Amazon, Microsoft improve their cloud computing game

Interesting read on AWS and Azure offerings. No surprise that Microsoft is offering SQL Server. One thought though is how many less sophisticated organizations run much of their business on Excel or Access. Is this really going to attract those customers?

The AWS pricing is so attractive that I will bet many organizations will bite. It is even tempting for a start up. Hmm…

See disclosure below.

Amazon EC2 Introduces Reserved Instances
This is a great pricing model for budgets that have the “use it or lose it” money. It might entice enterprises to try the service without the recurring payments and unexpected fees that many “As A Service” providers use.

Full disclosure: The wife works at Amazon, though in an area unrelated to AWS.

Increases in customers means increases in customer support. An effective tactic when starting a self-service initiative is to reassure Customer Support that the organization has to do more with less. Not less people, more support with the same number of people. During the bubble, it was because businesses would not be able to logistically scale. These days it is out of economic necessity.

Several clients have enjoyed a lot of success with this forward and positive looking idea. Try it out. The results can be surprising.

If there is one constant driver for customer service, it is contact reduction. Every customer service group wants less contacts. Rarely is the solution obvious and customer service representatives (CSR) in good times and bad always seem fearful of their jobs.

The idea or notion of self-service to improve the customer experience and reduce contacts are brought forward. On paper, it seems like a win/win. I have seen many, many customer service centers that forget to do the most obvious thing to improve customer service, reduce contacts and identify areas for improvement: measure, measure, measure and measure. If it cannot be measured, it is not a target for self-service.

More to come…

Many years ago, a client had recently deployed a self-service initiative that was hearlded as a great success. The project that I was working on was going to be held to that standard. I decided that I need to talk to a few CSRs at the client to understand what made that self-service initiative such as success in the eyes of management.

“A bonus of $2 per self-service article that each rep produces,” one CSR told me.

“How many articles?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I was doing 3-5 per day for the extra money,” said the CSR.

“How many do you do now?” I asked.

“None. Nobody does them anymore. They stopped paying us,” the CSR said.

Beware of what you pay for…

Growth Through Self-Service
Online self-service portals can become high-performance growth engines amid challenging economic times.

This post on self-service in CRM has me reflecting on my past experiences with self-service. Too much for a single post, so this week will be dedicated to CRM self-service opportunities and challenges.

With the rollover to daylight savings, I plan on taking advantage of the extra daylight to work on my photography. My portfolio site and this Google Gadget can be found at http://www.salmonbay.net.

Snow is forecast for the weekend which normally means rain. This winter has been a much different story. Still this weather has been a far cry from the Chicago winters I knew growing up.

This series from Stanford University (the wife’s alma mater) is excellent. In this recent podcast, Tony Perkins, Tim Draper and Michael Moe discuss the current market and its potential. Much needed positive views. Worth checking out and subscribing via iTunes.

Three recent business books that I have read, enjoyed and recommend.

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr
Summary: Carr argues that computing, no longer personal, is going the way of a power utility.

Why I liked it: The historical perspective matches the current cloud computing trend. Nice parallels, but later chapters are lacking in determine what is next.

Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie
Summary: Useful anecdotes about creativity and the creative process in a corporate setting.

Why I liked it: Great stories and vignettes. Enjoyed the pyramids and plum tree organizational structure idea.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
Summary: Offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence through examples of 11 companies that made the transition.

Why I liked it: Preaches simplicity and discipline for a corporate vision (or hedgehog concept).

Read on.

I had a conversation recently with a friend and former colleague on the state of IT. A common theme was that for all the advances in technology, projects still fail at an alarming rate. This got me to think about two clients of mine. Both were large enterprise software companies and were both partners and competitors in given spaces. Both were deploying the same CRM product to increase efficiencies in their customer service centers. The situation was a perfect example of how to make a project a success and how to make a project fail.

The first company had ambitious plans to deploy across multiple product lines, across multiple service teams and integrate with multiple CRM systems. The plans were big and bold. “We will be your most successful and reference-able customer,” the executive sponsor boasted in the kickoff meeting.

The second company had calculated and negotiated their purchase price based on a cost per call metric. They had a simple goal. We have 18 months to get to positive ROI.

Which company succeeded?