Bambi: Consumers are dictating the way they want products. Maybe its the integration with the technology that exists with a little tweaking with the customers. Digital delivery of music was always there, took Napster and customers demonstrating demand to create the opportunity for iTunes.
Ad Nederlof, Chairman of Genesys, author of Customer Obsession:. Amongst his many things he is on the board of RBC Roosendall, a Dutch football team (he still plays himself). Ad also surveyed customers and realized he needs to write a new book on Customer Frustration, so he is sharing some of his research.
Communication with consumers and enterprises is the front end. Genesys is the leading call center operations provider with a 100% software focus. Had one hard quarter during the bust, deep cuts, shifted focus to bottom line and did well until selling to Alcatel. 25% of the management became millionaires.
IT spending will continue at a slower pace in 2004, bottom-line focus will contine, do more with less. Growth is not with more services, it should be with license growth, leave services to partners. Too much of IT budget is eaten by maintenance/deployment (80% of spending), which limits purchasing power for new things such as ASP (which is taking off). Enterprises may start ending maintenance contracts.
With Samsung in Japan they are building a hosted VoIP call center service. China is trying to build 12 Silicon Valleys. Small companies bend over backwards to sell to large companies (e.g. Latvian prime minister inviting executives to visit). If you want to manage the bottom line you are going to take advantage of offshoring. If the US Administration makes it difficult to do so, others will do it and the US will loose its competitive power.
Businesses not undertaking revolutionary or experimentl projects, ROI is still kning, 12 month hard ROI is required in most cases. No more massive IT projects, projects divided into smaller pieces, spread out over longer periods and enterprises are demanding more from or doing without SIs. Setting the right expectations is 90% of the job for projects.
Wonders who the REAL system integrator is? There is a lot of risk avoiding behavior, usually the end customer takes all the risk and does most of the integration. Wonders are ISVs really OPEN? Not open when it comes to each others. There is a need for a standard. Do enterprises really CARE about customers?
Why are 80% of CEOs claiming its the top priority while only 40% are surveying their customers on a regular basis? Most CEOs visit the customer service center when it opens or closes. The average CSR gets 5 hours management attention per month. 56% of consumers believe good service as the greatest impact on customer loyalty, the largest factor. Good service can make up for product problems and provides differentiation in commodity businesses. 80% of consumers say customer service has a major influence on their impression of a company, 85% would drop a product after a bad experience, 56% have stopped using one. The younger the people the stronger the response. Loyalty, revenue, reputation and market share can be easily taken away.
Someone in the audience said that psychologists say: if its a good experience you tell 2 people, bad experience you tell 13.
For good service, 76% will use a company again if the experience is positive. Customers want no waiting, first call resolution and personalized service.
Build your organization around your customers. Only 10% of it is technology, creating efficiencies comes from this focus, the people, business processes and business rules.
Decreasing failture: Obtain C-level executive buy-in, Re-engineer the business first, after that (maybe) technology, train your people to succeed, don't buy more than what you need (overbought Seibel and SAP, creating a step backwards, don't have the opportunity to customize but have to pay for not using it) and understand ROI.
Genesys: Communication Chaos: multiple devices, locations, mailboxes, directories and fragmented knowledge. Bridging communication is what they do. 80% of information stays in employees' minds, 15% is unstructured and 5% is structured (Source: Giga). They are building the middleware to bridge information and communication, the structured and unstructured with VoIP as the base.
500M information workers in the world (people who communicate with the outside world as part of their world), the enterprise will eventually be one large contact center where everyone is engaged in sales.
Now I'm getting up to be on the panel discussion..see Phil's notes
