Serving customer experience

Last few days I went through two separate incidents reminding me of poor business applications resulting into bad customer experience that can easily be avoided – should customer view point is considered while automating any business process. 

1. My elder daughter who is now 17+ was in the process of buying a car. I decided to have her apply for an auto loan where she can be a secondary co-applicant with me – hoping it will start to establish her credit history. We spent multiple hours at one of the major national bank filling out the paper work, etc. only to be reminded after few days that loan can’t be granted with her as a co-applicant given she is a minor. How hard it is to have a simple work flow in the loan application process to error out on the age of a minor while filing the application when certain conditions are not valid? Think about the countless hours wasted of the banker; someone from their lending department and leaving customer with a bad taste who unnecessarily have to go through this long process. 

2. A national university suggests we pay bill on-line to get student registered to their college. We all conduct commerce on-line and now assume certain level of service. However, this university only accepts MasterCard as an acceptable form of payment. It does not accept Visa cards or other popular on-line payment forms. Visa and MasterCard are the big gorilla in the credit industry. In fact, hands down Visa is #1 in the industry with 60% of the market share. MasterCard comes second with close to 30% market share. We happen to be fortunate and had few days left before the deadline for us to apply snail mail way posting cheque in mailbox. Why tout on-line when you can only serve a percent of the customers? 

Anyway, it brings me to the point – automating business processes are to provide improved customer experience. Making business applications usable and customer connected is important.

We experience similar trend in the enterprise software industry – particularly products that have been around for decades and has accumulated lot of features over time. But if those features are hard to use and don’t provide basic reminders or simple error checks – what is the point as they anyway end up in lost productivity and unsatisfied customers. Just ponder – how few features get used when the product is difficult to navigate and hard to use. Feature rich is good – but product build without customer experience in mind is simply not a recipe for success. Applications has to be usable and not just functional to serve desirable customer experience.

Usability matters and it is much more than just cosmetics.

Sage MAS Community

Visit the new MAS community site which is being launched.

It will feature product specific forums; blogs; discussion board; tips and tricks; etc. 

Also, my colleagues and I will use the community site to blog all things that matters MAS. Here is my blog on the MAS site. Some day – I will attempt to link and aggregate posts from both sites.

I am excited about the community forum and look forward to seeing a vibrant community growing. Check it out (http://community.sagemas.com)

Convergence

We live in a time of convergence where examples are littered show casing various technologies or products converging to enhance end user experience. One case in point digital media and home entertainment serving to improve everyday experience. Just pick one category of your liking and you will soon find someone is pushing the envelope either bringing adjacency services closer or building one if it doesn’t already exist.

Same is true for the business software community. It remains an emerging trend to converge and deliver enhanced experience for business users.

I usually put the convergence in three categories that overtime gets delivered as one unified solution. These are:

 

 

1. Improve a person’s productivity in the workplace.

2. Improve the ability to make decision easier based on historical or projection based heuristics

3. Improve an individual social standing in the peer community

 

 

 

MAS 90 4.3 now available too

Now MAS 90 organization delivers next release of MAS 90/200 to manufacturing earlier this week. This release has several customer value features; usability enhancements; business insights improvement; improved integration; and others. It has lot of appeal and value to the customers and prospects.

One of the theme for this release is encouraging our customers to go green, save time, money and the environment by utilizing paperless office and direct deposit functionality. Now save paper, toner and postage costs, conserve office space used for storage, and reduce the time and energy spend in finding archived documents, as well as printing and mailing communications. A relevant theme for the world we live in today helping make world a better place – one small step at a time.

Like an African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” – hearty congratulations to Eliott, Scot, John, Scott, Becky, Jim, Steve, Doris, Linda, Anna, Maria, Debi, Kevin, Karen, Erika, Roberta and everyone in the organization involved in delivering another quality product to the marketplace!

What a prolific year for the MAS organization!!! Keep it up team.

 

Simplicity – Next frontier?

Recently, a blog post on Sandhill suggested how Simplicity is the next frontier for Enterprise Software.

This topic usually gets its share of debate – particularly what it means in the enterprise space. I tend to agree that Simplicity need to be on the cross-hair of an enterprise development organization. I will venture and suggest Simplicity to augement the definition of “Quality” and make it measurable while product is in development. To continue to differentiate in the market place, enterprise software simply need to go beyond functional and be usable as well.

There are various studies/surveys that suggest enterprise software functionality usage (or lack of usage) due to the end users challenges working with the applications. Functionality already in the product that gets overlooked and don’t get to see the light of the day…

Good news is much of the enterprise industry is investing in usability and developing best practices for wider adoption. The real gains though start to happen as Simplicity becomes part of the culture; grooming champions within the organization; including it as part of the software development process; encouraging indivduals to address Usability issues with the same sense of urgency as it would to the Quality/functional issues. Of course, sooner in the release cycle the better.

 

How you feed your Ecosystem

All of us are potential teachers and learners – in a collaborative environment we are both.

Ecosystem has been a topic I have covered off and on here both in the context of enterprise communities as well as social communities. Social communities continue to grow with various popular examples popping up everyday ala Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

Likewise, Enterprise Communities landscape continue to change and grow as well enabling collaborative and self learning Ecosystems. Few examples in the Higher Education space includes Sakai, Kuali and uPortal groups. In the Enterprise product space a good example is Act! from Sage and others that continue to make inroads. The paradigm shift include:-

	Old Paradigm	New Paradigm
Participants	Business Partners	Various (Partners, Customers, ISVs, Developers, System Integrators, VARs, etc.)
Purpose	Means to an end (Sales, Service and Support)	Way of life (Innovation, More Product, Reach and Scope, etc.)
Relationship	Business, Formal	Trusted, Collaborative
Communication	Mostly one way	Dialogue
Knowledge Sharing	Training	Peer Learning beside necessary Training
Problem solving	Mostly individual groups; limited sharing	Work with peers to solve the problem; and share learning with the world to follow suit
Process	Provide necessary steps to deal with the fiefdoms	Transparency
Technology	Phone, Email, Fax	Wiki, Blog, Forum, Bulletin Board, Youtube, etc. beside conventional means
Use of Web	Limited	Social. Can one live without it now?
World view	World is round	World is flat

For a software product company, regardless of the camp it lives - closed/traditional source software or open source software – the need to foster and harness collaborative, learning ecosystem help achieve sustainable growth as well as nurture innovation avenues.

 

Sage MAS 500 Receives 5-Star Rating

Earlier this month Sage MAS 500 grabbed another 5-Star Rating in this year’s review of High-End Accounting Systems by The CPA Technology Advisor. The product received nearly perfect marks in all 6 review categories – Module/Scalability; Usability/User Experience & Security; Extensibility; Integration/Customization; Reporting and Support/Training & Help.

Check it out here.

Organization Productivity

As enterprise software continues to evolve from automating paper/pen/fax based tasks to business processes/workflows – next frontier remains to tap the collective intellect of the organization and harnessing social power of its workforce to find the competitive edge.

The trend continues as personal web and enterprise web converge. As the next generation of workforce joins the rank it is increasingly important to carry forward the expectation of personal web into an enterprise. Individual experiences of managing various social interactions, relationships and personal preferences define the corner stone of various personal web phenomena. These set of technologies enable targeted communication and mass scale collaboration needed to unleash huge productivity potential in an enterprise.

Enterprise applications remains an exciting space to watch for as several upcoming web technologies makes inroad providing either make over to the current set of products or helping evolve new type of applications.

Mass customization

Joseph Pine was a keynote speaker during Insights. He eloquently described how various companies are tapping into Customer Experience as a way to differentiate and grow the businesses. He calls this “Experience economy” – an evolution as manufacturing and services are increasingly getting commoditized.

This thought process is parallel to what we experience in the enterprise business. Every enterprise customer needs and their business is unique. They operate differently, and have different business process needs. This drives customers to have unique implementation. They deploy enterprise products differently; customize it to meet their unique needs; integrate to their own home grown, or legacy or other niche applications; additionally deploy 3rd party modules from ISVs, etc. thus resulting in an environment unique to run their business. In such scenario, usually, no two customers are alike in their implementation. Their experience with the infrastructure is tailored to their business needs.

Also, as technology landscape continues to evolve it will further improve delivery of the platforms and architecture necessary to provide unique experience and interaction rather easily. Much has already been touted how Web 2.0 and other Social networks based progression enhances user interaction and overall experience.

Companies are investing a lot in the usability studies and interaction design to understand user experiences. TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and ease of use remains the mantra for much of the product organizations to deliver ultimate customer experience in whatever they do.

This talk also added 2 books to my reading list.

 

What’s cooking

Some screen shots from MAS 90 – BIE (Business Insights Explorer) demo that we showed at Insights.

Taking the data view ->  

and generate on the fly, configurable charts based on various filters, dimensions and more.

  

Stay tuned…

Can RSS enable new level of productivity in an enterprise space?

I am excited about how various technologies are evolving and shaping up to play in the enterprise space. Like RSS, which has already proven its mark on the blogging side – but it is now touted to aggregate and push the relevant enterprise data to various users within an enterprise. Some thoughts are captured here on the possible use of RSS in the enterprise world under Enterprise 2.0 vision.

For those who don’t know what RSS is – here is a nice video clip explaining it, how to use it and why you should care.

Watch the Video

Insights 2007

May 14 to 17th, I will be at Insights 2007 – our annual partner conference. I would love to meet you if you are around.

This event is always a special event. But this year it is more special due to the recent reorganization at Sage Software. Bringing old walls down between small business and mid-business; front office and back office products should be a welcome move by customers and partners. This will serve our customers well and it should enable partners to foster an healthier eco-system.

I look forward to catching up with several of you at Insights.

MAS 90 Release 4.2

On March 9th, we released version 4.2 of MAS 90 - a leading mid market accounting solution - to distribution.

Here are the key theme of the release beside being the next generation, better and easier product to be launched in the market place.

Gain instant visibility across your business

Increase efficiency with easy personalization

Turn data into actionable knowledge

Achieve higher productivity

Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200 works the way you do

Manage your customer relationships the way you want to

Congratulations to everyone across our various organizations who worked on this release. Thank you for your dedication and hard work towards getting this release out of the door.