Category: Reality Bytes

Training – Customer Service Excellence

One of the objectives of this blog is to share with all any useful new on the subject of customer strategy. Accordingly, am posting this mail I came across of a training being held across multiple cities in India.
I have no idea on how the program is & I am not recommending the same. Anyone who has attended this or know of anyone who has attended these sessions, please share your thoughts on the same.
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#1 Novartis initiates customer centricity initiative

Bloggers & pundits alike are saying that the tough economic situation would prompt many companies to get onto the customer focus bandwagon. True to their words, Novartis has announced its restructuring plan to implement many initiatives – Customer Centricity being one of them. 

  • to implement a new regional US business model that will better address customer needs and differences in local market dynamics. 
  • is designed to be more effective at driving sales growth by better meeting the diverse needs of multiple customers as well as a more efficient deployment of resources

China & America – last seven years

A Biblical Seven Years (link)
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Came across this piece by in The York Times. Some interesting notes :

  • “Holy mackerel, the energy coming out of this country is unrivaled.” And, two: “We are so cooked. Start teaching your kids Mandarin.”
  • The rich parts of China, the modern parts of Beijing or Shanghai or Dalian, are now more state of the art than rich America. The buildings are architecturally more interesting, the wireless networks more sophisticated, the roads and trains more efficient and nicer. And, I repeat, they did not get all this by discovering oil. They got it by digging inside themselves.
  • How China and America have spent the last seven years: China has been preparing for the Olympics; we’ve been preparing for Al Qaeda. They’ve been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks. And we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones

Partnering vs signing deals

From an Ericsson, Nokia or IBM’s perspective, this is a fantastic way to commercially partner with customers than just sign multi-million dollar deals.
With the $ spent coming under pressure due to macro economic considerations, this would be a interesting way for service providers to increase their customer base.

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“In keeping with that underlying philosophy, Bharti Airtel in 2003 signed outsourcing contracts with telecom vendors Telefon AB LM Ericsson and Nokia Oyj as also computer and software service provider International Business Machines Corp., or IBM.

The contracts, which transferred the costs of phone and computer networks to these firms, focused on cutting down costs while at the same time throwing in incentives for better utilization of the infrastructure.Ericsson and Nokia would get a base payment that would be linked to the voice traffic carried by the base stations and exchanges which are the core of a phone network, and would be a paid a pay-per-use incremental charge on that. “This way, there was both an incentive to perform better and a disincentive (that helps) to keep costs down,” chairman Mittal told Mint last year, reviewing the outsourcing deal for Mint. Besides, he had said, “there was no way we would have been able to add 20,000 towers a year (in fiscal 2007) if (we) were doing it ourself”.

An almost similar deal was forged with IBM, which received payments as a percentage of Bharti Airtel’s revenues. The arrangement, according to insiders, has sparkled for IBM — netting it revenues of some $2 billion to date. “Bharti is the most convincing case study (Sam Palmisano) can present to the world,” Mittal said earlier last year, referring to IBM’s chief executive. The vendor has since signed similar deals with India’s Idea Cellular Ltd and Vodafone Essar.”

Source: http://www.livemint.com/2008/05/07235634/Sweat-the-buck-more-is-Bharti.html