Category: Business

“Quality in a product or service is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it”. – Peter Drucker

I couldn’t think of a better explanation for the importance of service excellence than this, by the renowned business management consultant, Peter Drucker. As rightly put, service excellence is achieved when the customer or the client is most happy or satisfied with your product or service. But then again, how exactly do you achieve it?

Service excellence is an on-going journey. The better you get at what you do or deliver, the higher you will push your bar to get even better at what you do. You keep building on service excellence. I’m talking about building on your customer service excellence here. So how can you go about building on service excellence?

Here are 5 tips:

1. Communication – This is a bit of a cliche when it comes to quality of service. As already mentioned, customers need to be most happy. And one of the major factors to ensure that, is communicating with them. By communication, I don’t just mean after sales service. You need to keep a certain level of constant communication with your customers. In other words, engage with them. It builds trust and thereby loyalty. You can have various ways to engage with your customers like special events, contests and feedback. Feedback is one activity, which not only helps in customer engagement but also helps you in knowing what your customers think of you and work on the areas where you need to improve. The more you communicate with your customers, the clearer your goals become.
2. Closeness – Another aspect of communication is closeness. Yes, the better you know your customers, the better you can serve them. You need to be knowing their needs, interests and expectations more than anyone for that matter. Ideally, you need to exceed customer expectations if you want delighted customers. And to exceed their expectations you need to know them today. If you get close enough, you can even predict their behaviour to some extent and you will be able to serve them proactively. Now, that is a whole new level of service excellence.
3. Transparency – At no cost should you compromise on transparency. Be it in terms of pricing or product or service related information or anything that is relevant to your customers. Basically, you should refrain from doing anything that might cause distrust among customers. If your customers are dissatisfied, it will reflect on your possible prospective customers as well. So, there’s more at stake than meets the eye. Transparency adds to the trust factor and the benefits of that, as you know, are manifold.
4. Value addition – This is an extension of the principle of exceeding expectations or proactive customer service. The idea is to give your customers more than what they asked for, in terms of value. You need to add some value while providing services and for that you need to go that extra mile, pay attention to all the details, give in more than a 100% and ensure complete efficiency. You need to make your customers feel important and valued by serving them better. Following this mission of value addition in all your projects, will take you one step closer to excellence.
5. Standards – You need to have customer driven standards, which are realistic, measurable, attainable and time bound. By customer driven standards, I mean, ones which are determined after careful analysis of the feedback from the customers, as well as of customer behaviour through constant engagement with them. The standards so set should be implemented and measured as well, after which you can take steps to improve on them. Based on your evaluation of standards, you will find areas on which you can improve and hence set new standards.

All these are factors which basically add to the satisfaction of customers which, in turn reflects quality in the service you deliver. On the whole, it is pretty clear that it is the customers that help you achieve the goal of service excellence and the more you engage with them, the more they are satisfied, and the more you achieve.

When customers get more and more digitally advanced, what else can retailers do, but go over the top to get savvier and stay ahead in the race towards serving them better? Most retailers these days are struggling to maintain their faces with new technologies and marketing programs in the digital side of things. If you thought, a little bit of social media marketing would do the trick, then you might be wrong. True, social media does play a huge role in spicing up your digital marketing spree, but is that enough?

The answer to that, would perhaps, have been ‘yes’, maybe a few years ago. But with advancements in technology as well as the minds of the people today, who seem to be in an endless search for convenience and speed, the answer is definitely ‘no’. So, what exactly is the deal with this digital marketing and the people-the consumers, and what does it take to stay in the ‘present’?

Consumers have started to expect more from their vendors and retailers are bound to live up to this expectation. Let’s see, for example, how digital marketing has changed in retail to stay relevant and eye-candy for its customers:

‘Personalizing’ at its peak

One of the most effective and influential techniques of digital marketing is personalizing. And by that, I don’t just mean sending out personal emails to your customers, or adding their first names in the emails you send out. The in-thing now, is of course iBeacons; the latest Bluetooth LE technology used in malls and retail stores to send out personalized offers and messages in real-time. But that is when your customers are in your store. What can you do to get personal outside of your store?
The depth of the word ‘personalizing’ is starting to take new forms these days. And one of those forms is facial recognition technology. According to a recent report published by Transparency Market Research, the global facial recognition market is expected to reach almost US $2.67 billion by 2022. That is how big it is getting. Retailers can use this technology to gather information about customers, their buying habits, purchasing power etc. and then use that for marketing purposes like, presenting them with special and unique offers and deals.
Facebook, the social media channel, has been using this technology for the past few years for the purpose of identifying and categorizing pictures, and this data is being shared among other retail and social media sites, which enables them to target ads to users. Facebook also uses information from other retail sites by scanning their cookies and displays ads to users accordingly.
However, privacy concerns regarding this technology are still being discussed and how much acceptable it is going to get among the consumers, still remains unclear.

From wearable to digital assistants

This is for companies that use mobile marketing for leveraging their marketing programs. You need to really keep up with the latest advancements in mobile technology if you want to make your marketing effective. A “mobile-first strategy” is what a lot of retail brands adopt these days. This is according to Aaron Shapiro, CEO of New York based digital agency Huge. Shapiro feels that voice-activated technology, digital assistants and wearable technology are all set to change the way customers interact with their favorite brands, especially now that most of them use mobile devices rather than desktop computers and laptops. About voice-activated marketing Shapiro says, “ In cases where the screens are going to be tiny or non-existent, voice is going to be the way that we communicate.” It means brands will have to come up with ways for their customers to communicate with them in a voice context.
Shapiro also feels that mobile technology is definitely going to evolve into wearable as well.

Display advertising: Metrics better than click-through-rate

Click-through-rates are actually, most often, thought of as the best measure of display advertisements’ effectiveness. However, there are several limitations to this particular approach. It ignores factors like brand awareness and educating prospects. According to Sean Callahan, Marketing Director, Bizo, there are several other metrics that marketers can use to measure the effectiveness of their display ads. Some of them are:
Brand recall – where in, you can carry out an online brand study to see the differences in the awareness of your brand among the people who have seen your ads and among the ones who haven’t.
Branded search – where in, you can measure the lift in the number of searches for your brand, while your online ad campaign is running.

Likewise, there are a number of other such metrics that you can use to measure the performance of your ad campaigns.

All of these digital marketing techniques and tips are already being used by a number of retailers and are well on their way towards revolutionizing the retail industry as a whole. In a matter of few years, what we provide for our customers now, will probably seem outdated or maybe even absolutely ineffective. Like i said, if you have to stay in the game till the end, you have got to play it like it has to be played.

According to a recent report by InformationWeek on business intelligence, up to 28% of business professionals responsible for software selection in their firms, said that they have set the standards for one or a few analytics products in their organization. It was 35% last year, so this time apparently we have a 7% decrease.

Now, why has there been such a decrease?

The answer is not very different from what it was for the last three years. Almost 48% of BI decision makers say that “ease-of-use challenges with complex software or less technically savvy employees” is one of the main barriers to its increased adoption. Another major factor being data quality issues.

Although, the survey also found another 21% of decision makers did adopt several analytics and BI products for their firms, which is an increase from 16% from last year.

According to two different schools of thought, there have emerged two different approaches to developing and using analytics software. One school believes that if software, is simple to use, then people can handle even complex analysis. On the other hand, another school believes that if the software is made to be smart, then it can handle the analysis part on its own. So, it all comes down to choosing between simpler or smarter.

Products such as Qlik Sense, Tableau Elastic fall in the “simple to use” category and other popular ones from IBM and SAS fall in the smarter category. Tableau has gone as far as making their software mobile compatible too, adding further to the ease of use. A recent development by IBM is Watson analytics, a cloud-based service that is sure to help in high-end data analysis.

Even though, the choice has to be made between simpler or smarter software, the ultimate fact is that most people prefer software that is both smart as well as easy to use. Our own product ReachOut Engage intends to bridge this gap with an easy to use interface and allows users to analyze the data on a primary level and export data to third-party systems for further analysis. According to the survey, IBM and SAS also argue that their software uses smart features that also make it easy to use. Even then, this idea of smarter versus simpler when put in front of Steve Rimar, senior staff, IT architect at Qualcomm, brought 2 distinct vendors to the limelight. This renowned BI and analytics practitioner said that they have used many tools over the years and QlikView and Oracle OBIEE have proved to be their dominant standards.

When we look into the databases used, the report shows that 26% of decision makers involved in the survey, said that their firms used NoSQL databases, which is an increase from 19% in the last year. Another 22% said that their firms used Hadoop, which again, is an increase from 15% in the last year. Now, Hadoop is one database which is steadily and definitely gaining adoption as a platform for storing high-scale data that is not capable of being stored in other relational databases. Some of the major reasons for this increase in adoption rate include:

• Ability to store and process semi-structured, unstructured and variable data as pointed out by 31% of respondents
• Ability to handle massive volumes of data as pointed out by another 30% of respondents
• Low hardware and storage scaling costs as compared to conventional relational database management systems as pointed out by another 25%

All these facilitate big data analysis. All these also indicate the growing interest in big data analysis. Now, what exactly are the factors that drive this growing interest?

Some of the reasons are:

• The need for finding correlations across multiple data sources like internet clickstreams, geospatial data and customer transaction data as cited by 48% of respondents
• The need for predicting customer behavior as cited by 46%
• The need for predicting product or service sales as cited by 40%

Other major reasons include the need for predicting fraud and financial risks, analyzing social networks and identifying security risks.

On the whole, big data analysis is no longer just data warehousing as we know it at high scale as the report suggests. So, the bottom line is to not just depend on SQL tools alone to learn new things and use new data sources. As other tools are gaining popularity, data analytics and business intelligence and information management are becoming simpler and smarter.

Do you have a hard time managing all the “resistance to change” in your organization?

Many managers just like you, find it hard to incorporate any kind of changes in their organizations, especially, while introducing a new process or technology. Such resistance to change can become a major issue and more often than not, this results in huge losses.

So how do you minimize such resistance, or even better negate the same?

Here’s a thought, make the whole process of adoption systematic and comfortable for the staff. Such an approach ensures a smooth and successful transition. It can also save your company millions of dollars in the long run.

Here are some tips that can help you while incorporating technological changes in your organization –

Before adopting

• Do your homework – You need to make sure that the kind of technology you are looking to adopt is the right one and the best one for your organization. You need to do a thorough analysis of available options for that. You need to be well aware of the benefits it can bring and also how it will help your organization in the long run.
• Give your bosses a heads up if necessary – Sometimes your bosses may not be able to see the necessity to adopt the particular technology you are looking to adopt. You might have to put in some extra convincing efforts to make them support the adoption. So you will need to give them a heads up too, well ahead of the adoption. Support of the top management is very essential for technology adoption.
• Give your staff a heads up – If you let your staff know right from when you have plans of adopting new technology, they can be prepared. You should also let them know why you plan to do so. Make them aware of its benefits.
• Be sure to make everyone aware of not just the organizational benefits, but also personal benefits – Ok, let’s face it. People always do something they don’t want to do, only if they know it is going to benefit them in some way. Hence, if you need to convince your staff to adopt a particular technology, you need to address their personal concerns. You should show them how it can benefit them too.
• Test it on a group of people – Before actually adopting, you could choose a group of people and have them test the technology beforehand. You can use their feedback to assess the impact of the technology on the users. The more positive their feedback is, the more likely it is for the rest of the staff to adopt it readily.

After adopting

• Have fun training sessions – It is inevitable to provide training sessions of course, but if you make it fun, the staff will find it much more comfortable to use the technology. You can make your training sessions fun, by incorporating a little humour into your presentations or by having some lunch and learn sessions. You could even give out some rewards through tests.
• Engage experts – There might be some of those fast learners who get the hang of things pretty quickly. If you pick them out, you can have them help the others. It would be more comfortable for their friends to learn from them as well.
• Consider people who might need extra help – There might be people who might need an extra bit of personal help. You need to be available for one-on-one training sessions with them. Otherwise, they will hesitate in using the technology and may end up sticking to the old ways.
• Allow time for the transition – It is understandable that the people might take some time to get used to the new technology. You need to allow the time required for the transition and constantly monitor the use, to see if people are ok with it until it becomes routine.

Nowadays, technology is widely being used by almost every organization. Hence, it is important to know how to go about introducing a new kind of technology or incorporating changes to an existing technology. Technology is also constantly changing, which makes it all the more important to create an atmosphere to welcome change.