SaaS != Hosted (Or at least it shouldn't have to!)

These days when people hear Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), they almost always interpret that to mean "hosted" or "in the cloud." That's perfectly understandable considering that many of the market leaders in SaaS also happen to be hosted offerings (Salesforce.com comes to mind!).

However, there's nothing necessary about delivering software in a hosted model in order to support SaaS or subscription-based pricing. After all, why does it matter where the software is installed -- in my data center, in a hosted data center, some of each -- when it comes to how or when I pay for it?

Dynamic and forward-thinking companies are getting this, and looks like we're about to start seeing more software that is available on-premise and/or in hybrid models -- in addition to "pure" hosted software -- in a SaaS/subscription/pay-as-you-go model. This helps businesses control their capital expenses, flex their usage and consumption of software both up and down, and get started on initiatives faster.

Software companies who recognize these benefits to their customers and embrace non-hosted subscription-based pricing models for their own offerings are teed up for growth as more and more of the market looks for ways to control costs and increase agility.

Barriers to Churn

These days it seems like the only real barriers to churn -- i.e. leaving one product/service provider for another -- are artificially-imposed early termination fees (ETFs). It used to be really hard to move from one provider to another for a wide range of reasons including differentiated offerings, difficulty in transporting data/information, or even things like not being able to take a phone number with you.
Technology and regulations have made most of those things very easy to overcome. And, with more and more providers offering great incentives for new customers, the enticement to move is at an all-time high. The result, however, doesn't appear to be that providers are working really hard to convince you not to leave -- quite the contrary, they seem more interested in the next person they sign up than the one(s) they just did. And, the natural result is that they threaten you with fees if you leave before your contracted subscription with them matures.
Why not go the other way around? Why not focus on providing customers with what they want and expect from you -- and making sure your enterprise technology "stack" can help you deliver it effectively -- than imposing penalties so customers are afraid to or cannot afford to leave? Imagine building loyalty, providing great service, and effectively communicating with customers as the carrot that makes them want to stay with you, instead of the ETF stick that forces them to.

Customer Interaction vs. Customer Engagement

I recently heard this comment, and it really hit home: customers have all kinds of interactions with a company -- good, bad, indifferent -- but the real question is whether or not they are engaging and staying engaged.

That may seem obvious, but it's a point worth making in today's "customer interaction management"/"customer experience management" world: sure, you can interact with customers and they with you, and you can even get all sorts of analytics on those interactions to try to figure out what they are and aren't liking. But, until you engage them, all you're doing is piling up numbers and stats about your customers...and not building loyalty.

Today's customers have virtually unlimited options with regard to with whom they do business, and the "always on" nature of mobile communications and emerging business via social network efforts makes it far too easy for customers to find and switch from one provider to another. The way to make sure that doesn't happen with your existing customers and/or encourage more to come to you isn't just to make sure they can and do interact with you...it's making sure that every time they interact they are engaged.

Companies need to provide rich, consistent, and fully-functional touchpoints to customers in every communication channel. If a customer can do something on the web, they should be able to do it via IVR and other voice systems, via SMS, via an iPhone app, etc....and they shouldn't have to deal with different information and/or functionality being available in different channels as is far too often the case these days. That can be very difficult for a company to do without incurring tremendous price up front and/or every time something changes about what processes/services they are offering to their customers.

That means that companies need to look to supporting technologies that lower that cost of publication and cost per channel of communication. True customer engagement demands it, and companies will need to adapt, or they will lose customers and fail to attract new ones.

Human-Facing BPM

For the last couple of years, the Gartners and Forresters of the world have been pointing out that traditional BPM offerings don't handle people nearly as well as they handle systems. This is generically called "the people problem" for BPM. And, one way the analysts described this was by saying that the BPM offerings weren't "human-centric" enough.

Lo and behold, what do all the traditional BPM players start doing? Saying their products are, in fact, "human-centric." Then they point to all the ways you can depict human involvement in processes, etc. In this manner, they basically took ownership of the analysts' own way to describe their shortcoming to hide the fact that they still have that very same shortcoming. Nice trick.

So, what I'd like to do is talk about Human-Facing BPM instead of human-centric BPM...since the industry has pretty much obliterated the meaning of human-centric. But, that begs the question, "What exactly do you mean by Human-Facing BPM?" Well, I'm glad you (I) asked...

Human-Facing means exactly that: the part of a process that actually faces the person or people engaged with a process, and including the very interfaces they use to accomplish their tasks. This is vastly different from human-centric which essentially defines the fact that there needs to be a person or people involved -- and to be fair, sometimes even includes the characteristics of that involvement -- but doesn't actually contain fully functional ways for people to accomplish the involvement.

For a BPM tool to be truly holistic, it really needs to go that next step and provide appropriate user interfaces -- in multiple channels of communication, not just a proprietary web portal -- based off the definition of the step that requires human involvement. And, in order to do that, it almost certainly requires a fundamental re-architecting for any BPM tool that wasn't built with that in mind in the first place, because it involves state management, session management (which some do) and also flexible and abstractable interface generation (or "rendering") which almost no viable commercial offerings can do.

So, when thinking about which BPM tool might be right for what you or your company is trying to do, make sure you think about the real human-facing aspects of your processes and see if the tool(s) being considered really can give you a leg up by automatically providing a wide range of rich, consistent, and user-friendly interfaces in all the different channels people are using these days: web pages, VXML/IVR systems, mobile devices, social media, and beyond.

Relationship-Centric Companies: Part 5 - "Demonstrable Return on Investment"

The benefits to be gained from investing in the strategies mentioned in this series can be substantiated, and the return on investment can be quantified, by assessing real-world case studies and comparing our customer’s pre- and post-solution key performance metrics.

ROI at TRANZACT
Tranzact is a relationship-centric performance marketing agency that specializes in large-scale, fully integrated customer acquisition solutions and acquires hundreds of thousands of new wireless, credit card and insurance customers for its business affiliates — all while maintaining the systems and infrastructure to support 20 million annual satellite TV transactions. Theirs is a complex, high-volume and ever-changing transactional environment where each clients’ campaigns are not only vastly different, but also subject to daily change.

By implementing software that focuses on interaction delivery and enables the strategies discussed here, Tranzact was able to:

• Reduce development costs by 30% through improved efficiency and reduced IT lifecycles.
• Reduce time-to-value by 38%. Previously, new project roll-outs took 16 weeks as compared to the new, and considerably speedier, 6 weeks for new launches.
• Reduce workforce levels while improving manageability.
• Hire programmers who are proficient in solving business problems rather than hiring highly paid architectural experts.

"The results have been remarkable. From an infrastructure performance standpoint, just relating to our satellite TV business, we’re now processing more than 822,000 web service calls per day for our clients, while managing Web applications in real time that are used by more than 80,000 call center agents daily—and we are exceeding 99.9 percent uptime." - Jonathan Washburn, CIO, Tranzact

Relationship-Centric Companies: Part 4 - "The Benefits of Relationship-Centric Strategies"

While there are numerous benefits to be gained from adopting a relationship-centric strategy for interaction delivery we have identified five primary benefits that any company, of any size and in any industry, can achieve.

They are:

1. Technology-Enabled Agility
   Minimizing the risk of lengthy all-or-nothing software development cycles by facilitating an aggressive micro iterative release strategy that delivers progressive incremental value rather than heavily regimented and regulated process methodologies that are time-consuming and often inflexible to change.
2. Optimized Operational Efficiencies & Reduced Operational Costs
   Optimizing internal efficiencies related to staging and coordinating the people, processes and programs that result in a reduction in the costs associated with those operations.
3. Lowered Resource Costs
   Decreasing the cost of resources — operational, technological and managerial — associated with implementing new business initiatives and offers or maintaining and changing existing ones.
4. Compression of Time-to-Market
   Reducing the amount of time it takes to conceive, design, test, and implement new, technology-enabled business initiatives and more rapidly positioning the business for
   return on investment.
5. Reduced Total Cost of Ownership
   The cumulative effect of achieving the preceding benefits results in the apex of any value proposition: reduction of the total cost of ownership — in terms of systems (software applications and hardware and other IT assets), processes (manual or programmatic procedures that guide all manner of business activities) and people (the internal and external end-users, software developers, IT staff, managers and executives).

Relationship-Centric Companies: Part 3 - "Maximizing Relationship Value Through Technology"

Software can enable companies to broker value-driven business relationships through agile technology solutions. By focusing on the relationship-centric business pattern and the delivery of agile interactions, software product suites should help a company manage the internal relationships between business, operations and IT that together drive the external value-based relationships between the business, its partners and its e ndcustomers.

Value to the Company
By using appropriate products and services companies can reduce the time it takes to deliver their offers to the market by efficiently optimizing operations and reducing the resources (personnel and costs) required to do so through the adoption of agile methods. Agility with respect to the interactions that affect the internal development lifecycle and the external interactions that forge value-driven relationships with partners and end-customers ultimately result in a lowered total cost of ownership.

Value to the Partner
Companies that have been enabled through appropriate software and strategies can extend to their partners the intrinsic value gained from the use of those same products and strategies by establishing deeper, more meaningful connections by way of seamless integration and linkage of business processes that present the end-customer with a consistently delivered, contextually relevant and brand appropriate, high quality customer experience.

Value to the Customer
The end-customer is the ultimate recipient of these benefits because they are able to manage their relationship with the business on their own terms: they chose when, where, how and why they initiate interactions with our customers and their partners. And the end-customer knows the power is with them — if Company A is not committed to the relationship, Company B certainly will be. The right software can enable companies and their affiliates to elevate the end-customer to their rightful position: the top.