Want Better Customer Service? Take the Pulse of Your Company
February 1st, 2012
By Rosanne D’Ausilio
There is what we call a moment of truth when a customer makes a decision about you, your company, maybe even all companies in your industry, based on their interaction with anyone from the front lines up to and including your CEO. In those first three sentences, a customer determines whether their interaction will be a good experience, a bad experience, or a waste of their time.
When talking about customer service, customer satisfaction, and customer retention, you often hear that the best way to determine how you’re doing is to ask your customer. And that’s absolutely true. However, if you really want to know how your company is doing, ask your internal customer.
Nearshore Marketing: How Do You Get Your Sales-Ready Leads?
November 22nd, 2011By Fernando Labastida
Imagine this: Suddenly 2012 has arrived. You’re happy because you’ve successfully completed all your projects for 2011. But you’ve got no deals in the pipeline. Scary scenario, right? It’s also a very likely scenario, and it happens to far too many Nearshore IT firms.
If Outsourcing is All About Savings, then Show Me the ROI
October 4th, 2011By Randy Vetter, Director, Alsbridge, Inc.
Your CFO walks into your office 18 months after you signed your first outsourcing contract and asks, “What happened to the savings you promised?”
To prepare for this question, hopefully you have created and properly staffed a Vendor Management Office (VMO) function that manages the contract, relationship, performance, and financial aspects of the agreement. But to be able to explain any discrepancies (or even better, avoid them) ask the following questions:
LatAm as Part of Cross-Center Strategy
October 3rd, 2011
By Eric Simonson
Everyone loves a good debate. And one of the in global services is whether the external (outsourced) or internal (shared service or captive) approach is the “best” strategy for a particular situation. While most large organizations are getting past the either/or mindset and focusing instead on how to best combine and complement the two as neither is clearly superior to the other, Latin America is the one service delivery destination in which I see North American organizations facing a quandary on this issue.
The answer initially seems pretty simple. Latin America and the United States and Canada are roughly in the same time zones. Further, travel times to Central America and Mexico are fairly short. And as a bonus, you get either Spanish or Portuguese language skills to wrap into a …
Are You Ready For The US Market?
September 23rd, 2011
By Fernando Labastida
If you are a software developer or managed IT services provider entering the US market, stop talking about CMMI, agile, scrum, lean, .NET, Java, SharePoint, SAP, or any other technical or methodological buzzword.
To really prepare for the US market, to make sure you increase your chances of success, you’ve got to stop talking about the products or services you sell. Instead, talk about the problems you solve. Talk about your story, and how that fits in with your potential customer’s needs, wants and worldview. And talk about how you’re different from all the other CMMI, agile, Microsoft certified, or SAP/Oracle/IBM partners and developers out there.
Buyers and decision-makers don’t care about all the facts and figures you’ll throw at them (well, they do after they decide they like you – they use it to justify a decision they’ve …
Vendor Management Insider: Making the Most of Service Credits
September 8th, 2011
By Wolfgang Benkel, Forrester Research
Service-level credits and incentive models are important tools to help outsourcing clients increase business alignment and enforce service-level achievement. When executed effectively these tools drive the behavior of service providers and allow all parties to manage the relationship more effectively. But, skeptics remain.
Nearshore Marketing: Educate Prospects
August 29th, 2011By Fernando Labastida
Why do most Nearshore providers treat marketing as a one-off event they do whenever their pipeline is empty? To survive and thrive, you’ve got to treat marketing as a process. You have an accounting or payroll process, and if you’re a software development company you probably have a specialized development process like agile or scrum. As a recent McKinsey article stated: marketing is the company.
Following are the seven steps to marketing success you should implement as a Nearshore marketing process, adapted from John Jantsch’s 7 Steps to Small Business Marketing Success.
1. Narrow Your Focus
Just like the allies stormed the beaches at Normandy and established a secure beachhead from which to launch their European operations against the Germans, you too should establish a beachhead by focusing on a narrowly defined market segment.
This comes in two parts:
Focus on your …
Lepeak: Clouded thinking
By Stan Lepeak, KPMG
The potential benefits of cloud have been loudly touted by both pundits and providers, and much of the discussion has centered around the inherent challenges and risks associated with issues such as security and data privacy. Yet, there has been less focus on the practical enthusiasm of the average buyer organization towards cloud, or the skills and capabilities the typical firm has in place to address cloud opportunities and challenges.
Outcome-Based Sourcing: A No Go
August 15th, 2011
Measuring outsourcing deals on their business outcomes (such as profits or customer satisfaction) sounds much cooler than measuring it on gritty details like server uptime. But is this highfalutin’ business alignment more trouble than it’s worth?
Everest Group Research Director Chirajeet Sengupta says buyers, and service providers, are sometimes better off keeping deals simple. For the buyer, getting to the business outcome of outsourcing “is difficult, and it’s a lot of work,” he says. On the service provider side, it also “requires a certain level of sophistication” to commit to business outcomes, “and not all service providers have that. Those that do, command a premium for it. There’s a price for that alignment (between an outsourcer’s effort and your bottom line) and in reality you might not be willing to pay that price.”
He cites Tata Consulting Services as a provider …
Seeking Opportunity Arbitrage in LatAm
August 10th, 2011
By Eric Simonson, Everest Group
I often hear organizations wanting to attain benefits but with a desire to “minimize” risk. Understandable, but what they don’t realize at the outset is that this is a limiting mindset, particularly when most also agree they prefer sustained benefits. My preferred definition of global sourcing is “attaining a different profile of benefits from successfully managing a different profile of risk.”
Instead of trying to follow what has already been proven “safe,” the innovators in global sourcing are intentional about what risks their organizations can take and successfully manage in order to achieve the desired benefits. These risks may be in overcoming infrastructure disadvantages, creating delivery models that can withstand more variability, or choosing to cultivate an underutilized talent pool.
The single largest and most enduring challenge in global services is getting the right talent. …
