At the Cloud Retail Week Conference Amazon’s Chris North said “If you don’t listen to customers you will fail. If you only listen to customers you will fail” emphasising the need to work backwards from what your customers want.

If we put this in the context of innovation, without understanding the customer you will be innovating for the sake of it. Without listening to your customers’ needs, the success of any innovation is likely to be limited. Whether you focus on a product, service or way of working, it’s important that any innovation enhances customer experience and gives your organisation a competitive edge. Innovation does not have to involve major business change quite often “innovation without inventing” is a quicker route to achieve a business outcome.

We have seen the success of innovation in Domino’s where changes in the way they worked allowed them to develop how they provided services to their customers. Domino’s had witnessed a rapid growth in the amount of online orders through mobile devices and customers were asking for a wider choice of mobile channels. But to do this they needed more time. By outsourcing their Wide Area Network to Kcom they changed a major part of the management of their infrastructure. This allowed them to focus their time on the development of services including the website and other mobile channels that customers wanted. The result – mobile transactions now account for 16% of their online sales and online sales now represent 50.6% of UK Delivered sales.

What can we learn from this? Listen to your customers but then take what you’ve learned back into your business to use as the starting point for your innovation. And don’t forget, you don’t have to do it all alone. External resources can help unlock what you need such as intelligence, skills and the hardest to achieve – time.

It was interesting to watch a debate unfold right from the beginning, just on the varying definitions of Public, Private and Hybrid Clouds between the panellists. A definition from the Cloud Industry Forum (http://www.cloudindustryforum.org/) was used to baseline the terminology but the only widespread agreement across the panellists was that the language adds nothing but confusion!

What was evident though, following discussions with Channel Partners after the debate, was that there is still a great deal of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) in the realm of Cloud. Some partners find it so confusing they are almost scared of the cloud concept and risk missing-out on what it represents in terms of the cost savings, flexibility and opportunities.

I caught up with Stu after the debate for some key pointers that Channel Partners may like to note:

• First and foremost, the two things that you need to take advantage of with regards to the Cloud are – having a relationship with your customers and understanding their needs.
• Next, don’t be put-off by the terminology. Yes you’ll need to understand the implications of how the service is built but the principle to understand is you’re simply providing a service, not selling a product.
• Partners are still confused by how much they need to know – asking “What’s the killer app for Cloud?” is missing the point. Most services can be provided by the Cloud, the only question is, depending on the service, is it the right thing to do?
• The Cloud concept is a huge opportunity for SME partners – we’re only at start of a massive trend and the demand is only going to increase. There aren’t that many out there currently that have truly secured this so you have every opportunity to be a winner.
• Whilst some vendors may offer direct solutions, partners shouldn’t worry:  they’ll never be able to match the intimacy that a good partner can offer.

Often, in business, the investments you make are considerably more than a jumper or pair of shoes. And sometimes they don’t make the business impact you were hoping for. In an ideal world, we would only pay once the product or service has proved itself.

A try before you buy system with infrastructures or moving items to the cloud wouldn’t quite work; a lot of effort would be required to move things, and then again if they didn’t work out as expected. A lot of upheaval and hassle for potentially very little gain. So what about paying for a service only if it works?

What about, say, a call centre where you were looking to automate simpler enquiries to free up valuable resource for more technical enquiries. And what if you only pay for the completed automated enquiries?

Not such a ridiculous idea. Increasingly businesses want to pay on an outcome, not just a blanket cost regardless of its actual, not promised, business impact.

Maybe this is the way to ensure you get the most from your suppliers, do they believe in their services enough to, in effect, ‘put their money where their mouth is’ and only get paid based on outcome?

Its an interesting conversation to have with any potential supplier…and I wonder if it will ever move to the consumer market…I can see those conversations now, I’m not paying for this top until I get at least two complements…the opportunities with this new breed of buying could be endless!

NHSBSA needed a solution that dealt with the above issues. Find out how Kcom helped.

If you would like more information about this solutiopn please contact:

Mark Pritchard
Business Development Director
mark.pritchard@kcom.com

• Find the right place to work: Find somewhere quiet to work where you won’t be disturbed by noise. You don’t want your dog barking or a neighbour doing DIY when you’re in the middle of an important conference call.
• Structure your day: Make sure that you take proper breaks, have lunch and finish on time. There is a great temptation to extend your working day and use the “commute hours” to work.
• Set the ground rules: If you have family at home with you make sure they understand what working from home is about and that they appreciate that you’re not available for running errands all day. On the flip side taking the kids to school or going to the gym can all be accommodated in the right context.
• Have a back-up plan: If your company’s put an effective home working policy in place your secure and resilient business IT systems should be available at home. But if this isn’t the case make sure you have a back-up plan if your home broadband connection or power fails e.g. Using a smartphone or tablet for calls and accessing the internet.
• Stay involved: Maintain your office contacts and ensure that you stay on the invite list for office functions and other social activities so that you still feel part of the company culture.

If you take into account all of these things you’ll be as, if not more productive working from home.

• Multi-purpose connections – Businesses will look to implement one connection ‘pipe’  with the capability of supporting voice, video and data instead of multiple – ‘one pipe for all’ services. This will be driven by end users who will continue to look for greater efficiencies in Telecom services provision. In addition enhanced connectivity will help business to reduce ‘dead time’ from travelling to meetings and expand the use of collaboration tools and services such as webinars and video conferencing.
• Call routing automation – The desire to cut costs and improve efficiencies will see customer contact centres adopt greater use of call automation, especially through speech recognition. This will enable customers to ask for a specific department or member of staff and have their call automatically routed replacing the disliked IVR menus. For the channel this means that they must focus on offering what is often termed ‘extreme customer service’ solutions. Just delivering a call to the call centre will no longer be enough. Resellers will have to add value and deliver on the promises it makes regarding accuracy and reliability to the end user.
• SIP massive growth next year – This isn’t a new trend as it has already been happening for the last couple of years. The difference in 2012 will be that there are now demonstrable cost savings and real-world examples of ROI from past implementations. This will likely speed up adoption rates as it will be viewed as stable and trusted technology. It will also allow for the easier integration of multiple devices such as tablets, desktops and smartphones.

It looks set to be an exciting year and we hope that we can help our channel partners navigate the changes and add value to their customers. If you missed the previous posts and would like to take a look you can view them here:

Kcom channels its thoughts for 2012
Kcom channels its thoughts for 2012: Part 2

It would be great to hear what you think so please get in touch with a comment below.

• Bandwidth demands – There will be a significant increase in demand for high order bandwidth services, as the price for these services continues to fall. SME customers will move to business grade internet connections (over Ethernet) due to the better service levels offered. DSL will be viewed as a backup product and for the consumer market. Also with consumer broadband provision rates increasing during 2012 those providers supporting the core networks will see growth in bandwidth to support VOD applications, tablets and flexible working initiatives. As the summer of sports come to London and around the UK  and with the majority of events taking place in working hours,  businesses need to plan for exceptional demand on bandwidth as users access on demand video services such as BBC iPlayer, FaceBook, and other streaming video services so that they can be updated on the sporting action.

• Accelerated shift to the cloud – There will be a continued shift to Cloud in the coming twelve months with some businesses happy to operate with no IT assets at all. Cloud offers an op-ex structure which is extremely compelling in the current economic conditions and is likely to speed up adoption. For those channel partners who haven’t already made the move to Cloud this will be the year for preparing and education. There will still be some reseller s who struggle with confusion about the differences and similarities between Cloud, SaaS, Virtualisation and Hosted services. For partners, understanding how they can sell Cloud will be crucial, how to package it up, cross sell and monetise the services will be crucial. A major challenge for resellers with the Cloud is that they can be ‘short circuited‘ from the process as potential end users can go direct to cloud vendors. Resellers will need to skill-up, educate themselves and prepare for this major shift in service delivery.

2012 promises to be an exciting year and with so many trends we thought we’d share a few of our thoughts over the next few weeks. Here’s the first few and look out for the next instalment!  

• Continued squeeze on margins – Tougher competition will lead to falls in the amount that VAR’s and LAR’s are able to charge for their services. Many of the services which the channel have traditionally been able to make big profits on such as 0845 numbers are suffering from significant margin erosion. Changes from BT and Ofcom have meant that additional administration costs are incurred by resellers for billing which reduces margins. Commoditised services in particular are under threat from a margin perspective; resellers will be under increasing pressure to add value instead of just packaging up a service and selling it on.

• Increased investment and M&A activity – Further market consolidation and convergence continues to drive investment in new entrants and M&A activity; because of competition around pricing there is likely to be a lot of M&A activity as companies fight to acquire either market share or capability. In tandem with this there is currently lots of investment by Venture Capital in the sector.  This is because the technology and telecoms sector is viewed as being the most likely to respond to any improvements in the economic environment. As growing businesses look to invest for the future they will naturally look to explore how technology can support their desire to work smarter and will drive uplift in the Telco and Tech sector’s revenues.

Personalised interaction is still key to consumers, which is why the phone will continue to be the most obvious choice. Respondents cited speed of call resolution (86%) and effective call routing to an agent with the right knowledge (73%) as their priorities when dealing with contact centres. With consumers looking for more personal and quick service the challenge for organisations continues to be how to cut costs while continuing to improve customer service. Contact centre operators that were surveyed reported a reduction in budgets of up to 20%. So how can they do more with less?

The reality is that organisations can’t be everything to everyone but they can invest in smarter technology that will help them segment their customers and tailor the service they deliver – ultimately improving the overall customer experience while also cutting costs. Self-serve systems often get a bad press but technologies such as automatic voice recognition can offer a cost-effective way of personalising service without adding to staff costs. Simple transactions can be entirely automated which speeds up the process dramatically and calls can be routed more effectively by asking the person who they want to speak to rather than having them go through a  list of options. Speech recognition can also be used to analyse conversations so managers can be alerted if there are a lot of calls occurring about the same problem and act accordingly.

Voice automation won’t ever replace speaking to an agent but by using a combination of man plus machine organisations can drive customer satisfaction levels up while keeping operating costs at a manageable level. Something that is vital at a time when budgets are going down and customer expectations are going up.

This green fingered bunch (OK, only two or three of them can identify a weed and know how to use a spade!) assisted Head Gardener Sue Hobley in giving the hospices garden a late autumn make-over.

The team dug holes for some new roses (kindly donated by Kcom), relocated paving slabs to create a new path, weeded, planted and raked and swept lots and lots of leaves.  And managed to generally spruce up the garden without breaking anything!

The garden is a really important place for people going through incredibly tough times, the hospice describes it as “a place to play or to rest, a place to laugh or to cry, a special place for memories whilst experiencing the tranquil benefits and values of nature. Above all, the garden is special because every day for the patient, their families and their friends is very precious.”

So, thank you to everyone who volunteered – Richard Green, Ricky Parkins, Robert Chiew, Andy Nash, Nichola Langley, Anne Lee, Andrea Jansen, Brian Condron, Yvette Dainton and Mark Nethercoat.   The hospice was thrilled with all your hard work.

Despite the aching limbs the next morning, the team had a great day.

“Massively enjoyed today. Was good fun, and a good laugh, and nice to know we’re done something worthwhile that people will benefit from.”  Richard Green

“It was great to support our local hospice, whilst getting to know our colleagues better   …. and as an added bonus the sun shone!” Yvette Dainton

“I really enjoyed today and would do it again if the opportunity arises. It really helps promote a team spirit and it’s great to mix with other people throughout the business.” Anne Lee

You can tell from the comments that the Kcom team really enjoyed helping out the hospice, and actually got to know each other better in the process. This is a great way to show that the company you work for cares for its surrounding areas and is prepared to help improve the lives of those within them. Does the company you work for do things like this? In these tough economic times maybe helping out the local communities will be a way to help lift spirits and raise the Christmas cheer. If the opportunity presents itself to you, will you help out in the future?

It’s a bit of a catch 22 situation, we find the automated services frustrating, however they are ultimately directing us to the correct person for our enquiry. It may seem like the Spanish inquisition at the time, but these automated choices should reduce the need for the equally frustrating element of, once you get through to someone, being passed from person to person trying to find who should be dealing with your enquiry.

Recent research by the CCA on behalf of Kcom showed that even though use of social media was expanding and digital channels were enabling wider forms of contact, phone remains the preferred method of interaction with an organisation.

With the numbers of consumers making contact via phone showing no signs of slowing, and budgets becoming increasingly tight, organisations need to look to automation to help deal with the less complex enquiries, whilst utilising the personalised experience it can afford a customer. If there are low value, simple transactions it makes no sense for customers to waste time waiting for an operator, nor is it financially viable to tie up expensive customer service agent time with these enquiries. It erodes margin and reduces positive customer experience.

Having been on the receiving end of debit cards not been cancelled and mortgage applications not been processed I can see why people feel the need to talk to someone. The human interaction is reassuring, and with a complicated enquiry vital; however machines are programmed to do as they are told, ensuring a process is completed. And if you do need to talk to someone, they enable routing to operators who are best suited to solving your enquiry.  In addition, machines have no limits and can scale to meet customer demand to remove the frustration of a queue and music on hold.

Man or Machine-which gives better customer service? Ultimately, it’s not a question of one being better than the other, as machines could never replace human interaction for complex and technical enquiries. It is a case for all to embrace the new technologies and advantages that these automated services can bring. Overall, I think it is fair to say that the right combination of man and machine enable the ultimate customer experience.