Posts Tagged ‘business strategy’

Book Review: The Best Service is No Service

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

“The Best Service is No Service” by Bill Price and David Jaffe is an excellent book that ought to be compulsory reading for all companies with a customer service element, mostly because so many of them are so very far from providing even reasonable service.

The book gives clear, practical advice and loads of examples of where service has gone wrong and of best practice (plenty of examples from Amazon and first direct for instance in this category).

A few of the most significant points they make are:

  • Good quality self service has major benefits, making it easier for users to do what they want, when they want and significantly reduce operational costs
  • Get rid of unnecessary reasons for people to contact you (”dumb contacts” is the phrase they use in the book) - eliminate contacts that have no value to the customer and no value to the organisation
  • Value those contacts and relationships that are most important to you and have the greatest benefit to the organisation
  • Gather metrics on what people are trying to find out about, both on the website and through calls
  • “Service” is not just the province of a contact / service centre, it is equally important across the whole operation

    • The advice should transform customer experience where it is poor and have a major impact on the bottom line of companies who take notice.

    It is interesting to think about how this impacts on the NFP sector. I think the key issues are:

  • NFP organisations are different from the Amazons and BTs of this world. The relationships with their key stakeholders (particularly members / supporters) are more complex and long term, especially where it forms an important part of their career development or social engagement. This makes the following points even more important.
  • It shows the need for joined-up service, which is likely to be across the whole set of services and interactions - knowing about the member or supporter and their interests across all departments, not just the contact centre and using that information to provide excellent service.
  • Route calls and enquiries to the people who are best suited to provide the best answer.
  • Give ownership of important relationships to the most appropriate department (not necessarily the contact centre).
  • It is particularly important to provide good self service.

    • The two key IT elements of this are:

  • The website needs to have good self service functionality and provide information to eliminate the need for people to phone / email. So, people should be able to update their details, make donations, pay their subscriptions, book events, etc.
  • The CRM needs to be interfaced to the website and be the repository for contact history, preferences, areas of interest and information needed for marketing.

    • Also available: ebook version

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    The Future of Membership

    Friday, July 23rd, 2010

    The NCVO has just released the Third Sector Foresight report “What will membership be like in 5 years time?“. The report identifies major drivers that will impact membership organisation over the next 5 years and beyond:

  • changing sources of identity
  • changing attitudes to money and consumerism
  • increasing availability of free information
  • the rise of the social web
  • changing expectations of participation
  • the commodification of membership

    • There are some interesting pointers to how these challenge current models of membership, suggested next steps and a case study.

    It provides a useful starting point for thinking strategically about the impact of the drivers on membership models, engagement … and business and IT changes.

    See also - the blog by Katherine Hudson, one of the authors and member of the NCVO Third Sector Foresight team.

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    When is it time for an Intranet?

    Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

    It can be difficult to decide when it is the right time to deploy an Intranet, particularly because of the hype that surrounds the topic. As in most cases, it is more helpful to look at the benefits to the business rather than be swayed by the hype.

    The main business advantages come when a company or organisation is large enough that some of the following are useful (typically when you don’t know everyone in the company, or there are shift patterns / geographical spread):

  • directory lookup including more than just the Active Directory type information, listing areas of expertise, etc
  • news group / forum type features for sharing expertise or solving problems
  • information resources that are updated relatively frequently, such as HR, quality system, standard purchasing list (there can be a problem here of staff not being aware of the latest HR policy though)
  • useful applications, perhaps a purchasing system with workflows, linked to the purchasing list
  • where some internal communications are relevant to a subset of the staff (perhaps a division or special interest group); it can be more helpful to have this available on a “pull” basis by the user, rather than a “push” email to all
  • email summaries can be sent at user selectable intervals of what’s new and what’s changed with the detail on linked pages
  • as an extension to document sharing, particularly when SharePoint is used

    • Considering these can avoid investing in a white elephant that no one looks at.

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    Cultivating Knowledge through Communities of Practice

    Thursday, June 24th, 2010

    A very interesting slide set - Cultivating knowledge through Communities of Practice - from Steve Dale, the information architect for the award winning local government “Community Hub” online community. He sets out the fundamentals for setting up and encouraging Communities of Practice and the different ways of sharing and developing knowledge.

    The presentation takes is business-focused (rather than IT-focused), looking at the methods and roles to get successful Communities.

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    Seminar: The Death and Rebirth of CRM

    Friday, March 26th, 2010

    Our seminar on Wednesday was very well received, with three excellent speakers bringing views and insights on CRM from very different perspectives.

    Abby Wright-Parkes of ACEVO talked about their recent experience of implementing a new database solution - an experience they’ve found very costly. She drew out a number of interesting points for NFPs: that CRM is about relationships, not data; don’t forget about relationships with people who don’t use computers; there is a need for fine tuning of communication preferences; and that it is vital to ensure the culture of the organisation is right for the new strategy and system.

    Chris Jones from Remploy gave his conclusions from their experience of large scale business change, the key theme of which is to build a flexible scalable capability for them as a business. He highlighted two examples of where CRM has been introduced. The first was a technology led programme which has resulted in a system no one uses because the project didn’t engage with the business users to put the system into the context of the business strategy and how the system needed to work operationally. The second was a system (or actually a number of separate systems) that have grown organically in the operational departments. This has resulted in successful individual systems, but which are isolated and with no ability to aggregate the data or the processes.

    Both of these really highlight the need to get the strategy right and to view the programme as a business change programme, rather than an IT project!

    The final speaker was Dominic Monkhouse of Peer1, who brought an entertaining insight into customer service [relationship management] from the commercial world of managed hosting services.  He again emphasised that it is about the culture within the organisation and potentially the need to confront and change that culture. He put forward two challenges around the theme of how can you deliver great service? The first is what can you offer. His examples here were that as UK MD, he gives his mobile number to all clients, and has only ever had four out of hours calls; and that making a very significant offer when things do go wrong has had a huge benefit to customer satisfaction, actually at marginal cost.

    His second challenge was how to drastically reduce the amount of service provided, by giving great service, particularly by eliminating errors (that result in service calls) and providing excellent facilities for customers/users to find the answers they need so easily that they don’t need to call.

    More information: white paper and presentations

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    Advantages of using a Content Management System

    Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

    If you are tempted to replace your website using a bespoke content management solution, rather than using an off-the-shelf Content Management System (CMS), think again … and choose a CMS.

    The advantages of using a CMS are numerous:

  • Built-in features - this is where the major benefits are. The main CMSs have numerous features built into them such as social network functionality, wikis, support for internationalisation and even shopping carts.
  • Easy editing - most systems will have a simple interface for editing existing content and adding new content. It should be usable by non-IT staff.
  • Vendor independence - most of the larger CMSs have a good selection of companies and contractors who are experienced in delivering websites based on them, and a good variety of books and training material if you want to do-it-yourself.
  • Workflow for approval - unless you are a small organisation, the best way of working will be for people in different departments to write the appropriate contents for approval by the marketing / communications department. The easiest way of doing this is to use an approval workflow that is part of all serious CMSs.

    • And CMSs don’t need to be expensive - there are a number of free or low cost CMSs - examples include Drupal, Joomla! and Plone. There are also some good resources for further investigations such as CMS Review, CMS Watch and the CMS Matrix.

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    IT, the Business and Innovation

    Thursday, November 12th, 2009

    Many organisations struggle over the best place for IT within the organisation and extracting the best business value from investment.

    In his recent book, fruITion: Creating the Ultimate Corporate Strategy for Information Technology, respected CIO commentator Chris Potts sets out his views in a very easy to read fashion. His main themes are that having IT as a separate department has failed to deliver business benefits from investment, that IT should be (largely) integrated into the business units and that initiatives should be treated as business change projects rather than IT projects.

    He also concludes that there shouldn’t be CIOs. Rather, there should be an individual (a Chief Internal Investment Officer) whose job it is to lead the internal investment portfolio, including all resulting business change, and be accountable for the value the organisation gets out of its investments.

    Whilst agreeing with much of what Chris Potts says, the aspect this doesn’t consider is the role that IT has in innovation - bringing radically different ways of working to the organisation; not something that will generally come from within existing business units. The most obvious examples of this are Amazon in retail and Google with advertising (although innovation isn’t always as ground breaking as this).

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    Many Contracts Have Wrong Focus

    Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

    A recent article from the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management has concluded that the current focus for nearly all contracts fails to set the appropriate foundations for the relationship between the parties.

    Instead, many contracts concentrate on the negative - on indemnities, liquidated damages, IP rights and liabilities. I’m sure many will recognise the list.

    With the ever increasing trend towards outsourcing and strategic partnerships, there is a need to reflect in contracts the fundamentals of the relationship, setting the framework to enable opportunities, growth and mutual benefit.

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    Social Media Seminar

    Friday, June 12th, 2009

    Had some excellent feedback from a very enjoyable seminar at the RSA yesterday, despite the tube strike that resulted in a number of people having to drop out.

    Matthew Taylor gave some fascinating reflections on the journey the RSA have gone through since he became their Chief Executive in 2006, with regards to the RSA fellowship and their use of social media. Matthew also had some interesting thoughts on the future of membership, questioning its role in modern society. He was candid in acknowledging that past attempts at social media by the RSA had not been successful.

    They are now working hard to reap the potential through delivering a content proposition, engaging with and supporting their membership, and providing appropriate tools.

    The AAT in contrast, has a very different membership community than the RSA, and consequently, very different needs from their social media, which are in a sense easier to understand and “sell” to their membership. Their Chief Executive, Jane Scott Paul, gave an insightful historical view of how they achieved their success, starting with a clear business strategy and then developing incrementally.

    I came across some interesting examples in putting the IndigoBlue presentation together:

  • Looking behind the obvious success of LinkedIn in contrast to ContactDetails (no currently available website) who had a similar website offering. The key difference was that LinkedIn had a clear business strategy and used an incremental approach, whereas ContactDetails took much more of a technology-led, waterfall approach.
  • netmums is an excellent online community with over 500,000 signed up members, which provides immediate access to advice including nutrition, recipes, local events and local groups. It’s interesting to contrast this with the NCT site, which is very attractively laid out and does have a different audience, but has more of a corporate feel to it.
  • And finally, when looking for an example Facebook page, came across Vladimir Putin’s info page and thought would share as an example of effective use of social media (compare with Gordon Brown’s!)

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    IT Outsourcing in Charities - the bigger picture

    Friday, April 17th, 2009

    A recent report by the ESRC Research Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy at Cass Business School ”Scoping the Charity Outsourcing Market” concluded that the charity sector is missing out on potential significant savings through not considering IT outsourcing. This was reported to be largely due to avoidance of risk and lack of information. The study consulted with 450 charities with between £1m and £10m annual turnover.

    Our experience at IndigoBlue is that IT outsourcing is actually part of a larger picture - that charities are often small-to-medium size organisations in which IT has a disproportionally large impact. So, charities of the £1m-£10m annual turnover size would not normally be able to justify employing a full-time IT Director, but their website and membership/donor database are central to their business and there is a danger that poor IT can impede delivery of the overall business strategy.

    Organisations like the AAT, however, have been able to transform their businesses, with IT being a catalyst for business change. The AAT has access to an appropriate level of IT expertise, utilising a part-time IT Director. This resource has helped the AAT to dramatically change their methods of interacting with their members, so that they are now predominantly an online organisation.

    In most cases, the web is much more important than IT outsourcing in the role it plays in enabling (or impeding) a charity’s overall strategy. It is important that all parts of the organisation are able to be responsive in changing content, that the website infrastructure supports rapid (and cost effective) development of new features and provides the facilities needed to support interaction with supporters / members.

    Turning to IT outsourcing, the business case for, or against, outsourcing IT services needs to be considered as part of the overall strategy for IT. In some cases an outsourcing supplier will be able to simplify the IT infrastructure and deliver significant cost savings. Elsewhere, if the IT department is of the appropriate size and delivering the services needed, there can be great advantages to keeping an in-house team. The potential benefit of an in-house team is the deep knowledge of the organisation and how it operates.

    If outsourcing is being considered, it is important to select the right partner, with an understanding of the sector, with the expertise required and the ability to deliver the appropriate level of service, in the right locations.

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