effective customer self-service options to your customers
• Customized content enables you to create a true one-to-one marketing platform, letting you publish information to specific prospects, customers, or entire groups.
• Customers can enter trouble tickets by logging onto your site, rather than calling or e-mailing you. They can access content that’s been customized just for them, and can easily access relevant support documentation
• Build workflows from the customer case creation perspective that will strategically try to achieve a call diversion by placing the right KB articles, Forum categories and other tools before actually enabling the customer to open a case.

Process Adoption Preliminaries:

1. Content management and life-cycle workflow
2. Qualified KB content to be ready
3. System Access control framework
4. ODM – Online delivery model compliance
5. Information architecture and taxonomy
6. CRM Case management process review for data capture & correlation

Jesu Valiant – 2013

Knowledge Management in the Services Industry

 

 

The discipline of Knowledge management (KM) aims at discovering, capturing, sharing, preserving, developing & leveraging the knowledge capital. A structured Knowledge management routine helps organizations improve its performance and helps obtain a competitive advantage. Knowledge management best practices are evolved after continuous exposure to a whole assortment of challenges addressing varied communities and supporting the end to end ecosystem of the support & service businesses. Knowledge management Services covering the key aspects of Knowledge Management should help transform your current support services by incorporating well-structured, balanced and proven processes,
methods and systems.

Support 2.0 – Knowledge Centered Support model

Based on a recent analysis performed over enterprise technical support customers, we could see exponentially at least 15% of customers demanding better Knowledge base, better content on articles, DIY kits – Self-help systems, searchable, indexed knowledge base for them to drill down into the solutions. Structuring a robust and efficient Knowledge management practice helps both the customer in better adoption of service or product and for the engagement teams to help in better performance metrics impacting the entire support process altogether.

Intended Audience:

This recommendation is intended for organizations who require implementation of a Knowledge centric support model, knowledge management workflow, methodology and its adoption resulting in visible ROI. This recommendation is also appropriate for product managers whose products align with or enable the KMS practices.

Business Objectives:

• To introduce Knowledge management processes, best practices on rendering Knowledge centric support
• Creating a Sustainable Knowledge Management Framework
• Create strong product and process knowledge repository and build routines to leverage such an IP. Knowledge accumulation and usage is a key to business success.
• Improve operational performance levels with visible measurements and analysis to show the ROI of adopting Knowledge management / Support 2.0 framework
• Build & deploy  closed loop Knowledge management process targeting  varied audiences covering support teams, engineering teams to customers and business users
• Promote Information Exchange from among communities or between organization layers & community.
• Create thriving online spaces that deliver measurable value.
• Present a free, fair, open & transparent culture; helps gain value.

Successful adoption of the Knowledge Management methodology offers profound benefits for any information-intensive organization. For most groups, this is transformational in that it changes and increases the value proposition of support. The benefits realized in the short term can be tracked using traditional support metrics. The longer-term benefits are in new areas of value creation and, therefore, require new measures that we will deploy.

The near term benefits that will be targeted:

• Improved FCR
• Reduced escalation
• Initiate call deflection routines
• Higher Rate of Resolutions
• Increasing CSAT trends
• Technology expertise appreciation
• Higher productivity
• Lesser case reservoirs
• Product knowledge appreciation
• Qualitative Transactions
• TCG Resolutions Expertise

The longer term benefits that can be targeted:

• Higher adoption of self service, DIY systems by the communities.
• Reduced training time for new employees
• Improvement in call deflection  percentages
• Building strong domain and product KB repository
• Position community support as a brand differentiators
• Web / Self-support offering with Video / SIMS
• Include E-Commerce Routines
• Overall support process optimization adopting KM as a practice

Jesu Valiant – 2013

Edge Business Solutions Framework

EDGE has been structured to handle specific enterprise workflows addressing access control, content management, intellectual property and security requirements. EDGE enables the enterprise to harness the power of Web 2.0 to drive customer loyalty, drive marketing and product management, as well as provide collaborative environments for promoting ideas that drive continuous innovation.

Web 2.0 has transformed the way we look at online community behavior and the possible implications of collective, collaborative knowledge management models. The power of the model has been universally recognized. However, the implications for enterprise adoption suffer from a lack of immediate consensus.

Jesu Valiant – The Major Service Industry Trends

With the above trends shaping the services industry; there is a need to address the ever-increasing gap with a solution from a technological and logical perspective that would stand to evolve with the dynamics of the service industry. We tend to get attracted to terminologies in the services industry ‘use case’ like KCS, Social Media, Collaboration, Analytics, etc., forgetting that these idea bundles do not have a tested platform with observable data that can be adapted in similar environments, providing the same yield. With such a dearth of proven solution models; here I am looking at replicating the models of successes and to present the entire solution in a concise logical framework for global comprehension.

Introducing the Edge Business Solutions framework; I address the technology components, logical functions, ongoing support and evolution to the ‘services’ business dynamics. This is a working  solution model adapted by a few organizations; there is a mapped platform, defined process set, metrics & measurements and a visible ROI.

The Edge Solution Framework

Jesu Valiant_Edge_Framework

Edge new market solutions are designed to address a wide range of challenges and help users increase performance levels and streamline operations. Lean is in Edge Solutions DNA, this DNA ensures that we structure and deploy specific enterprise workflows addressing access control, content management, intellectual property and security requirements. EDGE framework enables the enterprise to harness the power of BPA-BPM and Analytics like never before; having a direct bearing on ROI. Solutions help drive customer loyalty, drive adoption and better product management, as well as provide collaborative environments for promoting ideas that drive continuous innovation. Edge Solutions have helped transform the way we look at Business Process Management and the possible implications of collective, best practice models.

Key Solutions:

• Knowledge Systems
• Data Collection & Capture
• Online Collaboration
• Learning Management
• Social Media Solutions
• Document Management
• Enterprise Wiki
• Enterprise Content Management
• Analytics + Reporting Dashboards
• Scorecards & KPI Management
• Self help / DIY Solutions
• Survey Management
• Process Tracking & Scheduling

The range of Edge solutions and services are powered by a native Edge applications framework also named Edge; structured to handle three challenges: the intensive deadlines, the stringent checklist of flexibility & security, and a predefined set of functional classes written by experienced Web developers. Edge application framework lets us build high-performing, thoroughly flexible, deeply secure, elegantly designed, Web applications quickly.

Edge web application framework is a high level PHP framework that encourages rapid, expandable,  inter-operable, web applications. There are predefined modules addressing core functions of workflow, charting engines, access controls and the likes that augment any build and deploy scenario rather quickly.

For more information please feel free to reach to me at my business email address at jesu.valiant@csscorp.com.

Copyrights – Jesu Valiant 2012

Service [TAC] oriented Knowledge Engineering – Framework & Process

Knowledge Engineering for Services [TAC]

All the data that is being gathered over every possible transactions reside in the databases. These transactional data amassed over time has the potential to yield a lot of intelligence and provide key insight into the major four areas of Business.  [a]-Product Analytics, [b]-Customer Analytics, [c]-Process Analytics.

Technology manufacturers need to evolve their strategy every time and stay competitive, they desperately need to understand the perspectives from a VOC – Voice of Customer.

TAC Centric Knowledge Engineering will make use of a varied a host of ‘technology and product BI companies’ and ‘BI as a service companies’.
There are three types of BI as a service offerings:
1. Generic BI platform capabilities (for example, online analytical processing [OLAP], reporting, analysis, data mining)
2. Application-specific offerings (for example, Web analytics, fraud analysis, risk analysis, benchmark analysis)
3. Combination of both application BI services & product specific analytics with a expert recommendations and consulting  [KE].

Knowledge Engineering will supply the all essential human expertise to build the knowledge analytics architecture based on the business case / SWOT and  conclude recommendations.

From a Services Industry perspective; I recommend pursuits be set over three specific areas. 1. Customer Analytics, 2. Product Analytics, 3.Process Analytics. This can help accelerate service excellence and optimize operations.

Product Analytics: Solutions that allow them to analyze across a series of product performance dimensions ‘end to end’ in the product’s lifecycle. Analytics over Product reliability, third party environments, bug impacts, causes to resolutions, escalations and factors, time to resolve, and maintainability requirements, while all the time focusing on lowering support lifecycle. Product analytics will bend the traditional value chain into a “feedback loop”; evolving into product intelligence.

Customer Analytics: Customer intelligence visibility, customer satisfaction RCA & recommendations, customers and prospects, customers’ likes and dislikes, cases history and trend, as well as future wants and needs, by consolidating customer information currently in multiple silos and mining information.

Process Analytics: Business Process Analytics provides drill-down and slice and dice capabilities from various perspectives for extensive process analysis and reporting. Derivations of general and specialist advisory based on analytics rendered over  historic and real-time data.

Knowledge Engineering Framework:

JesuValiant_KnowledgeEngineeringFramework

Knowledge Engineering – What it takes?
•    Enumerate, analyze, catalog, and suggest improvements to the core and support processes of the business unit.
•    Ability to assimilate and correlate disconnected and and articulate their collective relevance.
•    The ability to visualize and create high-level models to extend and mature the business architecture.
•    Technical knowledge over technologies covered in the product stack.
•    Importing, cleaning, transforming, validating or modeling data with the purpose of understanding or making conclusions from the data for decision making purposes.
•    Presenting data in charts, graphs, tables, designing and developing relational databases for collecting data.
•    Information management, relational database design and development, business intelligence, data mining or statistics.
•    Utilizes data analysis techniques or best practices and draw inferences and present comprehensive analysis.
•    Critically evaluate information gathered from multiple sources, reconcile conflicts, Decompose high-level information into details, abstract up from low-level information to a general understanding.
•    Prepare reports of findings, illustrating data graphically and translating complex findings into written text.

Do you have a pain point today and are you a technology product manufacturer? Reach out to me @ jesu.valiant@csscorp.com.

Thanks for reading.

Copyrights – Jesu Valiant 2012

*Logos in the Framework diagram belong to the respective owners. Here its to highlight and recommend adoption of these systems and tools to perform Knowledge Engineering.

Enterprise Solutions Framework for Salesforce

Salesforce has emerged as one of the best cloud solutions for the market and its evolution is quite remarkable. With a new range of feature sets deployed over cloud and the spree of acquisitions that Salesforce has done especially to add more capability to its offering; there has risen a strong need for organizations who have adopted Salesforce to understand, leverage and extract ROI over this rapidly evolving cloud solution.

There are a range of services spanning the entire lifecycle of cloud based CRM adoption using the Salesforce.com platform one can avail from the list of partners. However organizations fall much short of enabling the newest features and obtain the yield of critical benefits. Building these niche services and solutions are undertaken by select Salesforce partners who leverage exiting function sets and take the operability of the cloud to greater depths. We can build comprehensive solutions that drive sales, support through  Collaboration, Social networks, Business intelligence and Knowledge management processes. There are the critical new market solutions that have been framed in the industry to which there is no dynamic solution that has been created.

Almost many organizations find it harrowing to perform, 1. CRM & App Adoption and driving higher ROI, 2. Implementing the new market solutions for the new dynamic business landscape. Many Salesforce implementations suffer from a lack of critical expertise in adopting best practices, packaged solutions.

Have below Salesforce solutions and support framework [Have derived this from ITIL framework; this conjure specifically for Cloud Administration and Management] that can help appreciate the user experience and drive higher utilization of the cloud solution. Have listed the critical areas of operations support & administration where every organization using Salesforce needs to deploy a focus group.

Salesforce Solution and Support Framework

Framework defines a comprehensive solutioning and support stack. We intend to pursue adoption of this framework and thus provide direct value to the market in achieving the elusive 1. Adoption and driving higher ROI, and optimizing for performance 2. New market solutions for the new dynamic business landscape “to be done On Demand”. With a strong Salesforce expertise and solutioning cadence spanning across process management, analytics, interops, migrations, integrations backed by certified applications; the ForceNext as it is branded will deliver the best conjure of expertise in the Services domain.

Solutions Stack for the New Market: On Request mailto:jesu.valiant@csscorp.com

Copyright © 2009-2011 cran.edge/@jesuvaliant @valiantblogs

Strategic Financial Decisions – The Makers & the Breakers

Taking the Shylock route today’s organizations embark on a journey that can directly drag the organization to perilous and disastrous route into a future that offsets the goals and the mission of the Board. The financial charter by process design, rests with the decision of a very few; these few sometimes do not get the pulse of the organization; they constantly vibrate at a frequency that is completely off course the Board and the Business. With the changing trends in the corporate leadership and their approach to profitability, the only line items these leaders  see are bottom line cost reductions, spree of acquisitions & improper integrations, investing into sales & marketing efforts of decade old services, misplaced S&M focus over geographies and services. They are not to be blamed, without any depth in the service LOB of the organization and the technology vertical comprehension skills these decision and their makers drag the organization down and ensure it sputters to an halt like an old blocked rusted carburetor engine.

I want to discuss a few key examples of such perilous decisions and the decision makers that have devastated tall standing organizations. These decisions and the decision makers have collapsed structures and impeded progress in the name of growth and profitability; bringing to the fore their cleaving to traditional business structures and not adopt to the dynamic business environments governing the markets today.

Nortel Networks: Nortel struggled with a string of weak leadership team who huffed and puffed their way through mistake after mistake until Nortel eventually collapsed. They were burdened with billions of dollars in debt after missing out to raise equity and till they became a penny stock. Poor management and governance saw class-action lawsuits that cost it billions of dollars. Nortel made a series of multi-billion dollar acquisitions that were spectacular failures. Causes: Incorrect and out-of-line Financial Decisions by the handful of leaders that devastated the growth Nortel had achieved over the decades.

Air India: Foremost the Public holding of a Commercial enterprise does never survive, except for entities like ISRO where scientists and industry experts rule the roost. As for Air India and Indian Airlines the decision on not to privatize proves costly. The Indian state with its plural and coalition driven political schema cannot in anyway manage to be commercial in the wake of massive industry competition. The rising debts over fuel, airport parking, salaries, maintenance, one does wonder the future course of the organization. Wages account for just 16% of total costs, so the scope for reducing losses through wage or employee reductions is quite small. Blunders aplenty thanks to the Union ministry like the; Air India – Indian merger, Not outsourcing of fringe and support work, severe misuse of perks, corruption driven losses from high places, No industry expert to run the show as bureaucrats and politicians CANNOT run an airline. The purchase of Boeing 777 and 787 Dream-liners far beyond the airlines need is another major factor in this. Recently reports indicate corruption in the sale of assets of the Organization. Causes: Well.. its political state leadership. What more can anyone expect?

The above listed instances clearly highlight the need to have a strategic leadership team that drives business performance and posses great acumen and wisdom. Having taken financial decisions based on traditional and primitive approaches do not help growth in organizations that operate in dynamic business environments, the need of the hour is to have a sane leadership that can rise up and adopt to the changes. In the name of Optimization – Penny Wise Pound Foolish. Whenever the corporate house starts building hurdles for business growth in any form with red tapes lined with laces preaching of optimization; its high time the second level leadership and mid management foresee the conclusion. In the above examples we see that in the dynamic business environments the decisions becoming debacles.

Jesu Valiant – 2011

Social Media for the Enterprise – Strategies for Maximum ROI

Social Media dynamism, science and working is unique and can be adopted to Enterprises that have their own community, they can on-board existing traditional engagement channels into Social media and offer an unique customer experience. There are always huge benefits in closing out a successful Social Media channel for enterprises. Simply the Science of Social Media can allow a definitive and a sea of change for enterprises who will want to pursue new ways of global outreach and engagement of customer communities.

There are frameworks, methodologies, practices and process systems created to add tremendous value to enterprises seeking to deploy Social media strategies, With the application of Social Media strategies and by incorporating the best practices honed; enterprises can now pursue providing strong value to their engagement models by providing the need driven, value based solutions over Social media. Enterprises have a list of priorities that they should achieve by deploying Social Media platforms; these priorities are scenarios in which they get the maximum return over investment. These scenarios are the traditional engagement methods that are packaged and deployed over social media platforms; with a global community and outreach like never before. Have listed below few of the direct, maximum yield Social Media pursuits that I could research and list.

Investment and Maximum ROI Scenarios.

Enterprise Collaboration Enablement
Enterprise Support Enablement
Social Media Monitoring & Engagement
Social Media Sales Enablement
Web Collaboration & Intelligence

For detailed insight, visit my other Blog

Jesu Valiant – 2011

Strategic Acquisitions – How? and What?

All organizations try to achieve the maximum growth in the shortest possible time. The trajectory that they want to take depends on what strategies they adopt to manage the varied challenges that they will face. There are many strategies that can be deployed in the wake of time-lines based growth targets. Its almost a undeniable fact that we have growth targets breathing down on CEO’s and the Board in all organizations and the route that they decide to take spells either the knell or the trumpet.

To swell any organizations revenue the strategy and the impending road-map is key; growth can be achieved by multiple ways. Defining a strategy and the under lying mesh of a plan is a hard job and usually the CSO – the strategist does that; he has to further that his conviction to persuade the brass of the organization. Lets take a look at the varied  examples of growth strategies that have been successfully used on most occasions to improve the swell of revenues.

Growth through Acquisition, examples and top reasons:

Avaya’s acquisition of Nortel

With Nortel filing for bankruptcy and the entire global telecom community completely aware of the ‘cash cows’ of a customer base with Nortel. Avaya’s acquisition of Nortel ensured it roped in the top enterprises where it can up-sell / cross sell and also the key Large Systems piece that had many fans in the enterprise world. With Nortel’s strong presence in NA, Avaya could get a rapid entry there with its newer range of products targeting the UC opportunities with Aura and other range of newer products.

Salesforce acquisition of Radian6

With all the CRM systems loosing out to minnows of smaller organizations thanks to the capability of Social Media analytics that these start ups have created. With Lithium’s intended acquisition of Scoutlabs and the market thirst for Social media analytics, Salesforce jumped into the bandwagon and identified and completed the acquisition of one of the market leaders in Social media analytics “Radian6”.  Salesforce overnight added capability to penetrate a big chunk of the market and also provide new capabilities to its huge and delighted customer base.

Tata Motors acquisition of Jaguar & Land Rover

Tata Motors acquisition of the British icons Jaguar and Land Rover was seen as an achievement; here Tata Motors without wasting much time and realizing the economic slowdown in European and American markets completed the acquisition rather swiftly. It provided Tata Motors opportunity to spread its business across different geographies and across different customer segments. Tata Motors did not hesitate to incur a huge capital expenditure in planning to invest US$ 1 billion in JLR in addition to the US$ 2.3 billion it had spent on the acquisition. Well Tata Motors now had global reach, varied market segments penetration, infrastructure, labs and technology.

JP Morgan acquisition of Bear Stearns

JPMorgan Chase acquired Bear Stearns for $10 per share, a price far below the 52-week high of $133.20 per share. JPMorgan Chase made the last-minute buyout was aimed at averting a Bear Stearns bankruptcy and a spreading crisis of confidence in the global financial system. The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government swiftly approved the all-stock deal. As all could see JPMorgan benefited most in Bear Stearns’ prime brokerage business, which completes trades for big investors such as hedge funds. Bear Stearns collapse was spectacular just before the acquisition falling to 1% in 16 days.

Whats in a Acquisition?

Acquisition is an inorganic growth tool, many times this is the most sought after growth tool. There are many cases of pure failures in acquisitions thanks to the fine art that is required to compose a strategic integration. Acquisition tests the ability of most leaders who have little, or no expertise in shaping a joint market strategy and driving existing share holders commitments. Approaches abound and any failures in the estimated revenues are directly due to the lack of proper research and analysis over priorities and integration dynamics.  In certain events acquisitions could have been avoided and strategic alliances could have been the key.

How to make an Acquisition work?

Before even the ideas over a target company are framed, even before the very first exchange of numbers happen, there has to be a business analysis done from the market perspective invoking the best of methodologies. The earliest of activity starts with getting the priorities of the organization correct; priorities cover non-negotiable stance of the acquirer. This list of priorities are essential to even start mapping the possible targets that would help in fulfilling the non-negotiable stance.

Secondly the acquirer organization needs to ‘listen and monitor’ the market having its scanner on the alert not to miss any available opportunity, there can be missed opportunities that emerge that would otherwise been a launchpad for growth. It would be wise of the board members or CEO’s to avoid compulsions which would emerge from almost everywhere.

Jesu Valiant

CRM’s in 2011 – What the Market needs?

CRM applications have traditionally helped in issue tracking, tasks management, accounts management and have all their product feature appreciations over the decade. All such enhancements have addressed feature extensions and few rare cases of interops with other applications. In today’s scenario the CRM features are being looked at from multiple perspectives with the advent of newer engagement models and transaction channels. The market does have its share of feature packed systems but features have only looked at addressing the legacy use cases and have not looked at widening the visions over next generation market needs and emerging solution areas. With a late awakening we now see an activity spree in the market that does signal that product companies are trying to make the most, by way of new pursuits and with a load of investments.

Here we take a look at ‘What the market needs today?’, the product stacks prescribed by analysts and how they hold good against the needs.

Gartner in its MQ for 2010 lists the following set of product companies.

Leaders & Challengers per GMQ 2010
-Oracle Siebel
-Salesforce
-Microsoft Dynamics
-RightNow
-Pega Systems
-SAP
-Amdocs

Lets see what are the overall Gaps that are abound in these products with regards to the realities and engagements of today and tomorrow.

1. Integrated E-Support:
With high levels of adoption over self service modules and real-time on-line support systems growing in demand, many CRM’s in the market have not the ability to provide an integrated E-Support Module. E-Support will be the set of functions or features that will help in rendering real time support that will be part of the CRM, i.e., an extension. The functionalities does not end with ‘Incident Tracking’, ‘Data Captures’ and ‘Account details’ but goes on to provide a real time engagement console with the transactions being recorded. Features like ‘Create my Case’, ‘Chat now’, ‘Click to Call’, etc are opportunities to be pursued by CRM companies. There however has been few market leaders who have built capabilities on these lines but much of the market needs here remains to be addressed.

2. Process Automations & Management:
Every Product TAC, Sales & Marketing Teams, Engineering & Design Teams, and almost all the functional arms of any product company plays host to a wide variety of processes and procedures around the tracked CRM entries. There are numerous processes that are covered manually with the reports that are extracted from the CRM databases. CRM here typically functions as a storehouse of data and performs case captures, beyond that all processes are manually managed by the varied functional units within and organization. They have Excel based macros that process data outside CRM, they have audit screens done over third party applications, they utilize web based tools to automate other process and work-flows complimenting the data capture done by the ‘expensive’ CRM.
Here is an opportunity to fill the Gap and make available process / work-flow management functionality as part of the CRM to position product as a market differentiator.

3. Social Web Interoperability:
The last couple of years have seen the emergence of Social media, with direct identification of the individual profiles and engagements globally, this new medium demanded immediate attention from all of the enterprises and corporations. In the wake of Facebook, Twitter, third party forums & wikis, Collaboration platforms, there was an immediate need to listen, manage, engage, analyze these data streams that are out there. The negative impact that can be caused due to mis-management of this medium with its virality over comments and posts posed a very high risk proposition. Many CRM’s today fall absolutely short of capabilities to address this widening gap, however there are a few market leaders who have in the past months frantically went on an Acquisition spree or a partnership spree to add this strength. Salesforce & Raidan over Service Cloud 3, Lithium acquisition of Scoutlabs are few of the attempts made to address this gap.

4. Social Analytics:
With much said and more done over Social media on providing tools capable of listening, capturing, monitoring, engaging of conversation over the Social Web and third party portals and forums, there emerges the strong need to analyze these in line with the few key business cases and identify, get insight,  pursue opportunities, [Social Media Analytics features]. This key feature set is not offered by many in the market. There are only a few product based solutions that currently have tried to build capability here, this area is yet to evolve and the critical aspect of providing Business Intelligence over Social Media is an open opportunity for all the CRM’s out there. With the complexities and lack of analytical cases to pursue and render value there is whole lot of ideation and product features that sprout here with no comprehensive solutions. Again a very strong opportunity for CRM product manufacturers to set their pursuit on.

5. Data Reporting & Analytics:
Much of the CRM’s data reporting revolves around volume driven reporting and rule engine based reporting. Across all the CRM’s that are being adopted there exists a huge gap over data analytics and advanced reporting. We have modules on CRM today that provide the advanced users the ability to query the backend data stacks to procure reports and a very low level slice and dice capability. This gap here to run Analytics and Engineer Insightful details is a Grey area. Although the reporting capabilities have matured, the gaps are huge and every CRM user community over all the product pursue a separate MIS and Data analyst functions outside the CRM process. The market will lap up opportunities here and this can be a huge market differentiator for CRM product companies if they address this glaring gap.

6. Integrated Knowledge Solutions:
Based on an analysis performed over enterprise technical support customers, I could see exponentially at least 15% of customers demanding DIY kits – Self help systems for them to drill down into the solutions. There is also the tremendous gap between the product and its relative documentation that can be ‘called upon’ even by agents who work on incidents and tickets. Both for the customer to assist in better adoption of service or product and for the engagement teams to arrive at a solution to help in better and quicker closure the backend process of Knowledge creation, management, references, knowledge pushing, archiving, etc., remains much to be desired even with the market leaders and the challengers. Solutions over this can be a tremendous value.

Jesu Valiant