OSS are all about helping the customer in some way
Many years ago I worked on a three-way project with 1) a customer, 2) a well-known equipment vendor and 3) a service provider (my client). Time-frames were particularly tight, not so much because of the technical challenge, but because of the bureaucratic processes of the customer and the service provider. The project was worth well […]
“Today’s consumers want to get the best prices, but offering your brand at a discount can undermine profits and threaten viability. Smart brands utilize strategies to create and sustain a meaningful difference that helps consumers justify spending more.” Nigel Hollis, in his PoV on branding. I once read a statistic that at one point Apple […]
OSS delivery teams can be quite tense environments to work within can’t they? Deadlines, urgency, being in the customer’s line of sight and did I mention deadlines? [As an aside, I’m not sure which type of deadline is more stressful, the ongoing drain of fortnightly releases under Agile, or the chaos of a big-bang release […]
The diagram above comes from research by AT Kearney and Delta Partners courtesy of an article by Mark Newman of TM Forum. It provides an interesting perspective on CSPs’ ability to “compete” with a broader, more digitally native group of service providers. The golden age for CSPs was when they transported data from point A […]
As OSS exponents, I’m sure you’ll agree that there are many OSS tools / skills that we use and develop (to differing degrees) over the years. In fact, there are so many to choose from that we often have to make a conscious decision which ones to master and which ones to leave for others […]
Omnichannel is intended to be a strategy that provides customers with a seamless, consistent experience across all of their contact channels – channels that include online/digital, IVR, contact centre, mobile app, retail store, B2B portal, etc. The challenge of delivering consistency across these platforms is that there is little cross-over between the organisations that deliver […]
“I often leverage use-case design and touch-point mapping through the stack to ensure that all of the use-cases can be turned into user-journeys, process journeys and data journeys. This process can pick up the high-level flows, but more importantly, the high-level gaps in your theoretical stack.” Yesterday’s blog discussed the use of use cases to […]
“The Mechanical Turk… was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854 it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hoax. The Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess […]
Gordon Ramsay used to run a TV show called Hell’s Kitchen where he would take a failing restaurant and would attempt to transform it one expletive at a time. I’m not remotely interested in reality kitchen shows but I did watch a couple of episodes of this one. Enough to notice a trend happening. He […]
Voice and data are no longer the services that organisations, large and small, see as making a difference. The services that do make a difference are more dynamic and diverse – digital distribution, promotion and marketing, payments and billing, business intelligence, business continuity (including security) and more – the factors that make their organisations thrive. […]
“During Intel’s marketing of “Intel Inside” they taught consumers to look for the Intel Inside logo as an assurance of quality. Consumers eventually came to see “Intel Inside” as a standard and began asking the question: “Why doesn’t your product use Intel processors?” This standard became so important that today it is one of the […]
In the last couple of days, we’ve discussed frameworks that could allow CSPs to design disruptive business models around factors that our OSS / BSS can control. Not exactly riveting stuff for the tech-heads amongst the reader-base, but relevant for the amount of investment that gets directed into the tech projects that we all work […]
The diagram below shows the six phases in a customer life-cycle as defined by Forrester Research: It also represents a map of the omni-channel experience for customers and approximates hand-off points. As far as the customer is concerned, the experience should be a seamless continual loop regardless of whether they engage via retail outlet, online, contact […]
“…don’t ask your customers what they like or don’t like about your product. Or what they’d change if they could. That’s all about you. If you want really insightful answers, ask them about themselves instead. You can find out a ton about you by asking them about them.” Jason Fried. We’ve previously discussed how the […]
Singapore has made some really innovative decisions over the years. Recent ones include tokenisation of the Singapore Dollar on cyber-currencies, investing heavily in international startups based in Singapore and the streamlining of identity management (which will undoubtedly help to get around one of the biggest blockers to self-on-boarding new customers onto comms networks, particularly mobile). […]
“Brainstorms inside the company are useful but not as efficient as stepping outside and checking out the world around you. A lot of companies talk about innovation strategy. I always laugh when I hear that. In this rapidly changing world you cannot talk about innovation strategy anymore. That implies some sort of planning or forecasting […]
When it comes to data stakeholders (people / processes / systems / interfaces / etc), I like to think of them in five categories: Creators – The primary data creation / collection source, which could be people or machines Ingestors – The stakeholders that take the source data and compile it into a repository such […]
“Mike Flint was Warren Buffett’s personal airplane pilot for 10 years. (Flint has also flown four US Presidents, so I think we can safely say he is good at his job.) According to Flint, he was talking about his career priorities with Buffett when his boss asked the pilot to go through a 3-step exercise. […]
“I should say… that in the real world exponential curves don’t continue for ever. We get S-curves which closely mimic exponential curves in the beginning, but then tail off after a while often as new technologies hit physical limits which prevent further progress. What seems to happen in practice is that some new technology emerges […]
“Most customers buy the basic and learn to love the features, but the whole customer experience is based on trying to sell the features.” Roger Gibson. This statement appears oh-so-true in the OSS sales pitches that I’ve observed. In many cases the customer really only needs the basic, but when every vendor is selling the […]
