Making of a Customer Centric Enterprise

Enterprise-wide Customer Challenges
The importance of customers remains same across boundaries. Becoming a 'customer-centric' enterprise is not about implementing a Customer Relationship Management solution. It is the ability of an enterprise to capture rich customer information and analyze it intelligently to know their customer well.
For enterprises, the challenge of meeting customer demands is increasing. Each department requires intelligent and updated information of customers to strategize effective business processes. No customer process and data stays in one department within the enterprise. In most enterprises, fragmented, redundant, and unsynchronized customer data resides across discrete data stores.
Following are some of the reasons for this:
Rapid growth
Mergers & acquisitions
Multiple product lines
Each business unit with their own representation and usage of customer data
Different transactional systems not sharing the customer data efficiently and in real-time, and others.
Because of inaccessibility to customer data across business units in real-time, these business units end up using inaccurate, insufficient and inconsistent customer data. Every department of the enterprise are faced with a different set of challenges due to this inconsistent and fragmented data structure, some of which are:
Marketing
Multiple business units usually capture Customer preferences, but no common view exists to address customer preferences consistently across the enterprise to avoid legal issues like unsolicited emails.
Other challenges faced by the marketing department includes:
Creating effective marketing campaigns and accurately measure its effectiveness
Inability to conduct closed loop marketing
Productivity issues and higher operating costs
Product pricing issues for global customers

Sales
Sales force spends large amount of time on non-value added customer information validation. They also face difficulties in cross/up selling due to non-integrated customer purchase history.
The primary challenges faced by the Sales force include:
Unavailability of updated order status information
High administrative costs for sales credit assignments
Difficulty in collecting consistent customer information from distributed reseller network
Inability to effectively tailor messages relevant to current customer experience
Partner integration

Order Management
The order management process is no different.
The challenges posed to the order management process due to unavailability of single customer data repository includes:
Field Representatives and partners are forced to utilize multiple tools for order entry process
Inadequate cycle time for customer delivery - bookings and Shipping delays because ofinadequate customer information entry (invalid and redundant customers)
Fulfillment linked to initial 'shipped to' or 'staging' sites, but not necessarily inclusive of an end install site, limiting insight/planning for true install base.
Information not effectively shared between functions creates double work and confusion for customers and field reps when ordering solutions
Longer order management cycle time
Support
Inability to accurately validate entitlement of callers; giving away free service
Inability to view complete relationship and sales history for potential cross sell opportunities during support occurrences
Lengthy call times due to non-value added customer information validation .Lack of consistent information being collected upon opening of service cases
Higher total cost to service
Finance & Executive Management
The Finance department and the Executive management on the other hand faces a different set of challenges, as they -
Are not clear on o Root cause of the problem
Benefits that can be drawn from consistent customer master across business units
Changes to internal & external Business processes and policies
Changes to Data management practices
Changes to Information Technology
Efforts and time required

Business Value
Can not offer a unified experience for customers across business units
Do not have single source of truth
Face difficulty in updating and accessing billing, receivables, claims, payables and other information
Face challenges in Forecasting and Planning
Get reduced Marketing effectiveness
Get reduced Sales effectiveness
Get reduced Support effectiveness
Get unclear customer account

IT Department
The challenges faced by the IT department are:
High data management costs due to approach of following after the fact maintenance
Inaccurate data
Insufficient data
Inconsistent data
Discarded data Inability to access up-to-date customer profile in real-time
Duplicate customer data across systems
Duplicates within systems (Same name spelled differently)
Customer creation at multiple systems
Problems Cross Referencing Customers
Sharing customer intelligence
Data and Work redundancy

Shift to Customer-centric Enterprise
The old enterprise model mainly focused on Operational Efficiency. Tools and systems were developed to increase productivity and decrease costs. Profitability was directly related to enhanced operational efficiency while the main investments were made in the merchandising and supply chain function areas. The main reason for the failure of this model was the inability to retain customers and revenues that consistently reduced. With the new model emerging, the focus shifted to customers. Enterprises realized that the most crucial asset on which they could base long-term revenue generation stratergies was: their customers. Leveraging customer information for improved customer satisfaction, lifetime value, retention and customer insight became the profit drivers for the company. Investment focus shifted to reatining and acquiring new customers. Establishment of multiple customer service touch points and effective market strategies came into focus.
Customer Data integration, customer information management and customer insight emerged as the key function areas to transform to a consistently growing 'customer centric' enterprise.
Customer-centric Framework
The customer-centric framework is the end-to-end customer solution. It is combination of Customer Information Management, Customer Insight and Customer Insight to Action. In a Customer-centric framework, customer data integration is strengthened by Business Intelligence applications. Each solution enclosed within the Customer-centric Framework serves specific set of functions to make an enterprise truly customer driven.
Customer Information Management
· Single 360-degree customer view
· Data Quality & Refinement
· Customer ID & Classification
· Rich Customer Information Customer Insight
· Customer Intelligence
· Customer Value
· Customer Profitability
· Product Profitability Insight to Action
· Product Development
· Marketing, segmentation
· Sales and Support
· Relationship Strategies
Business Strategy, BPM
At each phase, the customer-centricity improves the business value through each business function. It helps refine offerings after an intelligent analysis of the market and customers. Some critical Business Questions that makes the Customer-centric Framework successful are:
· In what way and how often do we interact with our different customers?
· What campaigns / offerings are the most successful with our customers?
· Are we effective in selling and serving our customers?
· What additional customer information will improve our efficiency and effectiveness?
· Who are our most profitable customers? What are our most/least profitable markets?
· What segments are underserved?
About Nirvana
Nirvana, The Customer Knowledge Company, develops and delivers Customer Asset Strategies to increase tactical and strategic decision-making capabilities across the enterprise. As a leading provider of CRM, ERP, integration, and business intelligence services to the Global 2000, Nirvana turns customer data into strategic knowledge that positively affects the entire enterprise. Established in 1990 with international offices, Nirvana has a long-standing commitment to global delivery and is uniquely qualified to deliver end-to-end solutions through valuable strategy consulting services and highly skilled engineering execution. Strategic and technology .For additional information on Nirvana's full range of services, please visit our website at ://www.nirvanainfocom.com

Nirvana's SOA Point of View

The Need for a New Enterprise Architecture
The information technology solutions that many organizations have implement over the past decades are no longer adequate to meet contemporary business needs. In today's economy, the global marketplace requires businesses to operate with greater agility, competitiveness, and productivity, at lower cost than ever before—because now their competitors come from every corner of the globe. Technological advances that one company overlooks will be adopted by another and used to their advantage.

As a result, companies must quickly recognize and respond to new opportunities and challenges and growing global competition. We need to respond to customer requirements more quickly and precisely—and to offer tailored responses to the distinctive needs of various customers. Enhancing efficiency and productivity requires faster access to deeper, more accurate, and more timely information for better decision-making. As companies respond to their challenges by setting up virtual supply chains that bring more global partners and vendors into their core business, they need ways to seamlessly integrate with those partners and vendors.

Many IT environments aren't up to the challenge. Their systems are inflexible, incapable of quickly adapting to new business or regulatory requirements. Too many systems are complex, proprietary, and siloed, making customization and integration difficult. The inability to share existing application components increases the time and cost to develop, test, deploy, and maintain new solutions. As a result, too many resources are tied down with fixing, maintaining, and attempting to integrate existing solutions, rather than investing in innovative solutions to new business needs. The IT department, which needs to be a strategic asset to the company, is too often a cost center instead of an innovation center.

Fortunately, trends have been moving in a more productive direction. Technologies like extensible markup language (XML) and simple object access protocol (SOAP) enable new ways to integrate systems. Legacy investments may now integrate with new solutions across platforms, departments, geographic boundaries—even across enterprises
Together, these developments provide the foundation to solve the problems facing business and IT: service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

Organic trafic growth is important to your business

SEO strategy is something that has been difficult to define as the search landscape tends to change quite frequently with new innovations and technologies emerging up all over the place. There are so many dimension and aspect for it .To me, a successful organic SEO strategy should focus on three areas:
Getting Traffic to Your Web Platform via Carefully Selected Keywords
This is really the lifeblood of your SEO campaign. Without proper keyword selection, we run the risk of blending into search results oblivion. A strong SEO strategy begins and ends with keyword selection. In fact it never ends. Keyword research should be ongoing. To remain competitive we always need to develop creative ways to reinvent our messaging and content. Business is a dynamic process, markets change, competition change, supply and demand change and your business should change as well.
Keyword selection is a critical aspect of any SEO strategy. Keyword selection depends on a wide variety of factors such as: Type of Industry, Popularity of our brand, Competitiveness of keywords, Semantic mapping of the user, Stage of Awareness, Head vs. Torso vs. Long-Tail and Time of Season.
The list could go on and on. The fact is that keyword selection is not a one-time thing. You really need to make an effort to understand what terms searchers will be using when looking for your service or product offering.
Relevant, Compelling and Useful Content on our Web site
The greatest SEO strategy that we can incorporate is content development. from a user point of view, content development can be used to improve site stickiness and time spent on your site. We need to provide our audience with the content on our site and targeted landing page that they are looking for. If that means book review, we had better provide the reviews.
Even in 2008, the search engines still like good old fashioned HTML text copy the best. Not content buried in Flash or images, good old copy. However if you need a little content "pizzazz" try incorporating videos with transcripts, blog posts, news articles or the like. If keywords are your lifeblood of your SEO strategy, them content is the rest of your "physical" makeup. Search engines need content to crawl and index and of course rank. To increase your visibility in the organic space of the search engines (ie the natural search results) you need to have a content rich site. Do not expect to rank if you do not have any content on your site. Writing content for the Web is a key factor of any SEO strategy. Yet why is it overlooked by so many? Every SEO strategy needs to focus on content development. You are defeating the purpose if you are not pumping out new content on your site on a regular basis. You want to be an authority on "car insurance" you better have content about "car insurance". You want to rank well for "cosmetic dentistry" you might want to create some additional content for your site. Content development is critical for a successful SEO strategy.
Establishing Authority via Link Development
A strong SEO strategy needs to have this component for without relevant links to your site, you simply will not rank. The sites that are the true authorities are the ones with quality links from other sites and web properties. It’s not always about quantity, but more often than not it is about quality. If you want to rank well in the search engines, you need to build up your external link inventory. Many argue that the best way to do this is to buy links. I strongly disagree. Buying links artificially builds your link inventory. It improves quantity but does not necessarily improve your link quality. For my money, the best way to build your external link inventory is to do it by providing interesting and useful content. Some call this link bait, I call it smart online marketing. If you provide content that is somewhat unique, extremely useful and informative, chances are others are simply going to link to your content. Furthermore you can bet that the links will be of higher quality and more relevant.

Do you think that a site without a strong external link inventory can rank well? Well it does happen, but the "staying power" of these sites to remain in the top organic result is week. A site with a strong external link inventory will almost always outrank a site that lacks quality links. It’s built into the search engine algorithms, linking is still a fundamental factor as to how sites are ranked in the search engine results pages.
Conclusion
A successful SEO strategy must consist of three items
Relevant Key Phrases
Relevant Content
Relevant Links
If you can address these three issues with your SEO strategy you will do well.

Offshore developemnt support

Nirvana Offshore Development Center
Offshore Trends
· Global 1000 companies will continue to replace local contractors with offshore or near shore support
· Companies will continue to demand and opt for offshore or near shore components in almost every major outsourcing deal
· US-based outsourcing and consulting organizations continue to increase their offshore resource pools
· There will be merger and acquisition (M&A) activities involving North America and Indian IT services vendors (e.g. Wipro acquisition of utility practice of AMS and Headstrong merger with TechSpan)
· Attrition will skyrocket in the Indian IT services arena
· Fortune-class companies will continue to require offshore vendors to have mature processes in place before they engage them
· Companies will increase their first time investments with offshore service providers
· Companies will continue to experiment with reverse auction to secure the lowest possible price for offshore engagements
· Some Indian vendors will improve their relationship management and account management capabilities in order to establish higher-level and more secure relationships with clients. It enables longer business associations between user companies and Indian firms. In the future, relationship management will be a distinguishing factor for vendors. Low-cost, high-quality labor will no longer be the measure for the right vendor. Strong Relationship Management practices and the client-partner type of experience will distinguish vendors
companies will and must put in place centralized program management offices (PMOs) or governance structure
The Offshore Development Center (ODC)
Offshore Outsourcing has become a dominant theme among the IT Outsourcing trends worldwide and India has become the leading destination for Offshoring
Thus, the concept of an Offshore Development Center (ODC) evolved to provide its pool of specially trained resources, well designed infrastructure and proven and time-tested processes. It can be defined as, a dedicated, customized, and secure software development center established for a customer that needs to outsource substantial and/or continuous software development and maintenance work. The ODC service model evolved from the traditional project service model in order to accommodate the specific needs of individual customers, more efficiently. The major advantage of an ODC is that it takes project services few steps further ? technical resources are dedicated to the customer exclusively, fulltime, and for an extended time period. This approach gives the customer better control over the process of product development, and it leads to higher resource efficiency at lower rates (up to 30% lower than regular project services and up to 60% lower than with internal resources).
The offshore development concept evolved from these compelling factors. Under this concept it provides the entire infrastructure and a full-time IT team of pre-decided size to the client as an "Offshore Development Center" (ODC). A part of the development team may be located on site, at the customer's facility. The processes, methodologies, and standards of the ODC are designed keeping in view the client's concerns on offshore development and development requirements. It requires longer-term commitments and the center can be expanded to meet the client's growing needs.
Typical savings of setting up an ODC can be to the tune of 50 to 60% of traditional development & support cost and are derived from solutions developed and supported with combined on-site/offshore resources. Offshore development Centers are equipped to support applications management, development, or testing effort. It also benefits the service consumers (customers of the clients) with minimum of disruption within the client's facilities and greater utilization of client's internal resources.
Steps in ODC Setup
The following are typically the steps for setting up an ODC for a seamless extension of your software development facilities:
Step 1: Team Identification
The setup activity begins with the hand picking of technical/domain experts and programmers with the required skills.
Step 2: Acclimatization of Client's processes
After this core team is in place, application and systems knowledge are transferred with the coordination of client experts. This activity typically takes place at the client site.
Step 3: Process Definition
A process methodology is defined and customized to meet client requirements. This is a key step in the whole process as teams separated by time and space need to follow agreed procedures and processes to ensure high quality of deliverables. This methodology also includes checkpoints, protocols and review mechanisms, to remove ambiguities in communications. Use of standards and tools is identified and incorporated
Step 4: Offshore Environment
a: Simulation
The defined methodologies and processes are tested and fine-tuned, often with the core team working from the client facilities for a brief period in a simulated offshore environment. The initial results and early deliveries are checked against the agreed norms for compliance. If there are any deviations, the services level agreements are further refined. This cycle is continued until the requirements are met, confirmed and signed off.
b: Infrastructure
As a sub-step to this activity, a seamless IT environment is created offshore with communications links to client facilities. Depending on the requirement the ODC team is inducted at the offshore site. Some of the core team members return and train the offshore team on specific systems and applications, thus completing the offshore setup of resources.
Step 5: Project Execution
The ODC is now ready to execute projects for the said client. This will ensure on time, on budget deliveries using the Quality process and methodologies.
Key Benefits of the ODC
· Significantly reduced cost
· Offshore model, higher volume commitment and agreed rates
· Higher utilization and productivity
· Retained knowledge, quantum of work, efficient resource allocation
· Enhanced protection of intellectual property
· Client-specific R&D activities as value adds
· Significant emphasis on offshore activities
· Quick ramp up and ramp down
About Nirvanainfocom
Nirvana, The Customer Knowledge Company, develops and delivers Customer Asset Strategies to increase tactical and strategic decision-making capabilities across the enterprise. As a leading provider of CRM, ERP, integration, and business intelligence services to the Global 2000, Nirvana turns customer data into strategic knowledge that positively affects the entire enterprise. Established in 1990 with international offices, Nirvana has a long-standing commitment to global delivery and is uniquely qualified to deliver end-to-end solutions through valuable strategy consulting services and highly skilled engineering execution. Strategic and technology partners For additional information on Nirvana's full range of services, please visit our website at www.Nirvanainfocom.com or mail us info@Nirvanainfocom.com

How Portals Enhance Business Performance

When you log on to MSN, Yahoo and you’re on a portal. That is why most People understand, at least instinctively, what a portal is. Simply defined, it is an aggregation point for content, functions, and features, using web-based technology and dynamic channels to access existing applications in order to create an interface with a unifying theme. It is the interface between any particular user and the information they need or want for the day ahead or the task at hand.

Portals are very much on the minds of business and government leaders. According to Gartner, many surveys conducted in 2005 show enterprise portals on CIOs’ lists of top ten technology focus areas. Forrester Research reports strong growth in portal development and usage, especially in financial services, retail and government. And our own work confirms this trend: business and government requests for our help with portals are increasing substantially year to year.
This growth can be attributed to portals’ key
benefit: by using portals companies and
governments can achieve excellence in employee communication and productivity and customer management and service. Nirvana’s ongoing research into the characteristics of high-performance businesses shows that the most successful businesses and government organizations are those that can provide timely information to employees through technology so they can deliver an excellent, branded experience at every customer touch point.
Organizations that recognize the power of portals are pursuing portal projects to accomplish three
important goals:
1. facilitate customer and employee self-service
According to a study by Yankee Group, 82 percent of respondents cited employee self-service as a primary business driver for portal-based initiatives; 80 percent cited improving customer and partner self-service. Greater employee self-service was key for a leading global financial services firm. Following a merger, the firm had a corporate intranet environment residing on a wide range of technology architectures, featuring vastly different user interfaces, resulting in high total cost of ownership and poor communication
among employees. Working with Nirvana they developed a common technology infrastructure to support the disparate content management and portal services, and managed the migration effort to the new, shared environment. The result is the largest financial services portal of its kind in the world, with more than 200,000 users processing up to 750,000 transactions each day. The benefits
range from employees having fast, easy access to information, the firm having unprecedented flexibility to update information and change functionality, and technology infrastructure and
support costs having been reduced.
2. Enhance business processes and services Complex business processes, such as a highly integrated supply chain, require that many individuals, often across numerous organizational boundaries, coordinate their activities and respond appropriately to changing conditions, often in near real time. Portals are critical to providing up-to-the-minute data and instant response capabilities. The U.S. Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides an example of an organization benefiting from enhanced processes and services as a result of innovating their portal infrastructure. Teaming with Nirvana, NIST developed a portal that gives the nine Department of Commerce bureaus that NIST serves centralized real-time access to business systems, information, and reporting and analysis tools. With easier access to integrated current data, users have more time for data analysis and informed decision making. Now NIST and Nirvana are expanding the portal’s functionality, rolling it out to additional Department of Commerce bureaus, and extending the portal to serve as a gateway for public users.
3. Comply with legislation
Executives worldwide are concerned about complying with stringent new regulatory requirements, notably the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Basel II. To be in compliance, companies must be able to integrate, access, analyze and store both the structured data (e.g. transactions) and the unstructured information. documents) that represent their
operations. Sophisticated information technology is critical to supporting legislative compliance, and portals are a key part of the solution. A well designed portal can ensure that the right information is captured, aggregated, presented to the appropriate user, and available for the analytical processes needed for compliance and risk management. In particular, as corporate risk or compliance officers assume ultimate responsibility for the compliance of their corporations, they benefit from having critical metrics readily available via a dashboard.
Portal rationalization
Portals can be a powerful tool – if they are efficient and effective. Many are not.
We have seen companies with thousands
of portals, supported by multiple technology platforms and operating models, and maintained as time allows by hundreds of people. A lack of standards and processes makes the portals hard to use and maintain. Content is often duplicated and may be of dubious quality. And developing and maintaining multiple portals is expensive. So, portals are also top of mind for business and government leaders worried about their cost and complexity.
Nirvana has established a business case for portal platform and application rationalization, which enables an organization to retire redundant hardware, simplify the operating model and staff support, and thereby reduce costs. For example, we worked with a large financial services institution to document their
potential benefits from portal rationalization. Hard savings included a reduction in IT infrastructure costs of 61 percent, and in IT support costs of 46 percent. Also important, though harder to quantify, were the benefits of greater workforce access to knowledge, increased productivity and better decision making. Nirvana believes portals can enhance an organization’s performance by
efficiently and cost-effectively providing the information that an organization needs when it is needed to perform critical operations, improve customer and employee self-service and fulfill its mission. Businesses and governments aspiring to high performance should take a fresh, hard look at improving
their information delivery by improving their enterprise portals.
About Nirvana
Information Management Services
Nirvana Information Management Services is focused on bringing customers solutions to better manage their business, interact with customers
and make strategic, financial and operational decisions. This services specialize in information management including business intelligence, portals & content management and data management & architecture. For more information about
Nirvana Information Management
Services,
Visit http://www.nirvanainfocom.com/

Offshore Software Development Services in India | Outsourcing Software Development India

Offshore Software Development Services in India | Outsourcing Software Development India