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Transforming Customer Care with SoMed

SoMed(Social Media) represents one of the greatest opportunities to transform Customer Care operations. The potential impact goes beyond traditional cost improvement such as inbound call deflection or non-voice cost channels to the heart of customer sentiment where improvements in revenue, sales, and net income are driven by increasing customer loyalty.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service versus Internal Deployment

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is here to stay. In many cases an IaaS solution can be the enabler in an overall transformation strategy. However, allowing IaaS solutions to propagate throughout operating units without integrating the solution into the overall enterprise strategy often leads to diminished capabilities and decreased benefits.

Labor Arbitrage versus Transformation

The value of labor arbitrage is limited and perishable. As business processes are moved to lower-cost labor markets, labor-related costs naturally rise as oversupply is exhausted. In contrast a transformation program decreases costs by decreasing the need for labor in a business process delivering sustainable value. A strategy focused on transforming operations and decreasing labor requirements through automation and process improvements mitigates the absolute advantage of lower cost labor markets.

Software-as-a-Service versus Internal Deployment

SaaS solutions are often the best answer to driving improvements, but for larger enterprises they typically represent significant contractual liabilities, regulatory exposure, and privacy concerns. The larger risk is associated with adding an adjunct IT operation that is designed to deliver standardized capabilities and not customized capabilities. SaaS shouldn’t be driven by ad-hoc needs, but instead should be integrated into an overall enterprise strategy, where the needs and concerns of the organizations are well understood before sourcing begins.