Customer centricity & Chief Customer Officers

In the recent times, we have started to see a lot of organizations pay a lot more attention to their customers and have inducted Chief Customer Officers into their C-Suite. The rationale being that organizations need to be much more customer centric and need to understand their customers better and having someone responsible for this will go a long way in creating the necessary f0cus within the organization to achieve great customer service. However, in my opinion, having a Chief Customer Officer in place does more harm than good! Listening to customer’s and acting on it becomes someone else’s responsibility […]

The lure of large deals

If you are a sales leader, working in the software industry, you would know the importance that any organization places on the deal size. The bigger the deal size, the better it is for you. Right? WRONG! In my experience, really large deals (aka, multi-million dollar deals) rarely prove to be a success; for both the parties – buyer and seller. This sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but it really is true. When I think about why this is so, I came up with the following reasons because of which this is not good for the buyer: Typically, once such a deal […]

About Greenway – An intelligent way to navigate your city without getting into traffic Jams

Greenway is an innovative navigation system which significantly reduces CO2 emissions of cars and therefore protects the environment. The system orchestrates the traffic through a distributed routing algorithm in an optimal way. Ordinary navigation systems divert traffic jams onto smaller streets after they occurred, whereas Greenway actively prevents traffic jams. This is possible because Greenway reserves timeslots for cars on the streets. With this technique, Greenway knows the position of participating cars for any given point in time, including the future.The heart of the system is an optimized graph traversal algorithm that calculates shortest paths in a matter of milliseconds. […]

New endangered species – salesmen

“What can be digitised, will be digitised” – unknown The continuous growth of e-commerce and cloud solutions is creating a new problem of sorts – dwindling breed of salesman! Imagine the following scenarios: I can buy any books that I want to on Amazon.com without any talking to anyone at amazon. I can buy clothes or shoes or accessories from Zappos without talking to anyone. I can buy an insurance from ICICI Lombard General Insurance without talking to anyone. I can re-charge my mobile phone online without talking to anyone from the phone company. I can buy any consumer durable […]

Dear Facebook: Please Give Us A ‘Sympathize’ Button

Vinay Iyer recently wrote a very interesting post about the importance of Capturing the real 360 degree ‘Voice of the Customer. You can read the post here: Dear Facebook: Please Give Us A ‘Sympathize’ Button. There are some very interesting things that he talks about: Find smart ways to “mobilize the promoters” and “recover the detractors. He also explains why context is key in any form of survey done with the customers. Though, I agree with all of his suggestions, I still think that this is a reactive way to engage with your customers and could work for simple transactional situations. […]