Thought of my day....

Customer Experience - Cultural Alignment Vs. Lip-Service

Most large organizations spend large sums of money on developing guiding principles of corporate culture – mission and vision statements, high cost training/grooming programs in addition to other Quality and HR spend and, last but not the least, the huge sums of money paid to external “experts” who are supposed to create magic. While most of this spend is well intentioned, the outcomes are mostly quite destructively disruptive and most of what remains after the battles have been fought and paid for is a wide lip-service campaign – banners, posters, videos and the whole nine yards; without any actual improvement in the level of customer experience.

In my previous blog on the subject on how customer experience is a fusion of Cultural Alignment and Proactive Design, I spoke about how great customer experience is not as objectively measurable as we would like to believe. It is really a function of every person in the organization the customer is interacting with, having a strong belief in the well-being and benefit of the customer in addition to a way of work that is personalized to the context of the customer as against by randomly sampled survey responses.

Most Customer Experience improvement programs in companies are designed around building a broadcast based multi-channel communication effort towards the organizational frontline, based on a limited perspective that a certain list of things, based on surveys and focus groups, that form the core of what customers are expecting. We discussed earlier how the expectation of customers is determined by the context of the interaction. Hence, any program designed on the assumption of a sample based feedback mechanism will have short terms impacts, at best. Most often however, it leaves a trail of confusion amongst the company frontline and things tend to go backward than making any meaningful move forward.

The most important aspect of developing a corporate culture is to realize that every team within any organization will impact, directly or indirectly, the experience of the customer. This therefore requires that every department is shaped, by the nature & flow of processes and the nature of people, keeping in mind that the end recipient is the customer. Whether you are tightening screws on hardware, typing in customer address and phone numbers or actually speaking to the customer. The accurate fulfillment of what each individual does will impact the customer in some degree. Hence, everyone must be aligned to the same principles. 

The second most important thing is to ensure that the bridge between agreement and alignment is eliminated. Most managers and their respective reportees agree that customer comes first. But when actual execution is at stake, more tactical and cost centric measures take priority, thus leaving the importance of meeting a customer’s expectations as an agreed good to have – seriously short of a must have that everyone aims to achieve FIRST.

The last, and possibly the most important realization is the toughest to swallow, especially at the senior management level where the dollars and percentages of the short term tend to drive decision making. Great Customer Experience does not walk in parallel with continued pressures on reducing cost. If you want cheap, cheap is what you will get, and most often, cheap is not great. The ability to understand every customer’s context and design solutions and products to be able to cater to it, will cost money in the short term. However, once institutionalized, the long term benefits in the dollar and percentage terms multiply. Manifold.

And therein lie the secrets to the development of successful corporate cultural.

1. EVERYONE must be aligned to the same principles.
2. Meeting a customer’s expectations is a must have that EVERYONE aims to achieve FIRST.  
3. Great Customer Experience does not walk in parallel with continued pressures on reducing cost.

One last thing – you know your organization best. So, while frameworks and other 3rd party models are a great way to take a fresh look at what you are good at and draw a path towards greatness, it is generally counter productive, much like customer experience in itself, without context. If your culture is working as is, it is the right place to be and let no one, no matter how well recommended, tell you otherwise. 

Great Customer Experience = Cultural Alignment + Proactive Design

Customer experience is not really a set of feedback forms and derived charts and measures. Being the worst abused performance metric compounded with being thoroughly misunderstood by most ‘experts’ and ‘leaders’ trying their own various means of measuring something as abstract, has taken a steep toll on the approach towards customer experience across the board. Only a handful actually get it right and even when they do, the structure is short lived and fall into bad habits of endless charts and measures post the tenure of the visionaries who are at the focus of getting it right.

 

The first step to getting customer experience right is to be able to come around to understanding that it cannot be numerically or objectively quantified accurately, no matter how sophisticated the technology or how complex the statistical methodologies. The key is to be able to cast yourself in the shoes of the customer and asking oneself, what would one want out of any particular interaction. And given that every customer, and their needs thereof, being unique in some respect, the quality of experience is a function of unique expectations crafted as a derivative of individual backgrounds, situations and contexts.

 

Say this to any expert and the first reaction will be one of statistical smugness. Yes, no matter how diverse people behavior, all of these can be cast into a scatter-plot and statistically defined based on demographics and nature of the interaction. One of my biggest realizations from life is this – my expectations (and I suspect this as true for most customers) when I am facing a computer issue an hour before a critical presentation and my expectations in the similar situation when watching the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy will be very different from whoever owns my experience at said time. I am demographically the same person in both the situations and the statistics of people from my past and present state will say with 95% confidence that I will be happy with a computer issue resolution that does not take more than 20 minutes of my time and failing a working computer, have someone come over to my house in 2 days to replace the motherboard on my computer. I am not questioning the statistical methods of arriving at this conclusion, but I do not agree with it. A score of 8 on 10 out of a preset questionnaire that asks me whether my computer issue was addressed does not make for a happy me! Because, in reality my problem is not a bad computer! My problem is a computer that failed to deliver its purpose when I needed it to most.

 

No hardware troubleshooter over the phone, online or any other medium, without a magic wand, will make me happy if I do not have a working computer before the critical presentation. The ability to back up the entire contents of my computer that I can access over my mobile device and project in the event of a bad computer is what will make me really happy – a 10/10. And that makes for good customer experience. A proactive design driven by a culture to ensure that the customer who has been sold a served a promise, be served that promise under extreme situations.

 

This brings us to discussing what makes for great customer experience – cultural alignment and proactive design.

 

Cultural alignment is not a script and posters with smiling faces reaffirming that the customer comes first. I have met employees of different companies who smile and sell the customer first countenance but in the safety of their homes, swear by the competitors promise. ‘Customer First’ as a philosophy has run out of shelf life sometime back and the era is of putting the customer at the very center. While, in fancy representations of a smiling customer at the center, the philosophy is easily expressed, the adoption of an organizational thought process that act starts, collaborates and circles back to the customer is one of the toughest things to do. And this is the weakest link in the chain to great customer experience. While most people will agree that great customer experience means empathizing with the customer, the hurdle is that very few are actually aligned to that fact. Alignment is very different from accepting the broad principles. The reason for this is that empathizing is often done wrong. The trick is to place yourself in the customers shoes and not becoming “I” in the shoes of another person.

 

Most of us are, literally, so full of ourselves that we, most often, make the customer fit into our shoes and go from there. Going back to my earlier example, a computer savvy computer hardware and software specialist would, 9 times out of 10, assume that that the next step is obvious – restart the computer. 60 minutes before a presentation that may make or break my career, the most obvious does not always strike a chord – irrespective of how sweetly it is said. And if I am as tech savvy as the person trying to solve my worries over a phone call, the obvious is not why I would have called in the first place. What might therefore work other than designing a pitch that holds true for a statistically significant sample?

 

The answer is the ability to be imaginative in applying Murphy while thinking about the customer. What can go wrong will go wrong and the only assumption that holds true that status quo is the only thing the customer will be happy with. Everything else is just the subject of hours of intellectual wrestling. So a bad computer ahead of a TV show and a bad computer ahead of a critical presentation are just two of a million combinations possible between me, my computer and my average day in life. Culturally, an organization aligned towards providing good customer experience, must be able to expect and plan for the worst, and treat the context and situation of the customer as their own self in that situation. And then think through and deliver the interaction as one would expect in for themselves. And the interaction may be at any stage of the value chain with or without any actual contact with the customer. A product designer must think as fondly of the customer as the person who calls the customer to collect on an outstanding payment.

 

Is this holistically always possible in a world of economic and other resource constraints? Yes and no! No, you cannot do everything that has to be done right. But then if I start with a list of practices (best practices as we have heard every so often) we are going back down the path of scripts, tools and statistics. And therefore, yes, it is possible to achieve the nirvana state of customer experience orientation with a bit of contextualization and, coming to the next critical item, with some proactive design.

 

I have been a customer of Progressive and Geico. And I had an accident each in their company. When I called into the Progressive helpline to report the accident, the first thing they asked me was if I was okay. Geico asked me if my car was in driving condition. This is the difference in culture. Progressive had a rental car and the towing vehicle reach my accident spot at the same time. Geico sent me a towing van and then I took a cab back to the nearest hotel. Progressive kept me updated on the status of repairs and my claims through the process, even at stages that I did not quite care about – somewhere in the process they informed me only once, almost apologetically, of the deductible. Geico’s first update was an estimate of repair expenses and deductible and asked me to go online and approve. The next time they sent me an update, proactively, only when my car was ready to pick up.

 

Who do you think gave me a better customer experience? The answer, and the solution therefore, are obvious - proactive design with the customer’s woes and expectations in mind. Organizationally, once a decision has been made to differentiate a service or a product (without that, what’s the point of being in business?), design is a continuous process that starts with the customer, continuously collaborates with the customer and ends with the customer.

 

Once upon a time a couple of guys independently thought of making bottled beverages. One of them decided that the best way to do this was to drop the drink to a receiving bay in free fall for about 23 feet. The other decided after taking an aerated drink from the free fall machine, to create a built in conveyor belt to carry the beverage from its slot to the customer. Every time a customer took the free fall route, a shirt was stained and the second guy created the conveyor belt to prevent the fizz caused by the jolt of the free fall. This hypothetical example shows how a customer woe was converted into proactive solution that improved customer experience eliminating the anguish of a stained shirt.

The combination of a cultural inclination of giving the best possible experience to the customer by creating a great consumption context and a process that focuses on proactively designing for the best possible outcome for the customer in normal and adverse situation forms the founding blocks of creating great customer experience. No product, in today’s environment, is consumed in isolation and that is the key. A car is not an engine, interiors on 4 wheels. A car also includes connectivity, great roadside service, innovative financing, great mileage and cheap & accessible maintenance. Because the owner of a car is no longer a guy who just needs to go from point A to point B quickly in a good seat and listening to a radio!

The Burden of Legacy

I have often grumbled and cried foul about the world around me not being one in which merit is not the only driver of progress. There are other factors, (most irritatingly one called tenure) that get in the way. And mediocrity gets away with being mediocre. But then, on some mornings I try to imagine a world which was only inhabited with prodigies with IQs that make Mumbai skyscrapers bow down in shame. And the problems of that structure became very obviously apparent – at least it did to me.

 

Imagine a world of geniuses where everyone had a very high capacity of being able to crack problems and get the solutions right, every time. What that would do is (i) make everyone lazy, complacent and non-competitive since there would be very little to compete against with a clear path to victory, and (ii) it would make for a very high individual and collective ego, in turn leading back to add more to the lack of competitiveness and complacency. One and all become victims of the “what’s the best you can throw at me” attitude that makes for very little aggression, if any and hence leads to the absence of progress where progress should be the natural outcome. I call this the burden of legacy, for the lack of a better description.

 

By comparison, consider the world made of a triangular hierarchy of ability and intelligence, the way it is. Sure, it makes for a lot of cause for grumbles and agony, but what it also allows for is the ability to get a big picture painted and creates aspirational outlook within people therefore enabling competitiveness. And we all know that healthy competition leads to healthy creativity and ultimately progress of the group. Imagine a surgical team. From the nurse and aide to wash and make instruments available to the master of the art, the surgeon, everyone has (i) their calling according to their skills, (ii) the aspiration to learn and grow up the value chain and (iii) a distinct part to play, essential to completion of a complex surgery. In an operating room with 12 – 15 surgeons and one patient, there will no doubt be a lot of creative haggling, discussion and debate however; the chances of the patient’s survival at the end of the process will be greatly reduced.

 

Now let us take this scenario and magnify it proportionately to form a looking glass to look at a competitive market for a particular kind or a set of similar products or services. Imagine a Company-A that has been pioneer at many things and has been regarded with respect by shareholders, stockholders and (the most important!) the media. Company-A is able to skim the best talent, make the best work environments and offer the best value in the market. With this legacy we stride ahead not noticing with so much focus as Company-B comes out of nowhere and does the same things that Company-A holds the pioneering rights to. Only, they do it cheaper, better and faster. Company-A has become lazy, unwatchful and somewhat myopic suffering the burden of legacy. Except in Company-A, no one perceives the lethargy that has crept in as a sign of a burden of any sort as their leadership continues to be proud of the past and dependent on it to sell and be profitable.

Company-B, by comparison, is agile with a lesser baggage, creates an environment within that allows for agility and infuses the aspirational spirit where everyone is trying to excel. What it also does is attacks at everything from every direction, most often in the blind spots of Company-A. And very soon Company-A realizes that Company-B is everywhere where the former boasted of invincibility. It finds itself trying to play catch up, reacting violently against moves by Company-B (though lawsuits, negative publicity – sometimes blatant and sometimes subtle and other not so healthy means).

 

What should Company-A do? Well, many millions of papers can be written in hindsight that would talk about how they should have changed strategy, restructured leadership, focus on core competency, build relationships, etc. All of that and more basically mean that Company-A needs to (i) identify their burden of legacy and (ii) shed this burden. There are a million enablers but the objective of the journey should be to become proactive and not reactive.

 

What does a Company-A typically do? It will continue to bear its burden of legacy, fight back drastic change and bask in the comfort of ‘it’s worked for us so far’ or ‘our model is more robust’ or ‘we can withstand the storm and will come out on top of it’.

 

Sound familiar. Look around you and you will see history spotted with examples.

• · Apple, the legacy vs. Google, the agile.
• · Microsoft, the legacy vs. Google, the agile.
• · Ryze, the legacy vs. LinkedIn, the agile.
• · IBM, the legacy vs. Dell and HP, the agile.
• · TCS, Infosys and Wipro, the legacy vs. Cognizant, the agile.
• · GM and Ford, the legacy vs. Toyota and Nissan, the agile.
• · Americal Airlines, the legacy vs. Southwest, the agile.
• · McDonnell Douglas, the legacy vs. Boeing, the agile.

I do not have a conclusion to write here because it is a matter of perspective, really. What is it that each company must do to face and rise to the challenge is an outcome of multiple factors like state of the economy, state of the business, availability of resources, trends, competitive landscape and many other things. Shedding the legacy burden is no easy task but it must be done from time to time. What it needs is the ability to (i) continuously raise the bar, (ii) measure everything that can be measured and be critical and (iii) be open to the possibility, every day, that things can be different and better.

 

Is there a right answer? The answer is definitely an emphatic NO. Is there however, a right direction? The trick is to be able to think and strive towards the fact that there is always a comparatively righter direction.

Ambiguity – How much is the right amount?

Almost all of us have and most of us try and follow the law of maintaining power through ambiguity. But in a leadership position it is crucial, and almost make or break, to know when to stop being ambiguous and draw clear boundaries. The knowledge of the appropriate degree of grey can mean the difference between an initiative being successful and completely failing. As with most things, the degree of grey is a variable that depends on the definition of the end goal and the size of the team or organization trying to drive towards the success of that goal.

How does ambiguity help?

• Spawns Creativity: Ambiguity always keeps people trying to guess their next step and their intentional attempt is to overcome the ambiguity, which very often does lead to creative and innovative outcomes in the right direction.
• Productive Competition: Some level of ambiguity in direction and control even allows for a great deal of productive competition.
• Avoid Unproductive Challenges: I have met people who would maintain ambiguity in how much they communicate to ensure that the path taken to the end goal remains unchallenged until the alternatives are reduced to a minimum. Ambiguous information flow is one of the only ways that work when it comes to getting what you want in a pseudo democratic environment.
• All Round Perspective: Ambiguity in organizational structure, in addition to spurring competition, ensures a somewhat flat organization; and can help the leader get a better perspective of the functioning machinery
• Shielding Lack of Clarity: Ambiguity is a very useful shield especially when the end objective is not very clear but the direction has very many and overlapping alternatives

In the modern day we see cut-throat competition, no matter where you look politics, business and even religion! And without doubt, everyone has an agenda or an end objective that is lesser than the greater good. While we all talk and write about transparency and seamless flow of information, in a world with absolute symmetry of knowledge (presence or absence of it) there would be no competition and hence it would stifle growth and competitiveness. But, human nature as it stands, cannot survive in a world with a ceiling on top and four walls – he must grow. In a world, or any cross section of it, of limited resources and potential, the room becomes one with a ceiling that contains a small exit. To grow therefore man must overcome adversaries to find their way through the bottleneck and grow. As resources get more constricted, everyone must maintain or attempt to maintain leadership through ambiguity. Overlapping ambiguity is often like putting layers of grey together until it is a dirty black. Hence the importance of the need to know where the black and white must show separately and where the grey is productive.

To come to a meaningful conclusion on the subject, I have have to go back to the banality of 2 X 2 matrices to define the right amount of grey. I must at this stage make a few confessions of my own lest this be misinterpreted.

• My analysis is based not only on my working experience but from what I read and see around me in all spheres of life
• My 2 X 2 is based purely on my attempt to understand the problem of how much grey is the right amount of grey and not based on elaborate research of human behavior in leadership positions. I would like criticism and counter opinions
• Some of the terms used do not have a lot of referential basis and are a figment of my thinking process

As I have mentioned before, the right amount of grey is dependant on two factors

1. definition of the end goal
2. size of the crew driving towards that end goal

To that end I have defined the following two categories of End Goals.

1. Direct Benefit End Goals - End goals that are targeted towards a decided benefit with no other factors or goals deriving from it, while it may derive from many In-direct Benefit End Goals (explained in the next point). E.g. top line and bottom line growth, winning the mayoral elections, outranking competition in a scholarship examination.
2. In-Direct Benefit End Goals – End Goals that contribute to a Direct Benefit End Goal and are essentially meaningless unless defined in perspective. E.g. Employee Satisfaction (drives productivity and profitability), maximizing campaign contribution (ensures a bigger campaign and hence the potential victory in the Mayoral votes), etc.       

The size of the crew, ironically, is itself a dependant variable and has some ambiguity around it. The ambiguity can, in some sense, be explained as the difference of importance between a 2 people crew trying to manage a $ 2 Bn portfolio of wealth for a certain RoI and a 200 people crew trying get the same RoI through a transportation business. In an attempt to meaningfully resolve this will need us to define crew size standards and that is quite outside the scope of what I am trying to achieve here. So I will use economic value per employee (EVE) as a definition – typically (and there are definitely exceptions) a high EVE means a smaller crew and a small EVE means a larger crew, assuming that the end objective is measured in congruent terms (like RoI). I will leave the definition of EVE in some degree of ambiguity but I think most readers will easily understand what that means in broad terms.

So now that we know what the parameters for measuring degree of ambiguity let’s move towards defining what level of ambiguity is the right amount. Hence the matrix below.

LOW GREY

This is applicable for high stake outcomes that are owned by a small band of people/employees. A very typical example is the CXO office comprising of the CFO, CEO, CPO, COO, etc. responsible for the outcome of the next shareholder meeting. At that level of decision making and outcome, it is crucial for everyone to be on the same page in terms of what needs to be achieved at the end of the race. The only aspect of ambiguity that can be left is in terms of direction setting of the individual towers. Any greater ambiguity without consensus at that level generally leads to disagreements as every member will have stake in the outcomes; this can lead to disaster. Hence, the level of ambiguity should be minimal and only to the extent of how stated objectives are to be implemented towards common goals.

MEDIUM GREY

This is applicable for the likes of senior and middle management, who will be responsible for the execution of executive objectives. What is critically important to remember with the people providing oversight of execution is that they also have a significant stake in the outcome and hence must have relative clarity of strategic decisions, well defined structural clarity and end objectives. This level of personnel will be defining targets and metrics for those in the lower ranks of the value chain. To that extent it is often constructive to maintain some ambiguity about the vision and other abstracts allowing for creative outcomes and freedom of choice in terms of how stated objectives can be achieved.  

LIGHT RAIN CLOUDS

These are the people on the ground, managing the execution, typically junior management and the equivalent. At this level it is important to have clarity of the tactical tasks that are to be achieved and the measures of success that will be used to measure quality and other parameters of the task at hand. This layer, most often comprise of people without the big picture and a tendency to raise objections and challenges to the way the big picture is to be painted (exceptions to this thumb rule however must be treated as such). Hence keeping the big picture abstract (e.g. “becoming the best customer service company” really conveys no strategic direction but a good feeling) is important to ensure smooth functioning. What needs to be enforced however, is a set of measures of success in line with the overall objectives being set by those in the Medium Grey.

Some level of control and structural ambiguity is sometimes maintained to allow for healthy competition that fuels creativity albeit with necessary oversight – healthy competition very often becomes unhealthy rivalry turning into a destructive duel. 

HEAVY RAIN CLOUDS 

These are the actual executioners – typically low on maturity and ability to comprehend the world larger that instruction driven outcomes. Any strategic or control system clarity means very little at this level except for defined metrics and tasks. A low level party worker or back office personnel will have to take task orders from a variety of people and explaining to him how that will contribute to the overwhelming success of the organization takes a lot of effort and very often wasted effort. Making control structures very transparent also leads to hierarchical thinking in the mind and can be counter productive.

A word of caution…

It is important however, at all states of grey, to know the exceptions. A creative and visionary within the Junior Manager should not be stifled with ambiguity because his inputs and thoughts might actually be well worth listening to. Similarly a non-mission-critical support function’s middle manager might be left with a little more ambiguity to ensure a path of least resistance where the support is delivered and the objectives are not challenged. One must, therefore, know the machinery very well before deciding on the level and quantum of ambiguity to thrust upon.  

It is also important and essential to follow up on ambiguity. Ambiguity is not the equivalent of keeping people in the dark. Unless otherwise proven, one must assume that everyone is intelligent enough to figure out some or most of the puzzle. Questions and clarifications to that end must be responded to with a balance of black & white and grey. 

Some questions that come to mind….

Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) while addressing the International Newsmedia Marketing Association said that the fundamental idea behind creating the UID project was the fact that Indians were becoming more mobile, travelling from rural areas to cities or migrating overseas to find jobs. The Infosys co-founder said UID was trying to bring about a change by putting people's identities on the cloud. This would 'untether' people from a physical location, allowing them to move around the country. (source: The Times of India article Media companies must assume all consumers are young and mobile while strategising: Nandan Nilekani)

This brings some questions to my mind on whether this is really a progressive move and I wonder what the plan is to mitigate all the risk factors (and we’ll talk about the conspiracy theory later) that are associated with the move. Let’s look at what happens in our precious Western hemisphere that undoubtedly gave us this idea to ape from – talking of the Social Security Number/Card (SSN) here. You cannot do anything without an SSN (unless you are on a business trip) in the United States of America staring from getting a bank account, renting an apartment, getting utility services  to buying a car (you can, of course, buy groceries with cash without an SSN but you can get robbed of your cash too, just as easily!). So this SSN becomes your identity, 9 digits that are forced upon you as definitions of your existence. And what came of it?

In 2009, 9.9 million adults were victims of identity fraud, up 22% from 2008. Merchants are paying $100 billion in fraud losses due to unauthorized transactions and fees/interest. We have over the years had our variations of IDs moving from the Ration Card through the License, Passport to the PAN card. I looked far and wide but I could not find any statistics for ID theft in India but here is what I found.

• According to the data compiled by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the money lost to such scams has doubled in the past four years. In the current financial year, banks lost Rs.2,289 crore (till December ‘11), while the loss was Rs.1,057 crore in 2007-08. (Source: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/banks-lose-rs-2289-crore-in-fraud-cases/1/131090.html) I am guessing a significant part of this is perpetrated by fraudulent PAN cards. When PAN cards started circulation there were paper flyers all over major and minor cities for getting a PAN card for Rs. 100 without any documentation. 
• The statistics, while no formal sources are available, are staggering in terms of Passport and related Visa frauds. WikiLeaks exposed a cable recently that said this about the Indian Passports.

The design of the Indian passport incorporates many good security features that would normally lead to a more favorable rating of this document’s vulnerability. The problem lies in production inconsistency and vulnerable source documents. Quality control is lax at production locations. Thus, genuine passports sometimes are partially or completely missing security features. Genuine passports issued on the same day at the same place can look entirely different…. The only documentation required for a passport is proof of birth and proof of residency. Easily reproduced school records can suffice for the former, while a bank statement or utility bill can be used to “prove” the latter. Although police are supposed to verify the information on each application by visiting the applicant’s neighborhood and interviewing neighbors, such checks are often cursory at best. In most cases, police officials will only check warrant records and then hand over a clean record to passport authorities….” (Source: http://www.travel-impact-newswire.com/2011/04/wikileaks-cables-expose-indian-visa-fraud-tactics/#ixzz231wZmMOW)

Of the Indian license and the Ration Card, the less said the lesser shall be the embarrassment. And looks like the fraud in Aadhar has already started facing fraud problems as seven persons, including four Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Ltd (IL&FS) employees and a ration shop dealer, have been booked by the police in the Aadhaar card fraud. The technical foundations are unproven in ensuring critical authentication, immunity from systemic fraud and data proliferation/theft. Hence the questions literally begs a response as to what the rationale is of behind spending thousands of crores of Rupees to create another ID platform instead of making the existing ones more robust. Because to me it seems that the more Hi-Tech you get the more the scope for fraud and misuse, and more the cost of fraud. The only purpose it might serve is to provide a significant boost to employment numbers. It’s like the employment boost the US gets every time they decide to take a census it is meaningless but the stick market gets a temporary adrenaline rush and everyone suffers from a misinformed sense of purpose and happiness.

And this brings me to the what might sound akin to a conspiracy theory, but I would rather not be tagged. Although with the number of tags going around already there is no way to run and hide but this is one thing, if successful (there is always the remote chance that this will succeed under extraordinary circumstances) this might be the chain that Government and possibly every private organization wanting to track your spending & usage patterns will forever hold to your neck. And I am not comfortable with that thought at all. Will you be comfortable with someone always watching you – what you spend, where you spend, and possibly where you go, whatever your do? And pay taxes to get such extreme breach of privacy implemented on to you?   

The art of looking busy...

Quintessential to surviving the modern day workplace is the mastering of the art of being busy without much business. These are not my secrets, but from what I have seen around, I think office technology is increasingly enabling the practice. In fact it is no secret at all! I must admit that on occasion when there has been time to spare, I too have practiced the witchcraft of being 'very busy' or as the more common jargon stands 'out of bandwidth'.

One of the most central tools that has made the practice easy is the creation and perfection of the Alt + Tab function, especially when someone is looking or might sneak up to take a peek. Way too many times I have seen sports websites and gossip blogs disappear in the nick of time to hide behind  arbitrary excel sheets and the other enabler of justifying idling - Outlook (we'll get to that in a bit). Nowadays, with the increasing complexity (all for the sake of user friendliness) it is easier to search for the perfect window to switch to. So in case you are multitask idling (generally a combination of your favorite Social Networking site, some random flash game, your personal email and maybe even the instant messenger built into your email client), one no longer has to worry about switching to the wrong window as in the old days of non-tabbed existence.  All in one browser windows and inbuilt apps ensure you can just switch once. If you are smart enough to keep a dozen or more work related 'stuff' running in the background, the probabilities are completely in your favor to be able to evade detection.

Technology has taken care of the problem of policies and firewalls, those buggers that your system admins keep implementing to make your life boring and sad! (Internet, free air-conditioning and subsidized food is what makes bearing office worthwhile, after all. And the best part is that you get paid to leverage all the comforts that would cost a bomb in the out of control inflation around us.) Someone said that broadband could be mobile and you can connect everywhere you are. Isn't that nice!

Policies and Firewalls? In the words of the great Mr. Obama, "BFD!!"

Coming to the one evil that has affected and changed all our lives - if you have a fundamental understanding of what it means to have a life, this entity has definitely changed you life for the worse. There are those who swear by it but then there are always the Satanists! Outlook and the concept of email is what I speak of here; and God forbid you are considered a high performer and get handed a Blackberry, or for the blessed, an iPhone. You can hide from the world but email shall pursue you unto death. And maybe even after it in some time. But then, such a utilitarian tool too has its little loophole - at least one that I was taught of. You can actually compose your emails and schedule them for delivery in the middle of the night. "Oh how hard working John Doe is! It is middle of the night and he is still working!" Yeah! He did get a consistent out-performer for three years, not because he was efficient enough to finish what he had to early but because he was sending pre-scheduled emails at the middle of the night while drinking a chilled mojito! It is the equivalent of the times when getting good scores meant writing epics during the examinations and marks were proportionate to the mass of your script (in many places, I am told, this is still the case).


Well, BFD! I hear multiple pings so time to ALT+TAB to my OUTLOOK. 


Happy Idling.....   

The Business of Consulting

As with pretty much everything there is the Good Consultant and the Consultant. The difference lies in the level of visionary thought a consultant is able to marry in with tactical details. Unfortunately, in an industry dotted with too many consultant speaking in Consultese (a word coined by a good consultant I know), the effort is more in terms of justifying than actually making a difference. For all those who hire consultants from the large hives - McKinsey and Deloitte and the likes, know this, every consultant is essentially measured (I mean the crux of keeping their jobs is justified) by billing rates and billed hours. To that extent not many consultants are different from the more popular category of leeches viz. lawyers - and we all know the level of love and respect practitioners of law command. Coming back to the point, about 85 to 90% of the industry (if you can call consulting an industry) is ridden with mediocrity! 

Here is what your typical $100 - 500/hr consultant gives you. 

• States the obvious in pretty pictures (frameworks, matrices, models, etc. - many names)
• Way too many credentials - inflated truths that most probably include all realms of the possible universe
• Over a period of time, takes you around in a full circle to where you started
• Comes with the capability of sounding intelligent at the expense of the folks who actually know what they are doing
• Jargons (or Consultese, as I now refer this language as) that really express what should ideally be common sense
• An airline view of life that will take a load of money and effort to implement in real terms (some of that money will of course find its way into the pocket of the said consultant)
• Make you a business case that will be ridden with assumptions and dependancies for future finger pointing in case of limited success
• Convince you that what is being said is (irrespective of what reality suggests) the Best Practice (another jargon that has no relevance, because if everyone followed a certain best practice we would be living in a communist world)

Broadly that summarizes it! For those of you who now think that you have been wasting money over nothing for some time, I must defend the profession saying that your money deserves to be spent but it is just being spent on the wrong set of people. 

When you are hiring a consultant what you first need to look for and possibly dig through the credentials list to find is whether the man/woman you will pay to tell you to do the right thing, understands the 'thing'! Putting credentials to overwhelm the client is pretty much the nature of the beast but the almost mythical Good Consultant will tell you on questioning how much time and in what role they have learnt and practiced the 'thing'. 

Why do most consulting gigs give you something impractical and sometimes just too high level to make any tactical sense? The most important reason most often is because as a client to the consultant, the company or individual sponsor is also withholding information and marking territory. Most consultants will work around this bottleneck (it's a part of the primary Consultese education process) and the outcome is just what you can expect - a presentation that is very abstract and needs significant additional effort to actually implement. It is most often the client who allows a consultant the excuses to get away without contributing to the cause. 

As a client to the consultant, you need some education of the jargons of Consultese you need to avoid. What you should not pay a consultant to tell you?

• Benchmark for everything: It is very crucial to be aware of what can and cannot be benchmarked is extremely important if you do not want to be sold on generic data
• Best Practices do not exist: While some practices prove profitable across the industry, as a client one must have conviction that your business is unique unless you are in a price driven commodity market; do not get sold on random best practices defined out of perspective
• Employees know better than frameworks/models/simulations/matrices: As an institution is run by its employees, it is quintessential that a Consultant's frameworks/models/simulations/matrices are validated, critiqued and sieved by employees who are the real practitioners. In my years of engagement with clients, I have realized that the people at the grassroots know the best solution for ambient challenges
• Powerpoint Slides make for bad strategic decisions: Real life business is very difficult to reduce down to slide ware - beware of slides that represent a living breathing business in bullet points

So then, what makes for a good consultant?

• A Good Consultant takes the pain and even invests in understanding the business or technology environment at a practitioners level - it's easy to decipher a Good Consultant in this respect because he or she will never start by telling you about industry trends and the best practices
• A Good Consultant uses jargons that have a ring of familiarity therefore - he has learnt from the employees and understands the language & uniqueness of the business
• A Good Consultant will present a model that includes all strategic and tactical aspects of the problem instead of force fitting the problem into what's very often a framework that has been plagiarized over generations of abuse
• Last but not the least, a Good Consultant delivers a business case that actually reflects the state of the business and a journey that is inclusive of extraneous considerations like weather, competition, economy or whatever may or may not affect the future of the financials

A client or an institution sometimes plays a crucial role in making a Good Consultant of a Consultant by undertaking a few simple steps before engaging a consultants. 

• Identify the right people to interact with
• Get all the accessible information available and make them available to the consultant - don't hold back and expect miracles
• Invest sufficient time and mind space your hired consultant - left alone and isolated any person or team will produce an output that is not going to be relevant.

And last but not the least, have commercial agreements that are outcome based. Pay on completion of a satisfactory outcome only. 

  

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Letting the right people in – Developing the Right Impact with Social Media

Very recently, in the line of work and idle reading, I have been dragged through a lot of talk around social media and how it is changing the face of connecting and collaborating with the customer. About what the successes and failures of it are and how to do it right are among the top discussed items. With all due respect to the dependent economy that has grown around Facebook, Twitter and the likes, I think that the key to strategy when it comes to leveraging the Social Media is to leverage the underlying philosophy (you'll be surprised at how many people miss this!!) of the Electronic Social Media - Collaboration.

The best way to look at the true impact of electronic Social Media on businesses is to see what has been achieved by the successful.

• By the end of 2009 Dell had generated $ 6.5 Million in sales from Twitter alone
• In April 2008 Frank Eliason opened a Twitter account to help Comcast customer – since then Comcast has helped over many hundred thousand customers without lifting a phone line
• Starbuck went online to their customers and got 50,000 new product ideas

Besides the obvious customer satisfaction, customer engagement and positive brand image that are so extensively tracked from the top to the managers on the call center floors, we should look at what the impact of collaborative media had on the cost of running operations.

• Dell would have saved millions on sales cost that would otherwise involve hundreds of sales agents sitting behind call center cubicles, management of distribution channels and so on.
• For Comcast, this means, millions of dollars saved on the cost of providing customer care – assume an agent takes 15 calls a day and also assume that the cost of the agent, with all overheads loaded, is about $ 300/day, if a 150, 000 customers were helped it resulted in a 3 million dollar savings at very little incremental investment.
• For Starbucks, the money it would require to employ a kitchen full of Baristas to come up with 50, 000 coffee recipes would probably be equivalent to or many multiples of the cost of running running a Starbucks outlet.

While many hundreds will talk of the rather obvious customer facing impact of Social Media, the RoI calculations do not paint the picture of the money saved in the process. If we flip that idea around and look at how a Social Media strategy is formulated, the factors of letting the customer in to reduce your overheads (for free!) is never considered.

The idea of a geometric progression of a marketing message is so compelling that most social media efforts are not truly collaborative (as they should be for success) resulting in social media channels that equates to email spam, unidirectional mass communication, exactly what Social Media is not supposed to be. To make sure that you avoid falling into the easy trap of putting a message out there and hoping everyone talks (RT, Digg, Like, etc.) about it, it is essential to be able to define the Social Media strategy based on what needs to get achieved at a micro level and then build downwards from there.

Most businesses who did not get their strategies started with the CEOs saying, “We need a Social Media Strategy” and building downwards from there like any other strategy decision that is financed by the CFO and then  implemented and executed by support functions like Marketing and IT. Those like Dell, Comcast, Starbucks, and others who did get it right first time started with metrics defined at the operations floor; these were derivatives of core business imperatives and the build was from there.

Setting Up a Social Media Strategy – Let the Right People in…

The key is to let the right people in at the right stage. In the example depicted above, the customer care teams can define and tell you exactly how customer collaboration and self service can be enabled and what metrics will be impacted. Putting that at the core of the strategy is quintessential to the success of the effort. Marketing & IT must act as enablers and not the strategists in this case (the latter is typically the case in Strategy 1). This enables the ownership of and stake in the success of the channel by the people who built it allowing a collaborative feedback based dynamic environment being built between the customers and the organization (customer care group in the illustrated example) enabling not only the customer care helping customers and also customers helping other customers thus achieving a Social Media outcome that is collaborative, and hence social in the true sense.

Update: A very neat example on how Social Media is used effectively to build a collaborative model is shown in the video below where the customer was looped in to collaborate to make a supply chain efficient. Thanks Addu for sharing.