Permission to Get Dirty

Imagine finding underwear in the dryer at a New York City Laundromat-with a Web address and company slogan printed right on it. That's the creativity behind an advertising campaign called "Permission to Get Dirty" that Miguel Zabludovsky developed for his "eco-luxury" laundry and dry-cleaning business, Slate NYC.

Zabludovsky, a 26-year-old budding entrepreneur, introduced his target market to Slate's services right inside the "do-it-yourself" competition. The campaign was cheap and potent, he says, realizing a nearly 10 percent response rate.

Zabludovsky is turning the 50-year-old laundry service industry upside down with his innovative approach and environmentally friendly perchloroethylene-free solvents. His eco-friendly cleaning business targets the busy, fashion-conscious professionals who want their clothes taken care of with perfection-and are willing to pay for it.

Customers in the New York City area schedule pickup online, cram as many clothes as they can into a Slate hamper, and pay a flat weekly fee for unlimited laundry service and a monthly quote of dry-cleaned items. Slate returns laundry folded and wrapped in a fashionable shopping bag.

Zabludovsky manages the 3,000 customer names in his database and scheduling system with Microsoft SQL Server. He captures contact information, scheduling requests, and any specific instructions, such as hang versus fold.

Despite a sagging economy that might prompt less luxury spending, Zabludovsky is not seeing this effect with his clients. In fact, he's seeing growth.

"I think the people who pay for convenience offerings are cutting back in other expense categories or are not feeling the impact in their wallets," Zabludovsky says. Slate NYC is diversifying its customer profile and adding new products to the mix over the next few months, he says, including partnering with area hotels, restaurants, and high-end residential units as their dry cleaner of choice.

Growth also has required Zabludovsky to find alternative delivery methods within the city. His one van is reaching capacity with current deliveries. In the next few months, he will finalize a strategic alliance with FedEx for delivery service.

"We are working with the packaging engineers on how to deliver clothes without being wrinkled," Zabludovsky says. "This not only will provide reliability and tracking but also increase our reach and capacity in the region."

By Vicki Powers / Microsoft / Perfect CEM

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Attention : Is Your Call Center Ready for a Disaster?

Hosted contact center solutions help to insulate small to medium-sized businesses from disruptions – and offer additional benefits as well.

Hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, storms, power outages, terrorist threats … you never know when or how your business might be disrupted. But you do know that you must have a business continuity plan because customers don’t stop calling and e-mailing when you have an outage. In fact, volumes may increase. Your agents need to be available to customers. One negative experience with your company and you could lose that customer forever. Add the average number of customer contacts you have in a given time period and it is easy to see how quickly the damage to your business can multiply with any outage.

Large companies with established national or global operations typically have the resources to create redundant systems to overcome a local or even regional outage. If there is an outage or problem at one location, contacts are simply routed to the other open sites. However, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) typically don’t have the resources to build comprehensive disaster recovery plans and are left with few options other than rebuilding the system as quickly as possible.

Hosted contact centers to the rescue

Hosted contact center solutions provide SMBs with a cost-effective and reliable solution that minimizes business risks during an emergency by enabling agents to work from virtually anywhere. The latest hosted solutions require only a web browser, phone and internet access to provide the same complete contact center functionality as if the agents were actually on-site. Because all software and hardware are housed off-premise in a secure hosting facility, the “contact center” can continue to operate without disruption.

In fact, a hosted contact center can provide even greater flexibility and security than redundant physical contact centers. For instance, even if a company with multiple contact centers were able to re-route incoming contacts to one of their other centers, the remaining locations may not be able to handle the increased volumes or have the proper training to adequately handle the re-directed calls. A hosted solution enables you to automatically route communications to available agents wherever they might be. And if employees did have to be evacuated, re-establishing operations is quick and inexpensive, since agents only need a web browser, a phone, and access to the internet. This makes nearly any home or hotel a potential temporary outpost. The end result is the business continuity that your bottom line and customers require.

A virtual contact center for real-world events – and a global economy

Because the hosted solution places the hub of the contact center outside of the organization, it makes the virtual contact center a reality. By strategically locating agents in geographically diverse locations, you can dramatically reduce the impact any single event could have on the business. Far greater than even multiple contact centers, this can make the business nearly immune to local outages or disasters.

Fine Art By Hyatt is one company that can testify to the advantages of a hosted solution in an emergency. When Fine Art By Hyatt made their original decision to go with a hosted solution from Cincom Systems, Inc., a lot of factors other than emergency preparedness entered into the equation. However, when Hurricane Wilma stormed ashore less than 20 miles from the company headquarters in Naples, Florida, this ability moved to center stage. Larry Block, president of Fine Art By Hyatt, says “our agents in the Midwest and western states were able to cover the phones while we were covering our heads to protect from Wilma. We never missed a beat as far as taking customer orders was concerned!”

Under non-emergency conditions, a hosted solution can provide unmatched scheduling flexibility for agents and managers. It enables the business to employ the best agents available worldwide – creating a virtual contact center for businesses of any size.

The flexibility of hosted solutions also offers advantages during call spikes. Because no special hardware or software is required, you can quickly engage non-contact-center personnel to take customer calls. In essence, your entire organization can become a pool of backup agents for unforeseen load conditions.

The importance of multi-channel capability

A key component in the success of hosted solutions when addressing business continuity planning is the ability to integrate multiple channels. For example, if your customers’ phones are out of service due to an outage, they will try to utilize other channels of communication, such as e-mail, until they reach you. During Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 attack, this situation became reality as millions of telephone lines and cell phones were inoperable; yet e-mails could be sent from many locations. The ability to substitute contact channels proved vital in this situation.

Also, if your business involves utilities, certain government agencies, and other organizations, call volumes are likely to increase during emergencies. The ability to direct customers to alternative communication channels that are operational or to agents located outside the affected area could be critical. Today's hosted solutions make all of this possible.

Hosted contact centers on the rise

The business continuity and global business advantages of today's hosted contact center solutions haven't gone unnoticed by businesses. According to Datamonitor, hosted contact centers will be the fastest-growing sector of the market, and by 2008, will account for 38 percent of the global market. Additionally, DMG Consulting reports that by 2007, 20 percent to 30 percent of all new contact center seats will be hosted. By providing an economical and viable alternative to the on-premise contact center, a hosted solution enables SMBs to establish business continuity capabilities and global customer service that was previously not feasible. The end result is a leveling of the playing field for SMBs and minimized exposure in the event of a disaster.

Key business continuity advantages of hosted contact center solutions

Some of the key benefits of the best hosted contact center solutions in a business continuity plan include:

• Agents anywhere – Agents and other knowledge workers can log in remotely and receive phone, e-mail, chat, and fax interactions.
• Minimal capital outlay with no hardware or software investments - Typically a simple monthly per-seat licensing.
• Inherent security with off-premise hosting that places your contact center infrastructure in a secure, redundant location.
• Eliminates the expense and time-consuming process of buying, installing, and maintaining a backup site.
• Quick, simple, and inexpensive relocation with only a web browser, a phone, and access to the internet required.
• Enables non-contact-center personnel to take customer calls as backup agents to accommodate unforeseen load conditions.

By Randy Saunders

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What to Look for When Selecting a Hosted Contact Center Solution

According to Datamonitor, by 2008, the global market for managed and hosted contact center services will have more than doubled, reaching a value of more than $5 billion. So the odds are good that if you haven’t already implemented a hosted solution in your contact center, that you will soon.

But once you make the decision to implement a hosted solution, finding the right service provider is critical. What should you look for? Here are five areas to investigate:

1. Experience and capabilities

The vendor’s ability to provide a complete solution is as important as its ability to execute the solution.

• A service provider offering a hosted solution should deliver a full, robust suite designed for the hosting environment. It should include advanced analytics that track and measure all elements of the contact center at both an operational and business level, interaction channels with universal queue, and an agent desktop that provides a universal view of the customer.

• Companies can gain insight into the capabilities and support the company provides by checking customer and partner references.

• Most importantly, companies must understand the hosting infrastructure.

2. Functionality and security

As the demand for hosted solutions rises, traditional vendors have begun to retrofit their premise solutions to offer them as a service. The buyer should be cautious of these solutions, as they may not have the same benefits as a solution that was built to be both hosted and on-premise. Understanding the functionality of a hosted solution is key to understanding the vendor’s ability to customize, integrate, and provide security for your existing resources.

• A multi-tenant architecture can improve the operation of a hosted solution. It is an inexpensive and comprehensive method of providing a shared architecture down to the last table. With a multi-tenant architecture, multiple clients with distinct needs, tools, processes, customizations, and workflow can all reside in the same infrastructure – each with its own completely separate, completely unique set of processes.

• A Net-Native Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) solution can eliminate the need for client/server applications on user desktops. Additionally, it utilizes the internet as a global delivery system for maximum uptime and flexibility while ensuring full security.

• Integration should use a common platform based on open standards. This easy-to-program, goes-anywhere framework can summarize data from any system (transactions, interactions) and transmit it to agents using a single, web-based interface.

• Secure data transmission is also very important. Solutions should provide best-of-breed hardware, redundant firewalls, restrictive internet protocols, good authentication, and secure virtual private network (VPN) lines between the client and the service provider. With the multi-tenant architecture, core tenants of the security framework for hosting keep everything separate.

3. Scalability and flexibility

Having a hosted solution that can grow with your business is critical to long-range success and a long-term partnership with the service provider.

• The solution needs to be flexible and customizable to your business. The ability to configure and adjust communication channels, workflows, processes, knowledge and application access, desktop presentation, and configurations are all critical.

• A hosted solution should also offer a variety of deployment and financing options. Purchase a license and let the service provider manage the logistics and infrastructure for you, or start with a hosted version and confirm that it works for your business before investing in a licensed version. Or stay with the hosted model indefinitely.

4. Processing speed and availability

As hosted solutions physically reside outside the user’s network, companies should ensure that the service provider is able to meet processing-speed and availability requirements.

• The service provider should have a commitment to meet service-level agreements and the solution architecture and infrastructure to do so.

• To ensure redundancy, the service provider should have multiple data carriers.

• The internet service provider must provide adequate bandwidth, as well as meet latency and reliability requirements.

5. Feedback and measurement

Business intelligence functionality provides the insight necessary for managers to make informed business decisions. Thus, analytical functionality has transitioned from being a luxury to being a necessity for decision-makers in the enterprise.

• The hosted solution should provide real-time or near-real-time reporting that provides managers with immediate access to logical and intuitive reports based on the company’s operations.

• Flexibility in the controls of data manipulation is also important. Not only should the vendor offer standard reports, but it should also give managers the capability of creating custom reports that meet specific needs. Companies should look for online analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities that allow business users to flexibly manipulate or “slice and dice” operational data, using familiar business terms, in order to provide analytical insight.

If you fully investigate these five areas, you should succeed in implementing a solid software solution for your unique customer service needs.

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “The Hosted Model: Simplifying Contact Center and Agent Desktop Solutions." To download the complete white paper, go to www.cincom.com/hostedmodel

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RISING EXPECTATIONS

High growth expectations for MNCs in Asia.

Already struggling with myriad concerns, CFOs of multinationals are scratching their heads over their latest worry: pressure from headquarters to wring even more growth from Asian operations to plug gaps suddenly appearing on U.S. and European P&Ls.

“We have been looking at ways to tweak our forecast this very week,” says Pascale Dillon, CFO of MVCI Asia Pacific, a Singapore-based subsidiary of the Marriott Group. “For us it’s about boosting revenue and improving margins. It’s hard because we are only 15 percent of world sales. Trying to use Asia to offset a revenue gap in a region that accounts for over 50 percent of global sales is a bit of a tall order.”

Recent conversations with nearly a dozen CFOs show that this is a common complaint. The China-based CFO of an American industrial company (who asked not to be identified) reports that he’s just been asked to increase his forecast (currently 30 percent) by another 5 to 10 percentage points. “In headquarters, they don’t really know what’s going on in China,” he says.

The notion that Asia can find the missing value appears to stack up when you look at it top-down. The United States may already be in a major recession, but China’s growth has barely been dented. As CFO Asia’s sister publication The Economist pointed out recently, most of China’s growth is now driven by a combination of domestic demand and capital investment. The worst-case impact of the U.S. slowdown is a one percent drop, from 10.5 percent for 2008 to a still respectable 9.5 percent. India also looks impressively resistant to the contagion.

But big jumps in growth are hard to achieve, even in a healthy market. “Growth comes from investment, and the kinds of investment which drive significant growth take time to plan and execute,” says Dillon. “There is a real danger that the quarterly approach to results, which focuses on the near-term, will collide with the reality of Asia, which, wherever you look, is about long-term commitments and thoughtful investment.”

Ajay Jain, the Asia Pacific finance director for Schott, a German producer of specialty materials, components, and systems, says that he, too, is in a business that requires significant lead time. “We don’t sell the types of products where you can initiate sales and get orders in the next three months,” he says. In Schott’s case, senior managers understand that increasing the rate of growth may not be possible. “Nonetheless we will be—are being—heavily challenged to capture some opportunities in the business plan that might otherwise have stayed outside,” he says.

And there’s the rub. While revenue growth in Asia is easy, profit growth is not. “In markets that are already highly competitive,” says Dillon, “aggressively looking for more growth may well result in declining margins—because the growth that’s easiest to get is probably the growth you don’t want.”

The growth that companies do want—the sustainable, profitable kind—is hard to come by. “To acquire new business faster we need investment in new capabilities,” says Dillon. “We need to know where the new business is, so we need market insight, and we need a sales process that translates our conceptual view of the market into daily activity that focuses on high-margin growth.”

But in times like these, that’s no easy sell. “I want to have sustainable growth in China,” says the China-based CFO. “But our board and CEO are out selling the same story about how great our China business is. The expectations are very high.”

By Simon Littlewood, CFO Asia

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Cincom Sponsors the 2008 SAP® Configuration Workgroup European Conference

CWG Conference focuses on business benefits within the quotation, bidding and estimating processes of complex manufacturers

Cincom Systems (http://www.cincom.com) is pleased to announce that it will once again be sponsoring the SAP^® Configuration European Workgroup Conference that will be held at the Hotel Berlin in Berlin, Germany on May 5-7, 2008.

The Configuration Workgroup (CWG) (http://www.configuration-workgroup.com) is an international user group of SAP customers and partners, focused on the topic of product configuration as implemented in the Variant Configurator (VC) and in the SAP Internet Pricing and Configurator (SAP IPC). The CWG Conference objective is to facilitate the transfer of knowledge regarding SAP or third-party, configuration-related product offerings, generic methodologies and best practices.

As an SAP Certified Integration Partner, the Cincom offering helps SAP customers enhance their quotation, proposal, bidding and estimating processes. It integrates out-of-the-box with SAP and shares its customer and quotation data with the SAP system, feeding configured sales orders directly into the SAP Order Management and SAP Variant Configurator modules. It's specifically designed to assist complex manufacturers¾such as those specialising in engineer-to-order, made-to-order or configured-to-order manufacturing¾with the most complex product configurations and proposals.

Throughout the conference, Cincom will be present to discuss how Cincom’s product and sales configurator solutions can complement the SAP application environment. Cincom will also exhibit at SAPPHIRE 08 on May 19-21 (Messe Berlin, Hall 3-2, Discrete Industries, booth DI 2.5).

For further conference details and to register, please visit:

http://www.configuration-workgroup.com/publicInformation/futureEvents/futureevents.php.

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What to Say When Your Prospect Only Has 10 Minutes?

Have you ever had a prospect say to you "Tell me about your products and I only have 10 minutes"? What have you done in this situation? What was the response you received?

Before we look at three ways to respond, let's look at the "I only have 10 minutes" statement.

The "I only have 10 minutes" statement could be true and/or it could be being used as a protection mechanism. Your prospects want to protect themselves from salespeople, and this statement is ideal for this. If they've told you they only have 10 minutes, then they are not being rude when they leave the conversation in 10 minutes. Bear this in mind as you read on.

There are three options for how to respond when your prospect Says, "Tell me about your products and I only have 10 minutes."

Option One

You fall into the trap and tell them about your products. You talk nonstop for 10 minutes bombarding them about your products. You hope that something relevant is going to jump out at them as you talk, talk, talk and talk.

If you take this option, you've acted like a salesperson. If you're acting like a salesperson, your prospect will be counting the seconds until the 10 minutes are up so they can say, "thanks very much, I've got to go."

By talking nonstop about yourself and your products, you've committed six out of the 10 top sales mistakes, and you will have more than likely repelled your prospect.

Option Two

You ask to schedule a time when they have longer than 10 minutes to talk.

On the surface this sounds like a sensible option, but if they are using the 10 minutes as a protection barrier, it'll be difficult to get more time with them. Prospects don't want to let this protection mechanism against salespeople go.

If they really only have 10 minutes, then think of it from their perspective. They are busy and their time is valuable. In the 10 minutes they've given you, they really want you to show them why they should talk to you. So can you see that even if they don't have a real 10-minute deadline, they'll probably still only want to give you 10 minutes?

Option Three

This option is the complete opposite of Option One where you talk, talk and talk. With this option, you get them to talk, ideally for about eight out of the 10 minutes. With this option, instead of hearing, "Tell me about your products and services," you hear, "What's in it for me to talk to you?" You know you have 10 minutes for them to feel there is value in them spending their limited time having a conversation with you.

If they can see the value in talking to you, then when the 10 minutes is up, they'll probably keep talking and you might find the 10 minutes extends to 30 minutes to an hour, etc. Also, if the 10-minute limit was real, then probably at the end of the 10 minutes, they'll be the ones asking you to come back to continue the great conversation.

So how do you show them what's in it for them to talk to you? There are essentially two parts. Part one is where you set the context for asking questions and the second part is where you ask them highly relevant, targeted and short questions that get them to talk so you can listen.

Here's a very brief example of setting up the context for asking questions:

"There is so much I could l tell you, but rather than waste your time talking about products that may or may not be relevant or of any value to you, I'd really like to spend the next 10 minutes talking about your own specific issues. That way when I do talk about our products, I'll be able to show you exactly where the value is for you. You never know, we may even find that my products are of no value to you. If it's okay with you, I'd like to ask you a few questions. ..."

If you take this approach, you're not acting like a salesperson trying to sell them something, and consequently the salesperson protection barrier will come down. People are interested in people who are sincerely interested in them and want to help them solve their problems. They will want to continue the conversation as they will see it to be of value to them.

So in summary, whenever a prospect says, "Tell me all about your products and I only have 10 minutes," don't fall into the trap of talking and get them to talk instead. Ask meaningful, relevant and short questions and your prospects will want to talk to you—for much longer than 10 minutes.

By Tessa Stowe, Expert Access

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