Achieving Customer Centricity Without Breaking the Bank or Working Into Retirement

A lot has been said and written about the historical promise of CRM initiatives and how they failed to deliver the hyped-up transformational business benefits (to customers and vendors.) Then came along the hype of SaaS or Cloud as the manna for all past CRM evils from pure-play / standalone vendors like salesforce.com and others. Sure, SaaS has indeed transformed a lot of things about speed and ease of solution delivery as well as the short-term cost advantages. SaaS has also forced on-premise software vendors to re-architect their solutions to become nimble and easier to consume; which, overall is great progress for mankind. However, the fundamental question still remains: “Have these pure-play CRM SaaS vendors delivered transformation business value simply by serving the same Kool-Aid through a pipe vs. a bottle?”

Hardly. Standalone or silo applications are isolated islands of limited business value no matter how they are delivered. Siebel lived through the hype of standalone CRM for quite a while before ending up in Oracle’s arms when they realized that an end-to-end solution approach was the real way forward (Tom Siebel himself said this when Siebel got acquired.) Soon as the hype of SaaS and Cloud starts to wear off, the market will again start to question the real value of silo-based SaaS approaches and, consequently, their end is predictable as well unless they transform quickly – which is non-trivial as we know.

The proof is in the real transformational customer successes resulting from adoption of the integrated business process approach. Let’s look at one extremely compelling and transformational customer success story. Omnicell, a medical device maker, decided to replace their Siebel CRM point solution with SAP CRM to secure a true 360 degree view of their customers across front and back-office. By doing so, Omnicell has achieved a major transformation in being able to consistently deliver exactly what the customer wants. Today, at Omnicell, order accuracy has reached 99%, and the company can now easily track the on-time delivery rate of its third-partly logistics (3PL) provider. Shipping errors have been eliminated. Manufacturing can release new products to Sales on request, rather than quarterly and support incidents are down 67%. Now, this is transformational business value for a CRM initiative.

Such transformations are no way achievable through silo-based CRM approaches even if you hire an army of people to manually handle process transitions or spend inordinate amounts of money and resources to build all the complex plumbing. And this, by the way, is not easy to do in any reasonable time frame!

Holiday savings tip: Don’t invest in diamonds! It is getting cultured…

During a recent trip through Singapore, an article in The Straits Times caught my attention. Since this article was in The Straits times, which is not exactly known for sensationalism, I decided to pay attention. The article essentially posed a question whether the cartel controlled diamond industry (mostly controlled by De Beers) was at risk of a major shakeup because some company in the US had managed to manufacture real diamonds through the use of machinery by replicating (and fast forwarding) the process it takes Mother Nature to produce diamonds. While manufacturing of diamonds has been possible for some years now, there were technological limitations to the size and purity of diamonds that could be produced. This new manufacturing process has enabled the creation of larger diamonds (over 0.5 carats in size) at high purity which is the real news here.

Wow! Now, this is big news when you reflect back to what happened to the pearl industry when cultured pearls appeared on the scene over a 100 years ago. A whole new industry mushroomed; cultured pearls flooded into the market and prices of pearls crashed. I can now buy a nice-looking cultured pearl necklace for less than $50 in San Francisco’s Chinatown and you can’t tell it apart from an all-natural pearl necklace (assuming such a thing even exists today.)

Intrigued by this article, I did a simple Google lookup and found a company called Gemesis based out of Florida. Gemesis is the company that manufactures real diamonds through a new technique using machinery they purchased from Russia someplace. What was fascinating was their claim that there is absolutely no difference between a diamond they manufacture and a naturally occurring diamond since their manufacturing process pretty much replicates what Mother Nature does to produce diamonds. And, because they can control the manufacturing process, they can consistently manufacture superior quality diamonds (clarity, color) than what nature can produce. In fact, not even experts can tell the difference between one of these manufactured diamonds and a naturally occurring diamond and diamond certification institutes like GIA also certify these manufactured diamonds for the 4 C’s!

Needless to say, I had to check this out. I went to Barons Jewelers, a diamond jewelry store near where I live in Oakland, CA, and was completely blown away by these manufactured diamonds. For one thing, I had never before seen spectacular colored diamonds (in yellow). It turns out the current manufacturing process can only produce colored diamonds – which is extremely rare in nature and also highly prized. These manufactured diamonds glittered brighter than the natural ones (because of superior color and clarity). Sizes above 1 carat were GIA certified similar to their natural cousins. The only way I could tell the difference was by reading the laser-engraved of the manufacturer’s name along the lip of the manufactured diamonds under a microscope. There really is no other way to tell the difference!

Further, as you would be guessing, these manufactured color diamonds are much lower priced vs. their natural counterparts for the same 4 C’s. Not cheap, but, much, much more affordable if you are shopping for high quality color diamonds. I was told that the company has just started to manufacture clear diamonds. If these colored diamonds are any indication, there goes the market for clear diamonds as well!

I am sold. I think the end of the high-priced cartel-driven diamond industry’s future is near. I am not buying high-quality diamonds any more. They are going to only get better and cheaper soon. Besides, manufacturing diamonds also is sustainable and eco and human friendly (wrt blood diamonds.) I wish a quick end to the cartels and long live manufactured diamonds!

Who is my primary customer? A marketer's point of view

My CMO had recently talked about the challenge for marketers to clearly identify the 'customers' we are trying to serve. There are frequent demands from various stakeholders: end customers, sales, other marketing programs and field teams, investors, board, etc. How do we marketers figure out who our primary customer is so we can focus our engagements with them?

As I was thinking further about this, I came across an article in Harvard Business Review's latest November 2010 issue titled "Stress-Test Your Strategy: The 7 Questions to Ask" by Robert Simons. Not surprisingly, his first question is whether companies really know the answer to "Who is your primary customer?" His main argument is that companies often struggle to serve too many customers and in the end fail to serve any one customer really well. His example of McDonalds shifting focus from franchisees to ultimate consumers as their primary customer which led to their huge success is a great example.

In my experience as a marketer, we simply cannot afford to serve too many constituents effectively at the same time. Besides the endemic resource and budget constraints, it also becomes impractical to really hone in on a strong position and supporting messaging if the efforts are dispersed to address different audiences at the same time. Further, with volume of messages and channels of content distribution exploding these days, it is all the more critical for marketers to stay fixated on one primary customer in order to communicate something of relevance based on continuous engagement and feedback from the audience we are trying to serve.

Consequently, my focus today is on the end customer. The end consumer of our products and solutions is my only primary customer. So, what about all the others who also need to be served: the field, program teams, partners, product organization, etc.? Well, in my view, these others are simply channels to get our message across to the primary customer. These others are not my primary customers. My job is to enable these channels with the right strategy, message, content, etc. so that they can get the right message across to the single primary customer.

Pros and cons of this approach? For one thing, it has helped my team focus on one primary (and most important) audience - the end consumer of our solutions - and generate meaningful and consistently high quality engagements. By constant engagement with this primary customer, we are able to learn iteratively and improve. The challenge has been resetting expectations of some other customers (channels) we have also tried to serve as primary customers in the past. Change is certainly not easy to come!

So, who is your primary customer? What is your experience serving them? Would like to hear your thoughts.

Thanks
Vinay

Blazing hot Indian (Tamil) movie Endiran (Robot) smokes projector in Silicon Valley

As the swashbuckling Superstar Rajni clones fought in amazing configurations towards the end of the movie (in what is generally described as the best 30 minutes of the movie overall), the image on the screen in the movie hall suddenly started to burn and smoke!!! Duh, what timing! We were wondering if this was another special effect, but alas no. The screen just blanked out and all we could see was the warping film and shadow of smoke from the burning film. See photo of the screen.

Well, the audience waited for some time hoping the projector room crew would fix it so we could see the ending. But, no such luck. We were told the projector itself had gone kaput, and there was nothing they could do. So, they gave us all rain checks and asked to come back another day - to finish seeing the last 10 or so minutes of a 2hr 40min movie!!!

Not that I am complaining too much as this movie is indeed worth watching once more. Very cool flick with plenty of amazing action, a thought provoking story line and, amazing dance sequences with plenty of eye candy from Aishwarya Rai. A perfect entertainment treat!

Here's a link to the trailer on YouTube. Go watch the movie.