Best practices in Business Keeping US inspired and Customers moving

Amit Gupte
Overview: One possible way to acquire customer and nourish customer loyalty is through the implementation of peer-to-peer networks in any business across all borders. A sustained effort in recognizing the equal stakeholders of a company and carrying them together not only helps an organization to gain market share but go beyond the traditional barriers of My Business is best known to me concepts which are fast falling apart. Description: Customer first. Customer is the king. Customer has the topmost priority. How many times have we heard that? Seems just a clich these days. Left to the expectations of our clients, we simply dont get to exceed their wishes majority of times. Some of the best-known corporations around the world, which have succeeded on customer delight, have gained repeat business and new prospects from the same satisfied clients. Names like Microsoft, GE, HSBC, ABB, LG, Toyota to name a few are the ones who have truly kept their customers interested in them by delivering excellent products followed by services. A cue to be taken from the best organizations around the world is their client Acquisition Strategy and Retention Analysis. Diverse demands and focused plans are what keeping CEOs and COOs tied to the anchor and not enabling to sail smoothly. IT today seems to have taken up this challenge with the introduction of CRMs, Workflow Management software, Data Warehousing systems and ERPs as some of the tools, which bring visibility and force into top management decision-making. But again being tools will need inputs based on scores of data feeds and reality checks. Hence they dont fetch as much of benefits single handedly as one would imagine being. A solution to the problem of exceeding demands and creating value for the end customer lies therefore in our own approach to making it happen. Promptly enough the mathematics behind such an approach would be simple addition and subtraction. It would be to add experience and minus the risks towards better engagement of the two parties involved. Communication builds up necessary structures and processes enforce them into action. A new method of business execution is the peer-to-peer method. In this approach every level and strata in the companies engaged with each other as business parties, get to share and work on solutions for any issues that may or may not be involved with the current or future business activity concerned. This model lays stress on improving business cultures between the concerned parties. Gartner asked hundreds of CIOs and symposium attendees which domains they believe will experience the greatest growth and decline between now and 2010. "Unanimously, the areas of greatest growth were in both process and relationships," Morello, the business analyst says.

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The diagram below depicts the above-mentioned flow and the interdependencies in between the individual departments:

Company One

Company Two

CEO

CEO

CFO

CFO

CTO

CTO

DIRECTOR MARKETING

DIRECTOR MARKETING

The direct advantages of such communication passages are: More transparency: There is more information shared and awareness is created amongst the concerned people Quick Decision-making: Improves throughput, enables better judgments for effective decisions and problem resolutions Speed of execution: Streamlined and scientifically rooted methods for carrying out tasks at higher speed thereby contributing more to sound business dynamics Risk Mitigation: Well informed and proper analysis to prevent losses and damage to projects Personal bonding: Good understanding between peers to facilitate work and grow the symbiotic culture Systems and Process Leverage: Efficiency could be tuned and increased by adapting to the best practices of the partner company. Helps to reduce overheads and gain newer competencies Another technique is to provide maximum access of company information to clients and treat them as shareholders of the company. This not only allows for more accountability but also increases participation, which may provide for valuable inputs. Inviting clients and partners for forums including those that are non-business related also aids in long-term retention.

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Participation in the following activities generally augments relationships and encourages mutual development. Social activities Corporate games Think tank centers Joint Ventures This approach is based on recent thinking with hard practical experience. Its invaluable for organizations that are looking for tangible help in improving their approach to Strategic business enhancements. On other thoughts, companies can begin to invest in their specialists, people which have it in them. For e.g. any organization that runs with good corporal ethics will have employees at all levels, who believe in the system and work towards achieving higher standards. Such employees, if groomed and provided with challenges, shall become great assets not for their own organizations but also to their partners, vendors or clients. These organizations should then assign them as Consultants with domain/ functional skills and try to gain maximum leverage in the industries by outsourcing them. They (consultants) can be from Finance, Business Development, HR, Administration or any other business domain. Such employees will absorb and bring back the knowledge gained in their projects to enhance things back home and deploy the same in their next project. Say in IT, some skills would become more relevant in the coming future. The hot jobs in 2010 will be these enabler jobs: business enterprise architects, business technologists, systems analysts and project managers," says David Foote, CEO and chief research officer of Foote Partners LLC, an IT management consultancy and workforce research firm in New Canaan, Conn. The technology is part of many companies' highly competitive marketing approach. But you'd better also really know the customer, because chances are your competitors have that type of talent," Foote explains. This kind of talent allows IT staffs to do more than simply build things; they can also communicate with co-workers who spend a lot of time with customers or connect with the customers themselves to quickly make changes to processes. Everyone agrees to increased competition from all quadrants of the globe invoking a better response to it. But while globalization will continue to cause a sea change in the IT industry, the waves can be viewed not as damaging tsunamis, but as opportunities -- as long as you keep your eye on the horizon and maybe even learn how to surf. - Randy Carter, CIO at Cabot Corp. The challenge of resource management is so critical to any type of industry that ways to counter the downturn are being revised every quarter all over. Imperial Consulting Corp has researched that as the baby boomers retire [in 2010], 79 million people will leave the workforce and only 49 million will enter." Hence it becomes key to work very closely with all your customers and vendors to minimize the impact of sudden employee attritions. The above model mitigates these risks and provides for better customer relationships leading to sustained partnerships.

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Author Amit Gupte is a Business Manager Inside Sales, with Coconut Softwares Limited (www.coconut.co.in). He can be contacted at amit.gupte@coconut.co.in

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About Coconut Softwares Pvt Ltd Coconut Software is a global enterprise solutions and software services provider which designs, develops, integrates and maintains business applications that enable enterprises to solve complex, mission-critical business problems. Driven by an extremely talented core of Functional and Technical consultants, our company, Coconut, endeavors to achieve excellence in every area of its operations, continuously inspiring ourselves toward higher levels of knowledge, dedication and efficacy. Coconut is privately owned company and headquartered at Navi Mumbai. For more details log on to www.coconut.co.in

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