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4 Org Design Trends in Customer Service and Support
CCC conducted research around service and support organizational structures in the first half of this year and have landed upon the following four key findings below:
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1. Companies are increasingly moving towards more centralized contact center structures
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2. Companies are centralizing Quality Assurance, Training, and Workforce Management
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3. Companies are increasingly building dedicated channel teams
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4. Companies are increasingly avoiding complete organizational design overhaul to improve the effectiveness of organizational structures
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Social Business Platform “Elevator Pitch”
« I’ve been asked the question “What is a Social Business Platform?” a lot over the last few months, so I thought I would just share my “elevator pitch” response. Its just my personal perspective on what I think a social platform should ideally do, in the abstract. And while very few platforms do all this today, I think its fair to say that a social platform should at least have a vision for getting there. »
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A platform that provides the business with a set of social services that facilitate the process of collaboration.
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Which can be easily integrated into any business process or application €” bringing social to the business and not the other way around.
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A platform that has the potential to capture and represent within its social semantic network, all human actions and interactions across the business (and beyond).
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A platform that can harness the insights hidden within this network and allow them to be integrated back into the business.
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A Real-World Assessment of the Process Mining Manifesto
« n this post I analyze the business feasibility and solution scope presented in the Process Mining Manifesto (PMM) by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining (PM). Presenting a manifesto is €˜a declaration of principles and intentions’ €“ as the PMM says €“ and does not imply available technology. It is a statement of direction that will change according to coming experiences. I evaluate both current and future business benefits in terms of impact on business management and not PM technology. «
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PM tries to improve on the drawbacks of orthodox BPM (process rigidity, no agility, no goal orientation, no outcome focus, difficult implementations, no user empowerment, lack of resilience)
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The research references point for example to methods for repairing €˜broken processes’ when the flow sequence is no longer valid due to unpredictable changes.
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I propose that the process needs to learn from the performer directly the why and the how at the time he takes the decision. What the UTA does is referred to as €˜transductive training.’
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PM proposes to combine computational intelligence and data mining with process modeling and analysis.
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Process Mining uses social network/organizational data analysis, automated construction of simulation models, model extension, model repair, case prediction, and history-based recommendations
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Analyzing the communication content is not covered in the PMM and I miss the continuous performer interaction with the whole PM effort. This is in my mind the most essential need of improvement in PM. The discussed human interaction is with experts, while in ACM process owners, performers, and customers are the focus.
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We had to deal with collected log data containing substantial ambiguities and a total lack of context to business goals. Whether a Tweet or collaborative action was in relationship to an email or a certain case instance or a certain task, was nearly impossible to identify.
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Process Mining could be used to highlight areas of intensified communication and direct people to move them to ACM for better support!
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Using process mining today will be a trial and error approach of many techniques and many products requiring substantial additional manpower. It will multiply the cost of existing BPM implementations by an unknown factor.
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. The problem is not about identifying processes but that they simply can’t be supported by flow-diagrams
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Process Mining tries to find stable flows where there aren’t any but that does not mean that analyzing people interactions is useless.
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For BPM to actually become as mainstream as ERP, something substantial will need to happen and I propose that paradigm shift was started with ACM, whatever it will be called in the future.
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Facebook, Google, and the mirage of « engagement » I’ve been€¦
« I’ve been struck by a host of stories lately with headlines trumpeting the fact that people spend more time online with Facebook sites than at Google. Google, of course, has played into this narrative by positioning themselves as a social alternative to Facebook.
What’s sad to me is that Google used to pride itself on the speed with which it helped you find the information you want, and then get out of the way. « Time on site » is a terrible metric for an information utility! »
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when I’m getting routed to interesting articles that I want to read, Google provides more utility the less time I spend on site.
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With a little time to reflect on the Google I/O announcements, I’m disappointed by how many of them were social time wasters rather than real improvements in utility.
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my advice for competing with Facebook is to constantly focus on how to make social data more useful – which may mean less time on site – rather than more « engaging. »
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Agile and Scrum versus the God Complex
« For over ten years I have been questioning the viability of rigid process management methodologies and was ridiculed for €˜not getting it’. I have presented the scientific evidence around complex adaptive systems, the benefits of Systems Thinking, the heuristics of human decision making, as well as workplace psychology in terms of people motivation. I was and am still told that businesses are not interested in scientific evidence but in Return on Investment only and my response was and is that this is wrong. »
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BPM is sold to these bean counters as a top-down control methodology to reduce costs. As a way to define all the processes of a business in detail, it is weighed down by an immense governance bureaucracy that stops it from getting off the groun
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They arrogantly think that they have it all under control and that innovation can be encoded into processes.
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But BPM must be no more than the organizing context on top of the adaptive complexity that the economy and the business represent
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Dynamics are only productive if they are sufficiently guided by goals. Order them too strictly and you kill the ability to innovate
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According to Sutherland, Scrum builds on the theory of complex adaptive systems in nature, “to deal with physical reality where things are often not linear, not simple, and not predictable
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” If seen as a methodology and not a mindset, Scrum can’t guarantee success, but it does push to assess progress and direction on an ongoing basis
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- Define work goals clearly by the intended outcome for the user.
- The team interacts and discusses results with the user not management.
- Teams are autonomous in work estimation, assignment and measurement.
- Management doesn’t interrupt the team during a work cycle.
- Management provides means and removes obstacles.
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the future of management needs five fundamental shifts in terms of the firm’s goal, the role of managers, the way work is coordinated, and turning from value to values and from command to conversation.
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o deal with a radically different marketplace and workplace, today the whole organization must be focused on creating a stream of additional value to customers through continuous innovation.
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What is well positioned in Lean and should be embedded in the Business Architecture is the concept of Value Streams. And by the way: Plan-Do-Check-Act is not a scientific method!
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ACM Enables Agile and Scrum
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Some say that ACM requires a change in culture, but as always I like to turn these ideas upside-down: ACM empowers the executive to bring out the best in his/her organization without enforcing processes or enforcing changes in company culture!
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« n 1993 M. Hammer and J. Champy wrote the influential book €˜Reengineering The Corporation’. Their proposals have led to a widespread consideration of how business operations can be improved by €˜reengineering work into processes.’ Analyzing atomic work items would then allow to optimize the flow of the work by reducing unnecessary steps, optimizing each of the steps towards minimum cost, and reducing the wait times between steps. Overall this was meant to improve the quality by means of predictability and to reduce the expense of performing necessary work. As a matter of historic record most reengineering efforts failed to improve quality because they were purely focused on so-called downsizing. »
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in a process-centered organization, there are no convenient handoffs at which to monitor results. Work is a continuum, not a series of discrete pieces and the handoffs are actually inside people’s heads. He demanded that not the supervisor €“ a.k.a. the flowchart €“ is in charge but the worker.”
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Instead of relying on Six Sigma expert “black belts” do the process analysis and design, every employee should be a process improver, €¦“
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He portrayed the business as decentralized workgroups each responsible for a particular segment of customer service processes. The workgroup is guided by a process-owner who coaches a group of team players and monitors customer service quality rather than the process. Hammer could have easily substituted process-centered with goal-centered, but his choice is understandable.
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process quality information must be gathered from everyone in the organization, especially frontline employees, who are best equipped to recognize inadequacies in current operations or significant changes in customer need.”
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Process management assigns work to user roles and supports these in the current play without restricting their ability to shape the play individually.
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Rules and objectives are stable, while coordination and coaching is dynamic.
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How a business does processes is defined by how employees actually perform customer service.
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A game is defined by what players do and not by strategy or plans. We all know that hardly anything goes according to plan.
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To Do Mobile Right, Every Company Needs these Three Things
« Kids these days. Did you know that more than half (55%) of twenty-somethings around the world think that Bring Your Own Device policies at work are a right, not a privilege?
Indeed, more than a third of Millennial Generationers say they would, or already have, violated anti-BYOD policies at work, according to a survey sponsored by Fortinet.
Now, before you start sputtering into your morning coffee, consider that another survey sponsored by Juniper shows that 41% of all employees go around their employers’ mobile device policies, and 90% think its their employers’ responsibilities to protect their personal devices while used at work. »
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1) Your very own corporate Genius Bar. This would be a center on campus staffed by mobile experts to help employees test-drive smartphones and tablets, and help troubleshoot malfunctioning ones, whether personally-owned or corporate-liable.
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2) A Mobile/Mobility Center of Excellence. This is where your company would centralize management and policy-making around the mobile initiatives at your company
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3) Leading one or both of these institutions would be a Chief Mobile Officer. This would a high-level executive, emerging out of either the business or IT side and reporting to either the CEO or CIO
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Something else that your organization probably needs: a Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP). This enables your developers to write apps once, run them everywhere
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The future of HR lies outside the HR department, say David Page and Anita Lettink. They discuss the consumerisation of HR, saying the profession must re-skill to support business leaders and ensure the future of HR does not lie outside the company. »-
Companies realise that, to retain employees, they must accommodate their personal lives and create solutions to their individual needs.
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As work-life spills over into personal lives, and vice versa, so does technology.
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Jobs of the future will rely less on a fixed set of skills and a stable career path, and more on combining several advanced skills using the internet to collaborate
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Despite this, HR still does not or cannot measure what it delivers, meaning that added value is perceived as low.
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HR in the 21st century must be technology-savvy. Technology will be embedded in all aspects of HR. Digital HR access will give HR the capability to follow and measure interaction with managers and employees accurately at each stage of the process, and to influence and track transactions to further optimise service delivery.
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The challenge will be to run analytics on a collection of HCM systems implemented over several years, in various geographies. Once a company has a sound infrastructure to manage workforce data and processes, the resulting insights will become more valuable outside of HR.
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We’ve reached a €˜tipping point’ in HR: new technologies are changing the profession. The new HR must be small and agile, deal with different people needs and have a robust transactional base that can support the global workforce in a virtual manner.
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NorthgateArinso believes the future HR organisation will consist of two departments: an HR service centre (which can be insourced or outsourced) and a more specialist HR consultancy team that is flexible in size.
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One thing is clear: The future of HR lies outside the HR department. And if HR professionals don’t grasp that concept very soon, the future of HR will lie outside the company.
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Let’s Play: To Keep Gen Y Staffers, Gamify Their Work
« A recent MTV workplace survey showed that Millennials overwhelmingly agree that their jobs should reflect their lifestyle, their workplace should be social and fun, and they should have flexible hours and autonomy over the projects they’ve been assigned. They want regular feedback on their performance and recognition for their work. Who wouldn’t want all that? »
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“Millennials, like no generation before them, are demanding work/life balance, flexibility for themselves and social responsibility from their employers,” she says.
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Millennials refuse to wait until we’ve retired to live our lives. Forward-thinking corporate culture, flexibility and personal enjoyment have become essential factors in our career choices.
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The system capitalizes on technology and an innate sense of sportsmanship to encourage employees to engage in desired behaviors
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In return, they receive recognition for their efforts, regular feedback on their standing, a clear vision of what’s required to succeed, increased socialization, enjoyment and personal satisfaction.
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Employees earn points by posting creative new topics for discussion or responding to the posts of others, generating dialogues that keep the company’s programs and perspectives fresh and innovative. Employees are also encouraged to share blog posts, white papers and other externally-focused materials through their own social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. When someone in the employee’s network clicks on that link, more points are awarded. Points can be cashed in for a number of different prizes including everything from iPads, to lunch with the CEO. Employees are fanatical about the program.
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Gartner estimates that over 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will “gamify” them in the next three years.
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10 Guidelines to Consider for a Successful Enterprise 2.0 Roll Out
« If you are considering the addition of social technology in your organization, here are Jeanne’s 10 guidelines to consider in creating, organizing and planning the roll out of an enterprise 2.0 initiative. »
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1. Get senior executives to lead by example
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2. Build enterprise 2.0 into the work flow.
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3. Develop and seed new communities with content through community managers
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4. Consider creating communities as follow-on to formal training.
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5. Err on the side of creating an open culture
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6. Create ambassadors to be evangelists.
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7. Trust employees to self-monitor.
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8. Train employees on how to use social media responsibly and actively contribute.
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9. Link participation in enterprise 2.0 to performance management.
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10. Focus on incentives that link to increases in employee performance.
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SAP: convincing the CFO that B2B social media can be a benefit
« Last week I had the chance to bump into Sarah Goodall from SAP; I was very pleased to see her at the usefulsocialmedia conference in London one year after being acquainted with her at a marketing conference in London. Sarah is one of our best social media practitioners in the B2B world and I was lucky enough to sneak out of the B2C session and switch rooms to listen to her. Her presentation was about how to convince your CFO about the benefit of social media. Not an easy task, but Sarah knows how to circumvent the issue; here is how: »
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Hence, social media “came as a shock” to SAP according to her and “it helped [them] turnaround the sales cycle”
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Potential cost of R&D saved: if you use the comments and the voting and offset that against the money saved on R&D, this is tremendous.
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Social commerce: this is a little more tricky because “the SAP sales process doesn’t quite work like that” Sarah said. SAP tried to embed links in LinkedIn and experimented on how Facebook posts can lead to a registration. “It’s not enough to generate revenue” she said “it’s not an exact science but it’s enough to uncover value”
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Social intelligence: “this is a little bit more woolly” Sarah said but you can try and get insights from social media,
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Social insight: social media is also useful in order to measure brand health. SAP is monitoring what users are saying about SAP and their competitors.
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Social efficiency: social media saves a lot of money on support and reduces significantly the amount of inbound calls SAP is getting for support.
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you would have to “communicate the right metrics to the right audience.
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Gamification : une vraie fausse bonne idée ?
« Il y a quelques semaines Bertrand Duperrin publiait un billet très intéressant intitué : Gamification, Souvenez-vous que le badge est la récompense !
Au cas où certains d’entre-vous auraient encore des doutes quant à ce qui peut se cacher derrière cet anglicisme, je les renvoie aux définitions en ligne :
La mise en oeuvre de ces mécanismes au sein de la relation client comme de la relation employé est probablement la dernière tendance lourde au service de l’engagement ! »
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La gamification est une “nouvelle” façon d’obtenir que les gens exécutent leurs tches et c’est tout
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Peut-être et si c’est le cas, c’est prendre la génération Y et les suivantes pour une bande de gogos infantiles !
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Ce qui a surtout de nouveau (et d’intéressant) chez une partie importante de cette génération, c’est une capacité à imaginer sa vie en décalage par rapport aux “modèles” en cours, mais également à la mettre en scène, à la réaliser, en utilisant les outils, les moyens, à sa disposition
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on peut s’interroger sur les attentes réelles de l’entreprise et sur les conditions d’utilisation des informations recueillies tout autant que des conditions dans lesquelles elles le sont
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Il est assez consternant de voir l’apparition de “nouveaux comportements” favorisés par des outils et des technologies et de vite constater qu’on tente, à marche forcée, de faire “rentrer l’innovation comportementale” dans les schémas hérités du siècle dernier !
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Surviving Social Software Fatigue
These days everything in software is being referred to as « social »; social business, social enterprise, social networking, etc. But social features are not perfect for all situations nor do they social all our business needs. This presentation takes a look at several areas of social software and discusses problems with them and proposed solutions.
– Navigating the rapids of activity streams
– Aggregated Social vs. Integrated Social
– Don’t forget the “me” in social media
– Social Task Management
– Analytics & Gamification -
Transforming data into business intelligence remains a stumbling block for HR technology strategy
« While technology provides HR people with a wealth of data, accessing this data and transforming it into meaningful business intelligence remains for many a major stumbling block on the way to a successful HR technology strategy. «
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R directors generally have an awareness of the data that they can access and what that can be used for, but there is a deep frustration about how to turn that awareness into something tangible
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The metric HRDs have the best access to is average performance review scores – which they consider to be the least important
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Organisations will spend a year on setting a project up, then say they will come back to the metrics and the analytics late
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HR is simply deficient in the necessary competencies to handle sophisticated analytics. « In general, HR people lack the financial expertise and modelling skills to analyse and extract maximum value from the amount of data available to them,
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Not a lot of HR people do much on metrics and analytics, despite the fact we all know that’s how most chief executives and chief finance officers think. Too many in HR struggle even to say how many people are employed in the organisation, let alone what the trends are
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If the modern HR department is to avoid being demoted to a cost centre that needs to be controlled, and instead become a strategic business asset, then practitioners need to speak in business terms and have the facts and figures to back this up
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Many forward-thinking organisations are taking a more sophisticated approach, going beyond measuring even complex data such as quality of hire, core competencies, skills gaps and employee engagement, to manage workforce data in the context of other business information – and using this to drive decisions
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We don’t just want to see what’s happening now, but also address trends, concerns and opportunities so we can plan the resources the organisation needs
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Thinking about the “secret sauce” for the Enterprise 2.0 project management
« Since the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT in February I do a lot of pondering about the “secret sauce” of successful Enterprise 2.0 projects. As an outcome of the Paris event we have already summarized the call for action in regards to the design of the future model of the enterprise. We have also heard from the various practioneers that in spite of their willingness to drive the projects and the alignment with business objectives a lot of them are struggling on the enterprise-wide adoption as well as on the sustainable transformation.
The discussions at the recent industry events in Milan or in Boston are also resembling these conclusions. As a consequence I see a need for a more sophisticated and differentiated approach to the E2.0 project management! »
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From the discussions with our E20 practice group we have evolved some key thoughts on this that are turning around a stronger organizational development perspective of the E20 project.
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On the one side we have the process enhancing characteristics of the technology (“Yang factor”) and on the other side the transformational characteristics of the technology (“Yin factor”) €“ with the Yin elements coming as successor of the Yang elements. So yes €“ it’s about culture, but technology is a critical mean to the cultural change. And the cultural change needs to go hand in hand with the technological adoption plan.
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The business transformation follows on a later stage €“ after mass adoption of social technology has been achieved and existing processes have been enhanced by social business practices.
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we should also acknowledge the importance of organizational development (abbreviated OD) theory to help evolving the project
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« Working on the trenches of the social business transformation, I have had the opportunity to see how different people impacted these programs, either from a positive or a negative point of view. My focus being on talent management and leadership, I wanted to take the time to reflect on the ones that provided energy, thought leadership, problem-solving skills, engagement, passion, time, … and that strongly contributed to accelerating the transformation. I wanted to take the time to reflect on the ones that contributed unexpectedly and the ones that unexpectedly did not contribute to the deep transformation. »
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My experience actually confirms that, for a social business transformation to work, you need to be able to foster « leadership emergence », that is, the emergence of people that are not leaders such as defined by the conventional corporate wisdom (or by the HR practices and frameworks), but that will nonetheless take responsibility for the key conversations, relationship building, activities and tasks that will ultimately drive the transformation
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In my opinion, what emerges is much more social leadership than business leadership, and that can be a threat to your project.
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But what we are looking forward is transforming the business, pushing it to the next level, and to do that, you need next level business leadership
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the corporate social network must become the new business infrastructure of the corporation. This entails changing the deep structure of the organization, changing, if you wish, its OS.
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This vision of a corporate social network is not yet a reality for most corporations I know, as they adapt to the Big Shift.
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And then, how do you recognize it, reward it, how do you develop these unleaders, being as they are, at least in the beginning, revolutionaries, contrarian thinkers or unassuming managers ?
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explain the use of the term unleaders. It comes from unconferences. Unconferences or participant-driven meetings, have emerged as an answer to the need to invent new ways for how knowledge is communicated, exchanged, challenged, deepened in mass meeting
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If your remember, in conferences, the most valuable knowledge used to be exchanged in the lobbies and unconferences emerged precisely to have the lobby conversations take center stage.
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With unleaders, I am trying to have the work of these pionneers recognized, even while they do not belong in the existing leadership or management categories.
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I would go as far as saying that a social business transformation boils down to experimenting new types of unleadership, and progressively letting go of the responsibility of choosing next generation unleaders, a responsibility that should eventually rest with the social network. Then we would have leadership as an emergent property.
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As a conclusion, I do not think Chief People Officers should focus on nurturing leaders. Leaders will emerge whenever an organization can help build its people passion to work, collaborate, cooperate on a company’s mission.
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There’s A (Business) App For That!
« Yesterday I participated in the In The Cloud podcast, hosted by Bonnie Graham where we discussed the topic of Enterprise Application Stores. My co-presenters were Adrian Drury from Ovum and Dan Maloney from SAP. During the hour we talked about things such as what an application store is, how app stores at work differ from those in your personal life, the need for social features, security and licensing implications and we even made some predictions as to where application stores are heading in the next year or so.
One of the areas I focused on was explaining the 3 types of application stores:
1) device/OS specific – ex: Apple iOS or Android apps
2) product specific – ex: Add-ons for Jive, Box, Podio, SAP, Confluence, Yammer, etc.
3) company internal – span device or product, delivering the software employees need to get their jobs done « -
Comment éduquer les collaborateurs et développer la culture du travail en réseau
Découvrez le livre que nous avons co-écrit avec 7 autres experts avec pleins de retours d'expérience pour aider managers et dirigeants