For the past one decade, businesses focused on the short term profits. Many businesses outsourced the customer service and/or moved toward self-serve models. This not only significantly reduced the customer interactions with the business but also reduced, if not eliminated, critical information flows from the customer to the businesses. Customers are now resorting to social networks for their product search as well as to share their product experiences. Though short-term focus and offshore activities helped businesses to improve their operational costs but what it did was eroding the trust and there is no or little effort to improve the customer satisfaction.
I recall an interesting note by Charles Hardy in 1995 May-June, Harvard Business Review article, “Trust and the Virtual Organization”,
“An economy that adds value through information, ideas, and intelligence—the Three I Economy—offers a way out of the apparent clash between material growth and environmental erosion. Information, ideas, and intelligence consume few of the earth’s resources. Virtuality will redesign our cities with fewer skyscrapers and fewer commuters, making a quieter and perhaps a gentler world. Our aspirations for growth in a Three I Economy would increasingly be more a matter for the mind than for the body”.
Imagine where we are after 15 years. We are still building data centers to manage our applications with so much of waste of our capital resources, eroding the earth’s resources. Our roadways are still crammed with traffic jams. Like our roadways, our mind-ways are also jammed with too much of information pushed at us. Finally, Cloud is here to enable the next wave of 3I revolution and virtuality.
Cloud: Enabling Customer Driven Enterprise
Cloud Computing enables enterprises to invest their resources in improving and streamlining the customer facing business process(Core) and eliminate or reduce mundane and costly IT infrastructure services(Context). This shift in customer focus will enable enterprises to benefit from Customer driven innovation and thereby improving the customer satisfaction and loyalty factor. For the past one decade, vendor pushed many unnecessary technology features to the customers increasing the complexity burden on the customer. As a result of this complexity, vendors also supplied the best practices to deal with these complexities. Customers are more smarter now. They can do more with less. Open source innovations offered more choices at cheaper price as well as lesser complexity. Technological advances also offered “mashable” services on need basis. This is forcing vendors to shift from “vendor push” approach to vendor-customer co-creation.
Cloud Computing: Enriching the Customer-Business Interactions
Cloud offers technology and rich information access enables more interactions between customers and businesses. The result will be better customer experience, lower customer defection, increased customer dedication to the brand. Moreover, social network empowered customer becomes marketing agents for the company by WoM referrals to their social networks. As cloud simplifies the overly complicated information services delivery mechaims and frees up scarce resources to focus on reversing some of the damages caused by reduced or eliminated customer interactions for the past decade or so.
Cloud drives or enables:
Innovation: Creating innovative products and service by collaborating with customers
Product Promotion: Customers are key elements in the current social media network. Satisfied customers are more inclined to spread the promotional messages to their networks. Also, they are more likely to recommend the product favorably when some one checks with them. So, keeping the customer center of the innovation process helps immensely.
Customer feedback: Technological advancements and social networks have completely chaged the landscape of marketing communications and product promotion. With emergent tools and inexpensive cloud services available now and emerging in next two-three years will change the way enterprises will interact and react to their customer needs and demands. Business should be able to learn more about their customers and quickly configure business process to cater or address these customer needs. I clearly see current Customer Relations Management software evolving into very intelligent service capable of detecting, publishing, and analyzing the customer information or need changes and dynamically configure their business processes or rules.
Sensing and Responding: We are already deeply woven with many modes of presence and interaction technologies. Twitter, IMs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Contextual Mail Services(my wild thought: current mail systems are dumb. I am envisioning next generation mail services are much smarter ones powered by machine learning for semantic as well as contextual intelligence), GPS, and many other modes that convey who we are and what we care about. Manufactures will evolve their relationships with the customers directly eliminating the middleman.
Social Networks Connects Businesses and Customers: Next generation businesses will focus to engage their customers at every level of their business process. With all the chatter going on in the social media, businesses are facing daunting challenges to keep their brand image. So, Super Corps should be more focused on measuring their customer satisfaction by identifying critical interaction points and focus on delivering business processes to achieve these interactions. Cloud makes this easier for enterprises to achieve their goals.
Conclusion
Cloud not only enables customer driven innovation it also enables 21 century socially responsible organizations to tap into their customer social networks. These customer social networks provides valuable consumer context information that can be leveraged to discover new customer trends, needs, and complains. Also, by understanding the communication patterns related to products and services helps businesses to respond more quickly to address the customer needs. Businesses can also identify key influencers that can be instrumental in promoting their product and services. Cloud enables businesses to compose their business process more rapidly than ever before in response to the contextual information discovered in the social networks. This will put “You”, the customer, at the center of these interactions and drives WoM marketing. WoM is two more effective than radio advertisements, four times more effective than direct selling, and seven times more than print advertisements.
by Surendra Reddy
10 Feb 2010 at 08:58
I saw an interesting blog post “Leadership Yoga: Innovation Advantages from Seeing Disadvantage” by Rosabeth Kanter. Open Innovation is the key to enable 21st century corporation.
Rosabeth Kanter says, “have you noticed the tectonic plates starting to shift? Values and social purpose are creeping back into the business strategy conversation. Big societal problems are the next innovation frontier, and the best companies are practicing what I call “leadership yoga” — flipping the organization upside down to have their eyes to the ground to see the grass roots, where the next opportunities are starting to grow.”
Check it out: http://blogs.hbr.org/kanter/2009/11/leadership-yoga-innovation-adv.html
by Joe
15 Feb 2010 at 15:05
There are alot of “value-to-be delivered” type statements in this article with practically no examples to support them.
How, for example, is cloud computing going to “enable businesses to compose their business process more rapidly than ever before in response to the contextual information discovered in…social networks?” I respectfully submit that “information..in social networks” is just that – information. The business context results from analyzing the information and “connecting the dots” with other information. Once this has been done, then business have to determine 1) what the courses of action are, 2) what’s the information associated with these courses of action, and 3) then making the decisions. Those decisions may or may not result in composition or changing of business processes.
by Debbe Kennedy
18 Feb 2010 at 19:58
Sureddy,
Enjoyed your viewpoint article. The emerging world, even with all its turmoil and uncertainty, holds great promise. It makes one glad to be one of its pioneers, yes? I think cloud computing is a key part of a very big shift in how we think, behave and operate. It is opening new avenues of possibility and forcing us to re-think many things that were formerly closed. It gives us a clear opportunity to PRACTICE collaborating at the verge of differences. Lao Tzu seemed to know this benefit. I found his thinking recently… (paraphrased) 30 spokes converge at a single hub. It is at the verge where we meet. The hub makes the wheel useful.
One related positive sign I’ve witnessed during the recession is how forward-thinking businesses are sharing knowledge and assets in ways that would have been taboo at one time — in trusted, flexible, fluid mutualistic arrangements — everyone benefits (no one is ripped off) — orgs benefit, customers benefit, the world benefits. INNOVATION through COLLABORATION at a whole new level with people, partners, vendors, and sometimes competitors, is demonstrating we can do more than any of us could do alone — faster, quicker, better — by putting our differences to work.
Your energy and encouragement to rethink is refreshing and inspiring.
Thank you.
Best….
Debbe
Debbe Kennedy
founder, president and CEO
Global Dialogue Center and
Leadership Solutions Companies
@debbekennedy
by Camilo
15 Apr 2010 at 16:53
I like the idea of cloud computing used to reduce clutter and find simplicity amid complexity. Right now I see that the naive assumptions of businesses are more damaging to them and their customers, and that is caused by their inability to manage their data and extract significant information from what they do. Computing accelerates processes, but also creates inordinate amounts of information that require sophisticated approaches to extract meaning. We have the complexity, and the simplicity is still missing.