Being a Remarkable Learning Company®, we ourselves learned a lot in 2011. Some of the key learnings were:
1. The value of "failure" from Jeff Stibel's blog post "Why I hire people who fail?"
2. The value you get from continuously experimenting, measuring and adjusting
3. The value of using social media channels effectively for sales and customer service
4. Helping businesses and organizations understand the buyer, especially millennial end-user and mindset
5. According to Horses for Sources and recent purchases of SuccessFactors and Rypple, Business platforms like PAKRA are the future of outsourcing
6. One can bootstrap and with a little ingenuity create immersive learning experiences and data that provide insight. These videos from TED.com inspired us in 2011.
- Arvind Gupta: Turning Trash to Toys for Learning
- Luis von Ahn: Massive Online Collaboration
- Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape the world
Looking ahead to 2012:
As I try to comprehend various events that occurred globally in 2011 (and perhaps best encapsulated in the Time Magazine's "Person of the year"), I suspect that this tipping point of discontent stems from:
- Continual lack of service- Mismatched expectations
- In many cases complete disregard and disrespect of the customer and the constituent.
This was further elaborated via a multi-disciplinary study done by department of Mathematics (and others) of University of Vermont University of Vermont study of twitter feeds: Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter.
As you know, we provide products and services to businesses and organizations but in most situations, our products and services are tad bit far from THE end-user or constituent. We supply to organizations, who provide services and products to their clients. Their clients can be the end-users or their clients, who in turn provides services and products to their end-users. Needless to say, we are at least 3 degrees out of 4.74 degrees of separation to the end-user.
If all of us in the 4.74 supply continuum, become unrelenting champions for the end-user and continuously focus on the experience of that end-user, then we can address this era of global discontent.
The end-user experience begins from the time products/services are designed
--> To how those are marketed
--> To how they are sold
--> To order and access
--> To using and receiving service
--> To paying for the product and service
And the cycle repeates over and over again.
Personally, I believe that outsourcers, business gurus and management consultants led us astray by telling managers to focus ONLY on the circle of immediate influence. That kind of thinking led all of us (in leadership roles) create and deploy sub-optimized processes, set-up wrong incentives, create bubble economies, followed by a complete loss of line of vision to the end-user.
So! Let us Occupy Customer Experience. Occupying customer experience is the perhaps one way that can bring equitable satisfaction, make us all rich, and make us the fittest to survive all economic business cycles.
For 2012 and beyond: Occupy Customer Experience will be our theme and PAKRA® culture in:
- Every new product PAKRA® Games we build
- Human-capital management platform (PAKRA® Console and Analytics) we improve
- Marketing campaigns and blog interviews with leaders, we run
- Sales experience that you encounter with us and then provide to your buyers
- Customer service that you experience from us and in turn your end-users experience
Join us for this experience.
Wish you and your family a fabulous and great customer experience in 2012.
Rini Das
CEO, PAKRA
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Credit Roll for Mashup Photo: For our Holiday mashup card we give credits to the following image sites:
http://www.sohobooks.net/bobnew/muralgallery/msgmultitag.jpg
http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com/PhotoFiles/akon-vibe-magazine.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/NYTimes-Page1-11-11-1918.jpg/300px-NYTimes-Page1-11-11-1918.jpg
http://ladylixa.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/tank_girl_wallpaper_by_daskai.png
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