The building blocks of exceptional customer service!

Building blocks of building customer service from the seminal work - Outside -in paraphrased in my words!

• Service Strategy 
  • Best defined as intended experience, what is the kind of experience that you wish to extend to your users. Is it going to be COSTCO or Apple? Is it going to be an Airtel or LG? It is important to clearly define what is it that you wish to extend to your customers as experience. The strategy, therefore, is an expression of intent more than anything else.
• Understanding of the customer
  • Knowing who your customers are what is it that they want? What their expectations are from the organisation? Understanding customer expectations is only the half job done. What is it that they call good service? Archetypical segregation of customers is a good way to devise a strategy that will fit different kinds of customers that have to be dealt with. The methods that can be deployed range between
    • Solicited feedback and other unsolicited ways.
      • Surveys and using various opportunities to interact with the customers to form an understanding about them.
    • Communicating the findings with the staff is another equally important thing to do as only after they understand what the expectation is, will they be able to deliver on them.
• Service Design
  • Everything between envisioning and implementation of interactions that create the customer experience. It is about being intentional about designing the process, people, technology, platform, and inter-departmental exchanges to tailor the kind of customer experience that the brand wants to extend. It also is about opening a lab kind of a concept in which, feedback from customers and understanding of the staff and the partners on the impediments to excellent exchange between the customer and the company can happen, to be discussed and solutions to be found. It is about making sure that no bad design makes it to the real customer world. It is about bringing intentionality into the entire process.
• Measurement
  • Is a discipline that makes the organisation measure the quality of customer experience by assigning relevant metrics to it, that matter the most to customers, in a consistent manner across the organisation. The end goal of measurement is to give actionable insights to the organisation uncovering areas of improvement, alongside given pointed descriptions of :
    • What must be fixed immediately?
    • What should be improved over time?
    • What should be maintained at the same level?
    • What should be touted as the strength of the organisation?
  • The goal is to understand what are the elements in the organisation that help customers be loyal and then create systems to make sure that those things are taken care of.
  • Another important utility of measurement is to put the quality of customer service parameters right up there with business metrics like sales and profitability.
• Governance
  • If customer experience strategy is game-plan, governance is the referee and the rule book. The job is to constantly monitor and weed out bad causes from creeping into the customer service design. It is responsible for holding people accountable to the commitment to serve. It can be the conscience keeper and at the same time also a practice that has the ability to steer things back on track, if and when things go wrong.
• Culture
  • A set of shared values and behaviours that focus employees on creating exemplary customer service. Culture is the bloodline of any organisation, getting it right is most daunting and time-consuming. It requires constant reinforcement. Three key steps are
    1. Hiring - Hiring for value fitment, “hire for will and train for skill”. Commitment to service, customer centricity are a few traits that must be evaluated in hiring people.
    2. Socialising - The stories of the great customer experience must be told and re-told. The objective is to find the right rituals and the routine to reinforce the need to value customers and act in keeping with the highest standard of customer service delivery in mind.
    3. Reward - It is important to link both formal (promotion, raise, confirmation) and informal awards (spot awards, RNR) to customer experience. Behaviour consistent great customer experience must be rewarded.

A framework to assist customer services thinking!

Creating product differentiation is vital to success but the question is, at what cost must it be done?

A billion successful examples are scattered all over the world - which one to pick up?

How far should one go? 

Is it ok to stop short of the competition?

Imagine yourself in an auction!

You’re waiting with bated breath for an item that you love to come under the hammer and right when it comes,  you witness that you’re anything but lonely in liking the article. There are 10 more who have carried with a suitcase full of cash an ironclad determination to bag the product, just as willingly as you have.

They want it just as bad as you want it if not more. 

What do you do? 

Do you outbid everyone else at all costs, even at your detriment, or should you set a clear upper limit for yourself, before you uphold the card to make your interest in the item known to everyone in that room and, particularly, to the 10 others who are determined to make you lose, for the first time?

A smart choice perhaps is to decide well in advance a point, which you’d not cross no matter how lucrative the deal gets and how irresistible the urge to own becomes.

The world of business has undergone massive changes; profitability which used to be the only consideration in the yesterday years has now been replaced with the potential of ‘growth’. Organisations are willing to go to any length to attract eyeballs and, in turn keep users hooked to their platforms. 

In such a hostile and ever-evolving environment how does one lay the CX strategy to be better than everyone else, is something that is becoming increasingly impossible to answer. Where does value come from? 

Does it emanate from being unique? 

Or is it a product of being swift?

Or does being first matter more than anything else? 

We’re attempting to provide a framework for thinking this question through.

To my mind, customer preference should be your number one consideration! 

The organisations that invest in understanding the preferences of their customers end up gaining trust and everything good to do with business outcome follows from there.

If your customers are on social media - you should be there.

If your customer wants to catch hold of you on the phone - you better be present.

If your customer is fond of chatting from the messaging app of his choice - You gotta make yourself available there too.

If email is the jam of your customer - You will need to swear by it as well.

Getting the channel right is perhaps the easiest thing to achieve. The market today is rife with omnichannel solutions, they give a simple no-code, augmentation at an easy price. Tech will not hold you back!

What follows from the conversation is perhaps the most important aspect of the business. Trust is either gained or lost, as a result of it.

Your backend processes determine the success of your customer services department more than anything else. The questions to ask of the organization there are?

What is our defect rate on released features/products?

How many times in the customer journey do these defects dot and dent the experience of the customers?

How do you measure yourself against your competitors?

Do you have a method to track and then treat the causes of repeat failures?

What are your organizational tolerances?

At what point will you abandon, something that is not working?

Once you’ve device business processes to answer these. You’ll need to make sure that you find a way to understand the education failures? 

That is, to what degree does the customer perceive something to be an issue when it is not?

Have you been communicating effectively and efficiently? 

Could you be clearer?

What are your brand communication strategies optimized for? 

Are you after uncontrolled growth? 

Or do you wish to become big responsibly?

So in a nutshell, it is about. 

Being where customers prefer to meet you - Omnichannel!

Integrating customer journey in a way that no information critical to the customer experience is ever lost, completely eliminating the need for the customer to repeat - CRM

Get backend processes to get better with time, so that ultimately the quality of delivery improves. 

Make sure your communication strategy is effective.

The next part of the puzzle is the competition watch!

As the old saying goes, keep your friends close and enemies closer; except in the case of modern business. The competition is not your enemy!

There is a need to evolve that outlook. Opportunities to collaborate have to be actively looked out for, and wherever that is an impossibility, co-existence must be attempted. 

Remember, with the network grows the market. And when the market grows everyone in the market benefits from it!

Having said that, benchmarking is important. 

Institute a robust inventive and creative survey team that watches the reaction of the customers to the changes introduced by your competition with the attention of a hawk. 

Tabulates the impact. 

Ascertains it is relevant to the strategy of the organisation to compete in a specific segment.

Presents the roadmap to beat the competition.

Project manages the rollout. 

And then comes the final piece of the puzzle. 

Measuring the effectiveness of the rollout.

There also, learning from the customer is key.

Remember, you are solving for your customer.

If they like you - you are golden!

Think about it!

Good luck!

Framework for delivering exceptional customer experience!

Customer centricity gets spoken about a lot, don’t believe me? Tune in to any corporate briefing and you’d invariably find executives speak highly and passionately about customer focus, customer experience, and how they find 'excellent service delivery' to be central to their business strategy. Take a brief moment and do your own brief research first, resume going through this article after that.

You back? 

Thank you, know that you are very welcome here!

Tell me, did you not find the observation that I made about organisations uttering ‘customer centricity’ valid? Let’s take this experiment a little further to validate the claims made by these corporations. This research doesn’t have to be extensive or exhaustive. Just take a mental note of the brands that you searched, earlier. You’re most likely to find that these brands, which appear so similar in their assertions on the need to build a customer-centric organisation, seem vastly different, disjointed, and staggered all over the place, in reality, don't they?

Why might that be, you may ask?

If I may borrow from the seminal book on customer service,"Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of your Business”, written by the tremendously talented duo, Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine- No department or single individual does anything intentionally to inconvenience the customer but it is the collective effect of the unconnected, unintegrated and ununderstood actions that cause customers to sometimes get exposed to sub-optimal versions of the organisation. (** I’ve paraphrased from memory, this is not an exact quote from the book)

Organisations, nowadays are increasingly becoming complex, encompassing and encapsulating all manners of diversities and differences to cater to a wide range of and ever-evolving customer needs and desires. In an unforgiving hyper-competitive market organisations are forced to blindly chase their growth targets with maniacal focus and in doing so, in more cases than not, customer-centricity becomes the first casualty. Successful organisations are those that do not let aspiration of growth interfere with their commitment to delivering stellar customer satisfaction, look at Amazon, Apple, Zappos, Hyatt etc.

There is merit in understanding what are the elements that separate these spectacular successes from the forgettable failures. Or in other words, how does one weave customer obsession into the very fabric of their organisation? What are those building blocks that leaders should lay, own and put a lot of effort and focus into preserving? Having spent a lifetime in the customer services industry, I can tell you that - there is as much science in getting customer experience right as there is art in it. I like to think of building customer obsession, as a two-part process. 

1. Disciplines that go into making an excellent customer experience machine.

2. Tacts to building pervasive customer obsession.

# 1: Disciplines

Outstanding customer service departments must focus on organising their efforts around the below three aspects of its set up, with precision and passion.  

• Mechanics of service: It is about getting the arithmetic of the department right. 

• Demand estimation (forecasting): What is the expected volume of service, use historical trends from either your own organization or from your competitors to create a demand chart/flow.

  
  

• Staffing: Taking into account the time needed to handle each class of transaction that customers reach the corporation for, combined with service level aspirations (95/5). Derive from them the kind of support hour that will be required to be made available and therefore how many support staff must be onboarded and of what skillset.

  
  

• Tech stack: Omnichannel/CRM/Social Media stack and physical infrastructure that needs to be augmented to make the support desk functional.

  
  

• Training: Support staff without a proficient understanding of the products and the services that they are to support, will not be able to deliver an excellent customer experience. Hence, intelligent knowledge management systems and practices will need to be developed and operationalized.

  
  

• Quality management: You need to be able to measure if the intended level of service is actually being delivered, and there comes the quality management practices and systems. Shortfall identified by the quality function becomes the input for the training function. 

  
  

• Purpose of the department: This is about getting the philosophy of the department right.

  
  

• Service philosophy: What is the kind of service that the organisation aspires to deliver, it is this question that needs answering. Is there a specific service model of their own that the organisation is pursuing or do they wish to get inspired by another successful service model? From the clarity of service philosophy, emerges details of the kind of capital and OPEX investment that is required to be made in order to enable delivery.

  
  

• Service design: Service design is laying bricks to make the agreed service philosophy come about. It involves ascertaining the process, the platform, the technology and the people that will have to be brought together to realise the service aspiration. 

  
  

• Long-term objective: The measure of success must be determined in advance so that teams can work backwards from it. You could look at the metric that you like, NPS, CSAT, Churn, Repeat Buy, Life-time value of a customer etc. Choose the metric that compliments your overall business strategy well and then optimise your service design for it.

  
  

• Usefulness: On a scale of 1 to 5, how useful would you want your service to be? Customer effort is the metric here. Simply put, how easy or hard is it for the customer to transact with you.

  
  

• Operational efficiency: Benchmark level performance.

• What will you measure? : Operational excellence is key to success. Input metric measurement is being spoken about here. How many people are needed, how long will they take to work on something, how can the time be shortened etc? Process re-engineering routine will have to be adopted to make sure that the delivery mechanism improves continually. 

  
  

• Define target and tolerance: How good is good enough for you? Set targets for every measurable metric that you can think of, define control limits. So that process can be optimised to operate within it. Remember, lesser the variation, tighter the control, and better the experience. 

  
  

• Reward and penalty: Score-card approach is a good way to approach it. Organizations need to define clearly what level of performance they consider reward worthy and the levels at which they think it right to impose a penalty. 

  
  

• Consequence management: Details approach and process documentation to handle exceptions, on every aspect of the service operation. 

  
  

# 2: Building blocks of customer obsession: In this section, we will try to explore the science of building a customer-obsessed culture by talking about its 6 building blocks.

• Customer effort Index: We briefly touched upon it in the earlier segments too. The point that is being made here is that various departments come together to make customer experience happen, therefore, it is important to work with stakeholders to reduce customer effort. The idea is to make availing service or using the product so simple, so seamless and so straightforward and so intuitive that the customer doesn’t have to think before using the service.

  
  

• Anticipating customer need: Careful study of the customer data to preempt customer needs and then work towards meeting them. Latent, unfulfilled needs of the customers are being spoken about here. If we can devise a way to find out what is it that the customers would want next, we can make the thing available even before the customer needs it.

  
  

• Customer feedback: Device the framework for collecting customer feedback, they are the most valuable piece of information that a brand can hope to lay its hands on. Study them intently to take cues on the process and product refinement. Use customer feedback to understand the need Vis-a-vie the capacity of the product and service to meet the customer better.

  
  

• Creating “WOW”: Creating breathtaking and memorable experiences for the customers should be the only goal of the organisation. Make sure that this expectation is understood and people responsible to create these experiences are empowered with resources to do so.

  
  

• A set-up that exceeds expectations: What is great today, will be good tomorrow and just about ordinary the day after, to keep ahead in the race, the organisation needs to keep raising the bar of service. Devise newer methods to meet the customers where they are and to deliver them whatever it is that they expect from you.

  
  

• Let the customer know that they are your number one priority: #1 responsibility of the leaders in an organisation is to make sure that customers remain at the front and centre of every decision, every consideration, and every plan that is ever made. Bring the focus of every organisational process back to the customer, evaluate everything from the point of view of the customer and you will get there.

  
  

Remember, there are a billion known approaches to success in business, not taking good care of your customers, is not one of them.

Go out there and create memorable experiences!

Good luck!

How to select the right CX automation tool?

If I gave you all the ingredients that go into a great falafel, would you succeed in putting together the best falafel there is, or even an edible version of it? You and I know that those who haven't cooked in the past, are very likely to end up with an inedible dish, despite having access to all the ingredients, self-explanatory instruction, and all other implements of cooking. Professionals from other fields, creating products for service is a bit like that, despite having all the constituents of a great service product, their creation, in most cases, leaves a lot to be desired.

'CX Automation' is in vogue!

When demand soars supply picks up to create what is called a demand-supply equilibrium. Simply put, the market today, is rife with products that claim to automate 'service operation'. In my reviews, I have found that a vast majority of these solutions fall horribly short. The primary reason for the inadequacy, in my humble assessment, is that these technology products were conceived and created by good people who have not served/faced one real customer in their entire career. Their approach to the solution, therefore, lacks relatability and practical application. Don't get me wrong, there is great feature parity among these solutions but they get the organisation of these features wrong, so much so, that deploying these solutions might further complicate the workings of the service operation team. The falafel scene.

What most CX Automation solution providers miss is that the sum total of service operation is not just 'responding to customers'. CX Automation is not about simply digitising the operations. It is not only about automating the conversations, with solutions like BOTs (both voice and chat). Service operations are about creating a bridge between the customers and the inner workings of the organisation. Service professionals are supposed to be effective interlocutors between the consumer and the corporation. Their primary goal is to create harmony between the user and the product, bring clarity and take the purpose of the product to the consumers. What that issue could be you might think. In the interest, of being succinct let me just say that one can broadly categorise the need for service and its enablers in five categories. 

1. Education problem: Where the intent of the product/feature/process remains insufficiently explained or is inadequately interpreted, leaving the customer with the false belief that something is broken.
1. Here the responsibilities of the service operations team do not end at, clearing the air by educating the customer but they are also responsible for making sure that they unearth ways to reach out to all those customers who might have misunderstood the communication and educate them, proactively. They are also needed to identify the elements of the communication that might have caused the confusion and then work with the respective stakeholders to correct those and also adopt a process that will ensure that the same or similar errors, never leave the workshop of the organisation.
2. Broken system: These constitute complaints, situations in which things do not work as promised or advertised.
   1. Here, the service operations team need to understand, acknowledge and then gather evidence of the error so that other stakeholders in the organisation responsible for fixing the problem recognise the flaw and correct them. Here also, they are required to find out the possible set of users who might have got impacted by the error, get the issue resolved for all. And then decide if there is merit in communicating it to the impacted base of users. Judgement is important, you do not want to create unwarranted panic. Root cause analysis is required to be performed. The practice of 'Corrective and preventive action' is needed to be institutionalised.
3. Close Looping and surveys: Essential part of the brand communication in which the organisation gives an update to the user about the issue in question.
1.  It is required to be contextual, representative of the organisational values and at the same time carrying the content of the matter at hand, as clearly and as simply as possible. It is always important to find out how customers are feeling about doing business with the brand. A structured survey mechanism should be operationalised:  the whole business of deciding on what to ask, whom to pray, how frequently to summon, what to do with the feedback etc.
4. The business of running the service operation: There are a lot of moving parts that need to be well oiled to make a service operations team function both effectively and efficiently. Some of the building blocks of which are.
   1. WFM Tool: Demand estimation, what could be the volume of support generated and to cater to it what is the kind of manpower that might be required, down to the half-hourly interval.
   2. Training management system: An engaging and experiential way to train the team on product, platform, processes.
      1. Gauging their knowledge, TNI, TNA.
   3. Knowledge management systems - A central repository of all the knowledge. Read this article in which I have delved into some details on this topic.
      1. Knowledge Management and Service!
   4. Quality management system: A platform to assess the quality of service being given from the service desk
5. Reporting and MIS: Need I elaborate?

That is the brief scope of service operation automation!

To separate the wheat from the chaff, you need to ask the below question of the solution that is presented to you. The idea is to give you a perspective to evaluate: which solution to trust, what to look for in a product, how does the economy of the product help you meet your fiscal commitments.

We need a framework for the selection of the tool not just to accurately gauge the quality of the solution on the offer but also to understand to what degree does it help to automate and how much ground does it cover, from the entire scope of service operations.

Look for these:

1. Plot your day as head of the service operation, in an elaborate map.
2. Against the map see the area that is being covered.
3. Check how are they going about the tasks and the processes that you and your team execute, day in and day out.
   1. Are they doing it better?
   2. It is going to be easier for the customers to do business on this new platform.
   3. What are the accuracy levels?
   4. Under what circumstances does the solution break.

Always remember that CX automation is not an event it is a journey and when on it, you will need to carefully choose the path that you need to take.

I hope this has been helpful, good luck!

CX- Automation, how recent is this phenomenon?

Contrary to popular perception, CX automation is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, consumer mass deployment of the discipline dates back at least two decades. Record scrutiny and archival research should clear the air on which industry: Telecom or Banking was the first, in the Indian market to go the automation route. Pieces of empirical evidence seem to suggest that it was telecommunication that pioneered the automation of consumer-facing processes. "Self-help" was the term that telecom donned to speak about all its cx automation initiatives. It was groundbreaking, massive in scale and so simple to use that it caught on like a kite takes to the wind. Mind you, these were being done in the pre-consumer internet era. Text Messages and USSD strings were the carriers of these pathbreaking innovations. From simple queries like balance enquiry to rather complex workflows like SIM replacements were fully automated by the corporations and very well accepted by the customers. Banking hasn't been far behind too: Who can argue against the impact that ATMs have had on mankind's relationship with money.

I must call out though, that how these wonderful CX automation initiatives of the days gone by were different from what we understand of the term today. It is the intent, infrastructure support and proliferation of the internet that has separated the expression of CX automation of the present day from what it used to be in the past. It has acquired a new identity, a new name. Early CX automation undertakings were purely motivated by 'cost saving'. Yes, it was marketed as 'customer empowerment' but everyone working in both telecom and banking in the early days knew that it wasn't the case.

The term "Self-help", in the present day, doesn't invoke the same kind of emotions. "CX automation" is in vogue now and rightfully so. There is a world of difference in the technology landscape, computing capabilities, and general acceptance of the 'digital way of life" among end-users.

CX automation is a multi-billion industry today, we have to thank SaaS for it. The spectacular success that Freshworks, Zendesk and Zoho got has renewed the interest of capital in products that promise to automate customer-facing processes across a variety of industries. Advancements in cognitive technology, conversational Artificial Intelligence, and desktop automation have completely changed the scene. The ecosystem is fully ready to cut over to the new: 750 million connected smartphones beaming in India alone, the internet load for a day is cheaper than a decent cup of coffee (of course at telecom's peril) and there is growing interest in the industry to go fully automated. Capital, like it, always does is honouring the mood of the market. As we know from our economics lessons: capital and growth follow each other in a circle.

This change will cause massive displacement of low/semi-skilled professionals. The problem is that less than 5% of customer experience professionals today, truly understand the ways in which the new beast is to be tamed. That I am afraid is going to push the customer services industry (BPOs) to relive what banking when through in early 1980-90 ties, when banking embraced computers and they had to send nearly 70% of their workforce home (early retirement) because they just couldn't keep up with the machine.

There is still time to learn and adapt - the question is, will the BPO industry act in time? Your guess is as good as mine.

Knowledge Management and Service!

Without a robust knowledge management practice in place, customer/seller/merchant/client, or just about any other kind of quality support is impossible to augment. Customer experience and quality of support get spoken about a lot, but rarely would you come across 'knowledge management' getting the same attention, as a topic. Modern-day organisations are immensely complex, inherently multidimensional, and almost always non-linear, given that it is humanly impossible for 99% of the staff to commit details of products, outlines of policies and intricacies of the processes, to memory and therefore a knowledge repository is both essential and vital to support, the queries/requests and complaints that customers might bring to the notice of the brand for redressal.

The knowledge management practice of an organisation is much more than a stockpile of information though. It needs to be, as they say, 'smart', 'contextual', 'wholesome' and 'relevant' because more than customers being in a hurry the organisations of our times are hard-pressed to be painfully efficient. They wish to squeeze every second spent on customer support, more than a few times. So if you do not have a consummate assistant in form of a robust knowledge management practice in commission, you would invariably and uncontrollably commit one of these errors more often than you'd like or your customers would permit.

• Taking too long to respond - causing dissatisfied customers.
• Dishing out wrong information - Helps neither the customer nor the brand.
• Spilling incomplete or no information at all - no prizes for guessing what it does to cause of experience.

What are the building blocks of a good knowledge management practice, then? In my view, it should essentially have these three elements.

• A digital platform, the market is rife with knowledge management products. All of them claim to be unique and better than the rest, the fact is that all of them piggyback on one another. A feature gets copied/stolen (pick the term you like) quicker than you would read this post. All platforms are the same, to the extent of 70% to 80%. Don't worry too much, you won't be wrong in picking any off the shelf running product, look for a good organisation backing it. If you have an industrious team you can develop an awesome and fully functional repository all by yourself too, on platforms like Notion, Google site, even WordPress.
• Dynamic, Intelligent and near real-time, linking of the knowledge repository to 'top call drivers' and 'skill level index' of the front line agent - makes the platform intelligent. The idea is to spend as little time as needed in finding the information that is to be given out and that the information should be presented in as legible as short and as simple a form as the frontline staff would like.
• Content management strategy must be in place. Without correct content input, the smartest platform won't be of any use. You need to make sure that the information on the portal is updated, correct and complete; at all times. Put in place a robust audit mechanism.

If you can get these three blocks right, not only will you have improved the quality of conversation between the corporation and the customer but also created data sets that can be used to better training efforts, finding out what kind of articles are being referred to the most etc. You can then also build features like quizzes to gauge understanding of the staff, co-creation of content and support logging; the sky is the limit really. You can get as creative with the use of the date as your thought would allow.

Remember in ways more than one, the quality of knowledge management practice determines the richness of support.

Go review your systems and make changes, if needed.

Good luck.

Happy Independence Day, People!

Wanna know, what does Independence Day mean to me? Listen in.

5 step change framework for BPOs and product Ideas!

In the last article, I argued how the winds within the wings of traditional phone-based BPOs are being stolen by cheap, easy, and widely available automation alternatives. I also propounded that weakening prospects of the BPO industry do not necessarily mean a reduction in the overall scope of outsourcing as a business decision. There is a bit of a dichotomy between the two parts of this statement, which at one glance could appear disorienting and that is ok. If you read the 2nd part of the last article carefully (I will link it down below) the confusion will disappear. The more prominent question which the previous article did not answer fully is that if BPOs have to become a platform company to survive what sort of platform company should they really become? It is a legitimate question and that is the inspiration behind this one. It is in order to mention here that overwhelming 80%+ feedback emails that I received from my smart readers were seeking clarity on this very question. So here we go.

Before we get into the specifics of it, I think we should spend a minute thinking about why is ‘change’ important for business, and then when the business does elect to change how is it that the organization should attempt it? Answering the first part of this question is rather straightforward, the needs of an evolving society change over time and to cater to that organization in the business of meeting those needs must change too. Now, on to the tricky part of the question, what is it that the organizations that decide to change try to do when they pivot? Organizations sacrifice products for saving business. Remember the goal of a for-profit organization is to make money and to not make money exclusively from doing 'a thing'.

Now with that out of the way, let’s focus on the element that often startles those who attempt to embark on a change. The strangeness of the new, the absence of familiarity, lack of knowledge in the new arena that they consider pivoting into. Right out of the gate let me concede that the fear is legitimate, 100% so. Imagine that if you woke up in the middle of the night in a deserted desert with icy cold sand under your feet instead of your bedroom and on the warm bed on which you slipped into peaceful slumber earlier that night? The first few minutes would fit the exact definition of hell, will it not? You would then normalize your new situation and think about how did you get there and what are the options in front of you to get back to where you actually slept? You would at that moment be scared, unhappy, uncertain, nervous, and irritated. Would you not be at the sea completely?

Can anyone count that turbulence against you?

Imagine an entrepreneur who has been making XYZ amount of money from a set business, tried and tested product line is being asked by someone to change it to something else because they think that is the future. It is a tough bargain, but then one that must be made because what is today will most certainly not remain so tomorrow. A case for change will have to be continually made and pushed at the right forums, because, as big a force is need for change, the urge to remain the same is also not a weak trap. Torn between the demand of tomorrow and habits of yesterday, the decision-makers feel exhausted, clueless, and sometimes a bit disenchanted too.

I can't claim to have discovered the formula that works in turning key people around, every time. I have failed a fair amount of times myself too, but it is in the times that I did win, I find both my motivation and purpose. So my dear readers, if you are the one pushing for the change, I wish you luck and urge you to try out your own strategy.

I better stick to the part of the puzzle that I am most comfortable with, that is knowing how to carve out the change. It is important to note here that the change that we are referring to here is the change of device and not so much the substance of what is being executed. That is in essence it will still be reaching to a customer to either sell or serve or remind them of the both or either. It would be easier for the brand to sell what it has already sold, it is this core belief that often prohibits the founders from changing. So, as a change managers, we should start from there.

I present to you the framework!

5 step framework for BPOs.

Let's understand how is the current stack of clients/customers stack up. Data probing will be necessary. Here are the questions that you will need to ask and answer.

1. Figure out your area of strength.

• Which industry?
• What line of work?
• Which medium?
• What nature?
• Is there a specific demographic?
• Not just for existing clients but past customers too.
  • Why did the customers who left you did so?

Plot these details on the table.

A quick analysis of these details should reveal to you that which is that technology feature that can fully automate the work that you are now doing in a manual manner. Pick that product and then assess.

1. Would you like to create the product bottoms up?
2. Or you have the wherewith-all to acquire an organization that might already have the solution ready.
   1. If acquisition looks difficult, try merger possibilities.

2. Get critical stakeholders on board with the idea of ‘transformation’.

• Board
• Investors
• Key employees.

It is important to keep critical people in the organization informed of the direction in which the organization is wanting to pivot into. As it is this set of people who are going to make it work. This conversation is best not kept unidirectional, consensus building is needed. Bring the team on board and then get on with the plan.

3. Finding the resources (money and other things).

• Budget.
• See how you’re placed.
• Plan for the shortfall if any.

Change is easier said than done. Resource mining beforehand is critical to success.

4. Getting the team ready.

• Restructuring the organization.
• Hiring the skill sets that would be needed to build/run/manage the solution.

This is perhaps the most important part of the puzzle. Old world conventional leaders do not want things to change because they know it is too late for them to change and they also know that if things change they will become irrelevant. In preparing the team, the leader needs to understand both sides of the story: why is change vital and what is the cost of not changing.

5. Make a new business goal.

• Make a new goal statement of the company and then socialize it.
• Plan
• Act

Both your mission and vision statements might need to reflect the change in plan. Make it happen, socialize it - take it to the last employee. You need the whole of the organization to rally behind the change.

These five steps pulled right should carry you through, without much trouble.

For those of you who are not wanting to get on with the first step right away and wish to think through a few ideas for building platforms, here are a few.

Platform/Product Ideas for BPOs.

1. CRM Solution for managing customer service end to end.

• Dialler.
• Workforce management system.
• Knowledge management.
• Training management system.
• Performance management Module.
• Quality management system. 
• Data and Reporting modules.

2. Creating a solution for the industry where most of your contacts come from.

• Video KYC in BFSI.
• Digital onboarding.
• Social Media command center

3. Systems designed to reducing churn.

• Survey tool.
• Linking usage with trigger points.
• Devising strategies for increased longevity of the customer.

4. Conversation engine.

• BOT.
• RPA.
• Desktop Automation.

5. Vendor management system.

• Client onboarding
• Client sign up
• Life cycle management
  • Complaint and compliment modules.
  • Billing and Invoicing.
  • Change management.
  • Forecasting and supply details.

No matter what you do, you must not remain the same, because those who do not change perish.

On that note I shall end this, take care and good luck.

Link to the last article 

Outsourcing and BPO; the past and the future!