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I attended the Thought Leadership Johannesburg seminar this year, hosted by Alacrity (Pty) Ltd. With guest speakers to the likes of Ken Jarvis and Peter Cheales. The topic of the seminar was Single view of a client which in a ICT architecture and methodology, that came down to MDM, master data management. But all was not technical, as this seminar was more focused on the perceptions of the organisation towards the customer and vice versa.This short two hour event was so packed with information, let me try sum it up for you.<\/p>\n

To start this event with a twist, the host Dr Andrew Boake, CTO of Alacrity, was dressed in a black pinstripe apron and a black bowler hat. The Idea behind this was the concept of an old English sweet shop, where the owner of the store had a very close and intimate relationship with each of his or her customers, this result was that, long standing loyalty, trust and success was developed between the two. Doc then compared this shop to our current day scenario where most of the shops are situated within shopping malls, and the bottom line is based on the headcount you can move through your store, and in turn the malls charge exorbitant rate base on the feet count they provide. As a result of this the personal relationship factor went out the door. You will be lucky if the person in the store even remembered that you had bought that $500 suit yesterday, let alone the owner knowing you were even there.<\/p>\n

When Peter stepped up to the plate, he had to slot into pattern of thought that Doc had left. Peter, exclamated on the customer experience, since after all he gets to deal with customer service complaints on a daily, minutely bases. He painted a mental picture to the inverse of the current status of the corporate rat-race. He said that the higher up in the organisation you get, the smaller your office should be, and in fact that if you are the CEO, or owner, that you should have no office at all. You should be out there liaising with your customer and building a relationship. Be available, not in meetings. An existing customer is easier to keep than to gain a new customer, but it is even harder to regain a lost customer. He told a story of an expensive lodge he was doing a presentation at, and the facilities and service was great, but interpersonal relationship drew the short straw, and suggested that probably none of those people there that day would return to the lodge in future based on this. A very strong point that came across was that each person should revisit there attitude to move away from the “We will” and focus on the “I will”, “Take Responsibility”, he said. This threw a stick in the wheels of some of the people present as this meant the almighty statement of synergy “a cohesive group is more than the sum of its parts” was in question, but in the later part of the event (the panel), he elaborated and said that if every body in the group contributed to their part in the team with the “I will” attitude, this theory will be even more effective. He did however make a great point when he said. “Remember that each team player is in fact only there for himself”. The essence of what he had to say was that a happy customer was a paying customer and a returning customer.<\/p>\n

Ken had great shoes to fill, and that he did. He started his talk with a couple of videos that displayed not only possibilities, but also statistics based on the ICT trends of current end users(customers). He described the concept of companies prescribing to there employees which computers they should use. in the same manner some companies prescribe which mobiles phones they should use. People are going to use what they are comfortable with, and what they find works best for them. Especially in the current day and age where mobile technology is growing at faster pace than the human brain. One of the statistics that he pointed out was that it is projected that within the next few years, the average computer will be capable of computing faster than the average human brain. Back to topic, in the same manner organisations should not prescribe to their customers what technology to use, but rather cater for the technology that the customer is comfortable with. He painted a (mental)picture, of a top student, dux, cum-laud, alumni etc from the best school in the world. Every organisation was head-hunting this person, and when he finally decided on a company, the HOD mentioned to him, “oh by the way, we use ABC brand pc”. The candidate was thrown aback and responded that he only uses XYZ pc, as this is what he has been using all his life and the only way he knows. The HOD went to the CTO and the CTO said. “Give him what he wants”. This should be the prime objective of the organisation. Give the customer what he wants and not what you want him to have.<\/p>\n

He showed a video by Microsoft of a futuresque living where mobile devices(in fact every thing in range) and interchangeability, integration, and collaboration is the driver of communication in daily life. This is not yet reality, but the future is closer than you think. He explained how at any given time terabytes of data is knowingly and unknowingly collected on a daily, hourly minutely, secondly bases of almost every individual. And that organisations should get on track and start using this information available. He used the example of where a man bought a shirt from a clothing store. The store was happy because they thought they had a happy paying client, but if they were to integrate their security video footage into their business intelligence, they would find that the man in fact entered the shop to buy a pair of pants, and could not find the correct pair that fitted, and coincidently on his way out he spotted a shirt that he liked. And the message that the man is going to stick on a social network is. “Could not find the pants I was looking for in ABC shop. Bad experience”. Some of these statistics indicated that more people use the mobile phones for internet and social networking than any other internet able device.\u00a0 If you are an organisation and not yet making use of mobile technology and social networks to service your customers needs, you are falling behind.<\/p>\n

Finally, we entered the panel\u00a0 discussions, where three key people from Alacrity\/Argility, joined Peter and Ken to answer some of the grilling questions that the audience had asked. The basic result of this panel came to a conclusion that customer centricity and relationships should not only come from the top, but that it should have a good driven leadership that will promote the right moral and valuer in the entire workforce of the organisation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I attended the Thought Leadership Johannesburg seminar this year, hosted by Alacrity (Pty) Ltd. With guest speakers to the likes of Ken Jarvis and Peter Cheales. The topic of the seminar was Single view of a client which in a ICT architecture and methodology, that came down to MDM, master data management. But all was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c0nan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c0nan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c0nan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c0nan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c0nan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/c0nan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191,"href":"https:\/\/c0nan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions\/191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c0nan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c0nan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c0nan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}