Industry news

One of the most significant trends in customer engagement over the last three years is the rise of social media outside marketing and inside customer service. Social media is moving beyond contacts and interactions to a culture of community and collaboration for the most engaged and customer-centric companies.

More than 23 percent of consumers from the age of 18-32 prefer social media when learning about products. Consumers are no longer relying solely on the traditional channels of phone and email. They are interacting online with peers over sponsored communities and over the public cloud via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.

Consumers and consumer groups are setting up social media and other online advice services themselves. Approximately 83 percent of consumers tell their friends if they get a good deal, demonstrating that the demand for advice from fellow customers is present and strong enough for consumers to act to enable this type of advice.

In the financial sector, for instance, more than 12 percent of consumers turn to blogs and almost 7 percent use other forms of social media as a resource for advice.

Social is more than an interaction, or transaction, it is a culture. Social is an approach to doing business in a more interconnected way. Social media is becoming the answer for crossing functional and departmental barriers and for collaborating as one business. Social media is the answer to getting that one contact who comes in once a year connected to the one person in the company who has the experience and insight to provide the right insight at the right time. Social is a philosophical belief that more people working together is better than one person working alone.

Follow these five steps to establish a customer engagement strategy:

1. Keep an Ear to the Cloud: Companies that fail to monitor the conversations unfolding on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Instagram and other social networks are missing critical opportunities to address concerns and turn criticism into advocacy. Put the technologies and teams in place to listen to your customers and identify opportunities to create buzz, build loyalty, and resolve issues proactively.

2. Develop a Strategy and Implement it Quickly: Social media strategies require sufficient planning, but time-to-market is equally important. Accept that there will be several unknowns, as the social media landscape is still under development. If you try to mitigate every conceivable risk factor, you will likely miss out on several customer opportunities.

3. Achieve and Maintain Executive Buy-In: Reach out to C-level executives early in the planning process. Ask for their involvement and support; communicate the need to put together a cross-functional team of social media “champions” from relevant departments – sales, marketing, customer service, corporate communications, IT – that will closely collaborate on social media initiatives.

4. Collaborate with Other Departments: Find out about their current and planned social media customer initiatives to better understand how it can impact your organization. Feedback is a two-way street. Share your implementation plan roadmaps to understand key dependencies. When possible, take a joint, collaborative effort to project planning, implementation, support and continuous improvement methodology.

5. Manage the Entire Social Lifecycle: Once your social media strategy is implemented and underway, expand your capabilities to cover all aspects of the engagement lifecycle, including:

o Building online customer communities/forums

o Handling inbound social media contacts

o Handling outbound/proactive social media customer contact

o Campaign management, knowledge management, reporting and analytics

o Continuous improvement methodology

If your social media engagement increases beyond your internal capabilities, consider leveraging your contact center partner to scale your operations and expertise.

Social networks and community forums are very visible channels for customers to share and discuss experiences they have had with a company. Companies that understand this and establish a social media strategy are better prepared to quickly address customer issues. A proactive and speedy response helps improve customer experience, increase brand loyalty and potentially diffuse the negative impact of any bad customer experiences.

Although much of the talk in the outsourcing sector does tend to focus around structuring contracts and delivering the best value for money, customers are now routinely saying they want more innovation. But if innovation is going to happen, it requires hard work to engineer it.

In Parts 1 and 2 we looked at the importance of communications and effective contracts. Underpinning them both is good governance. Although there are still many obstacles to achieving innovation in outsourcing, the biggest barrier can often be inertia. Defining a clear governance structure is critical to ensure both parties deliver on the commitments in the contract, work well together, and pave the way for innovation during the contract term.

It is important to define innovation from the outset so that both parties have a common goal. True innovation might mean continuous process improvement, emerging technology implementation, or new best practices. A clear definition allows the contract to reflect the appropriate business areas and terms associated with it. Customers will then be free to work towards achieving their innovation ambitions in a proactive way.

While the ICT supplier community on the whole has reasonable processes around innovation, suppliers tend to be reactive and thus need to be driven. For example, they often rely on the outsourcer to define innovation for them, which puts the vendor in a difficult position. A joint innovation steering committee supported by an agreed innovation charter and senior sponsorship – from both the business and ICT communities – should be established from the start of the contract and not left until after an initial transformation period when ways of working are already established. Innovation must not be ring fenced within the ICT departments, suppliers must learn to live and breathe their customer’s business. A service provider can't be expected to deliver significant innovation without knowing what types of innovation would help its client attain its strategic objectives from the very beginning.

Care should be exercised in appointing the right people on both sides, and empowering them to lead the innovation agenda. The level of joint investment needs to be established as well as a clear process for assessing and progressing with promising initiatives. Careful thought should be given to metrics used to measure innovation: input based metrics are only useful to measure the amount of effort being expended, whereas output-based metrics should track the business value generated.

In conclusion, a clear innovation strategy needs to be agreed up-front, which sets realistic expectations and considers the nature of the organisation and maturity of supplier relationships. The greater the innovation ambition, the more focus is required on ensuring the right collaborative environment. Innovation objectives, measures and incentives should be as specific as possible in the contract.

Active governance is required by both parties throughout the contract to ensure the innovation objectives and obligations are met. There is no silver bullet to solve the issue of how to ensure innovation through an ICT contract. The right framework and environment is crucial but ultimately, it is the ongoing commitment from both the supplier and customer that is most important to get the best return from innovation.

Innovation in outsourcing part 1

Innovation in Outsourcing part 2: The importance of contracts

India’s comprehensive range of capabilities, and its ability to support large projects, makes it the ‘department store’ of outsourcing, particularly for IT services. However, our conversations with sellers and buyers of outsourcing services tell us that ‘boutiques’– regions that specialise in a particular business area – are gaining ground.

For example, the Philippines is becoming known for customer-facing voice services, while China is establishing itself in animation, alongside traditional disciplines like manufacturing and IT. Ireland runs shared service centres, Poland is associated with accounting, and so on.

As well as differing business specialisations, there are also cultural and linguistic differences that suit providers in a particular region to a particular geographical market. For example, China’s outsourcing industry gets the majority of its business from its domestic market, or from Japan. Poland does business mostly with other parts of Europe, while Canada serves the United States. And of course India does a huge amount of outsourcing business with the US and UK. This ‘satellite sourcing’ arises from cultural, as well as linguistic, alignment – something that really counts in areas like customer service, where countries like South Africa are attempting to capitalise.

What’s the message here for the locations, and for the organisations choosing between them? Anyone marketing a location should understand that it’s not possible to be all things to all customers, especially if it means competing in a market that’s already sewn up, for example taking on India at application development projects needing a cast of thousands. Far better to specialise in business areas where you excel, particularly emerging ones like mobile apps, where you can ride the crest of the wave – and develop them as your brand.

Choosing your specialist area is mainly about critical mass. Whether it’s gaming, voice processing or mobile apps – canny regions are identifying specialisations where there’s enough activity to attract and sustain a viable labour force. Without that critical mass, growth and long-term sustainability will be limited. Once you have critical mass, you’ll attract more specialists, so there’s a virtuous circle.

It also pays to consider geographical markets. Pick one that is culturally close and that believes in you – American companies, for example, have been happy to be among the first to work with providers in the Philippines.

For the buyer of outsourcing services, it’s important to work out which regions are best suited to your needs, you want to go where it will be easy to find the right resources. Even for conventional outsourcing, location is still worth considering. And remember, in this hyperactive marketplace what was true 18 months ago may not be true today.

One thing is certain though. While departmental stores may capture the most business, boutiques exist for a reason, and will continue to do so.

Government has a historic lack of professionalism in procurement’ and inhibits suppliers, say analysts.

The government is being “counter-productive” and “unhelpful” according to a report published by IT analysts TechMarketView.

The "UK Public Sector SITS Supplier Landscape 2012-13" report was critical of the public sectors failure to supGovernment has a historic lack of professionalism in procurement’ and inhibits suppliers, say analysts.

The government is being “counter-productive” and “unhelpful” according to a report published by IT analysts TechMarketView.

The "UK Public Sector SITS Supplier Landscape 2012-13" report was critical of the public sectors failure to support suppliers, and the practice of ineffective methods to promote SMEs, while inhibiting the current top suppliers, resulting in both ends of the supplier spectrum being hindered.

While restricting top suppliers the government is still involved in many long term contracts, which are now being impacted by a deterioration in relationships.

The authors of the report Georgina O’Toole and Tola Sargeant said: "The anti-large agenda is unhelpful when those very companies continue to run the majority of Whitehall ICT infrastructure, under contracts that may be running for many years to come."

While the report acknowledged that both government and large suppliers were not exempt from failing, the public sector needed to recognise "an historic lack of professionalism in procurement".

port suppliers, and the practice of ineffective methods to promote SMEs, while inhibiting the current top suppliers, resulting in both ends of the supplier spectrum being hindered.

While restricting top suppliers the government is still involved in many long term contracts, which are now being impacted by a deterioration in relationships.

The authors of the report Georgina O’Toole and Tola Sargeant said: "The anti-large agenda is unhelpful when those very companies continue to run the majority of Whitehall ICT infrastructure, under contracts that may be running for many years to come."

While the report acknowledged that both government and large suppliers were not exempt from failing, the public sector needed to recognise "an historic lack of professionalism in procurement".

US industries including key players from within the electronic and IT sectors are mounting an extensive campaign against EU data protection, as Europe debates regulation modernisation.

A letter sent to key members of the US administration, including the; Secretary of State, Attorney General and US Ambassador to the EU, and signed by American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Digital Democracy and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, highlighted a extensive industry lobbying campaign, to “limit the protections that European law would provide".

New technology including bid data, cloud technology and the use of social media has stimulated debate, with the EU looking at strengthening regulation amidst privacy concerns.

With the rises of internet based technology and services that use uninterruptible power supply or UPS, the European market has recorded record growth, taking $1.98 billion in 2012, with predicted rise to $2.3 billion by 2015.

The market for UPS is seeing high levels of growth, which is only expected to rise, as Big Data and Datacentre facilities fuel demand.

Services such as Datacentres can suffer huge losses if power is interrupted, even if only for a minute. UPS is vital in such business models where downtime is not an option.

A buyout of Dell is expected to occur today as rumors point to a imminent deal, with Reuters citing anonymous sources that point to Dell CEO and founder acquiring a majority stake in the company.

Microsoft have also been rumoured to be in the running along with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners.

Microsoft eyes $3 billion Dell acquisition

Bloomberg has reported that bidding amounts have doubled between prospective buyers, with amounts now reaching $2 billion per bidder.

A new release of the Scottish Infrastructure Investment Plan is expected to be outlined today. The plan will set out all major capital spending projects, including health, transport and infrastructure projects.

The previous version of the infrastructure invest plan detailed projects totalling £12. 8 billion, with the total expected to rise.

Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, told the BBC: “we'll look at a range of programmes which are longer-term, which there is less certainty about because of the timescales involved, but it is nevertheless important to give detail of what our intentions and our ambitions are so that industry can be prepared."

The release of data from France has revealed a dramatic drop in manufacturing, with activity falling over four months in January at rates similar to those at the height of the global financial crisis.

This has led to fears that future poor economic forecasts within the Eurozone could render France’s public finances unsustainable.

Economists have predicted that France’s economy will remain stagnant over the 2013.

Manufacturing accounts for 11 percent of France’s economy and has been vulnerable to the global recession, performing poorly in comparison to its German neighbour.

BT have won another two government funded superfast broadband contacts, so far ensuring a 100 percent take of all government broadband contracts.

The two new contracts will see BT provide increased broadband capabilities across Devon and Somerset, with the aim to provide high speed broadband to 90 percent of all residents by 2016.

The project has been valued at £94 million with a further £35.6 million coming from another fibre optic project in Wiltshire and South Gloucestershire.

Communications minister Ed Vaizey said: "It's projects like Connecting Devon and Somerset, the largest of all the English local authority projects, that will help achieve the government's aim for the UK to have the best broadband in Europe by 2015."