elhanini.com: Organizations, Processes and Projects

BPO/SSC: The keys to making your Customer happy

Mohammed El Hanini — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 10:21:23 +0000

BPOs and SSCs businesses have often the customer satisfaction as their #1 priority. Lots of efforts and valuable resources are engaged for the sake of a happy customer. A number of BPOs have a QA responsible if not a whole small unit dedicated to track and analyse what’s wrong, because yes, there’s always something wrong.

Unmet deadlines, uncomplete deliveribales, low service quality, lack of proactivity, absence of engagement towards the business needs,… If you work in or manage a Shared Services Center or a Business Process Outsourcing company you must be familiar with all these critics. We all know how frustrating and disappointing it can be to make huge efforts seeking that satisfaction and to end up with an unhappy customer, just like if you weren’t doing any efforts at all.

Today I’d like to share with you some small aspects which surprisingly will have a big impact on your customer satisfaction indicator.

The formula to improving the Customer Satisfaction in your Outsourcing business

Make your SLA clearly defined: An SLA mustn’t be short. Yes, you can issue an Executive Summary version if needed, but the SLA/SMF is going to be your only contractual document. Use it to make sure your customer has no further expectations beyond what’s explicitly written there.

Stick to the SLA/SMF: Looks simple but lots of outsourcing/offshoring service vendors are falling into the pitfall of exceeding the customer expectations. And while there’s nothing wrong with delivering the service going the extramile, the pitfall appears when the customer starts considering it part of the regular service, even though that part wasn’t included in any previous service agreement. The outcome of such a situation is usually a ver low customer satisfaction indicator.

Propose new SLA revisions: Although your Service Level Agreement might have a 2 or 5 years validity, it’s worth it to make regular revisions, on a yearly basis for instance.

By nature SLA’s tend to require frequent revisions at the beginning of the service delivery migration/hand-over. The next phase is normally more stable and thus needs less updates, but still a regular revision would help for example bringing more service scope to the unit or including new business needs.

Warn your customer of service outages risks: Don’t hesitate to communicate every single and little possibility of service delivery interruption or service quality drop. Anticipation will be appreciated by your customers and somehow will help you share the risk responsibility. Moreover big announced and planned risks are usually better perceived than a small but sudden risk that nobody anticipated.

Rebrand you “Customer Satisfation Surveys”: In despite of their high subjectivity level, customer satisfaction surveys are of vital importance when it comes to measuring a BPO/Outsourcing unit performance and most importantly the way the customer perceives the service quality. A good tip that will most likely turn the survey results more objective is to rebrand/rename that tipical Customer Satisfaction survey into something different. While its purpose will be still the same, something differently named like “Process Improvement Feed-back” will give for sure a more profitable outcome. Not only will it be a reliable and objective feedback on your current service quality and performance but a well-crafted survey will give you the answers to the question “How are we supposed to correct/improve this?”

Work out your own processes: Sometimes the customer might be right Always there’s a room for improvement. Never disregard any improvement possibilities you might come across. Invest some decent part of your resources in process analysis and improvement actions, it will be worth it. That’s just like having an R&D inside your unit. Successful businesses invest in improvements.

Business Process Blindness

Mohammed El Hanini — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 23:06:37 +0000

Within a given organization departments and units are boxes that exist only in relationship to one another and compose often a shared responsibilities environment.
Process-blindness is a frequent problem most organizations, both companies and public administrations, suffer from. It has to do with the employee seeing a process but without understanding the process of the whole.

Tendency to perceive “our” process as the most important part of the big puzzle is usually the main reason behind this. Or, at least, it’s a predominating feeling that our part of the process is the most important part “for us”.

Photogrph from jmpznz Creative Commons Lisenced

If your company is not encouraging you to be process-wise this doesn’t make it worst than the rest of companies. In fact, very few companies are concerned about their employees being process-aware. The moment you get onboard you might get some 10% of very generic information regarding the company’s activity and sector, its main business, etc., but then the focus is mainly on YOUR department business, that’s the knowledge you’re going to acquire. Moreoever you’re going to be an expert in your field and nobody is going to consider wether you’re aware of the company whole process or not.

The good news is that enterprises are developing a growing interest in solutions and systems integration, with the aim of reaching rapidly their markets and aligning their business systems with the customers and business partners. However when it comes to process interoperability we’re still in the beginning of the journey. Staff of major coporations speaking the same language and residing in the same location don’t seem to actually understand some cross-organizational processes, they’re experiencing real difficulties to get adapted to each other business needs.

Business process design, roll-out and optimization efforts are a meaningless investment if the staff has no clue on how things work.

IT Position Interview

Mohammed El Hanini — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 21:33:24 +0000

Let’s add a little humor to those IT colleagues who are about to have an interview soon
Explaining your IT field of expertise is important, regardless how “wide” IT and Computer Science is..

Customer Care is not a Department

Mohammed El Hanini — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:14:21 +0000

Ok, this will sound harsh: most organizations don’t care about the customer. That’s it. Although they think they do, it turns out that real Customer Care departments are supposed to be only a small fraction of a global Customer Care strategy involving the whole organization, something we don’t see that frequently.

Customer Service, that small office:

To begin with, there is no general agreement regarding where exactly is the Customer Care department to be located within a company. There is a tendency to have it generally hosted in Sales and Marketing, but a big number of companies have their Customer Service unit reporting to Operations. The reason behind both choices is merely the company’s own perspective: either Customer Care that makes its customers happy and sells them things and thus belongs to Sales and Marketing, or Customer Care that provides operational support without any kind of concern to company sales figures.

On the other hand, Customer Care is in most of the cases the only department that apparently “cares” about the customer: usually Sales and Marketing targets are related to the business revenues, Project Office’s main wish is to deliver its projects within the estimated timeframe, cost and quality, while other functions (Finance, Real Estate, HR, Billing, etc.) have their own KPI’s mostly related to their own businesses, which is understandable but then only one small part of the organization is seeking (with all its efforts) the customer’s satisfaction. For the rest of units and functions customer satisfaction is just something they shouldn’t care about, since it seems like it’s not affecting them, whilst it does. It affects them for sure.

How does the Customer Satisfation affect me?:

If we thoroughly think about it we always end up finding a link between the customer satisfaction and our daily job, the bad news is that the customer satisfaction pursuit doesn’t lead to anywhere if it’s not a general habit in the organization as a whole. This happens making people aware of the necessity of contibuting somehow in the customer satisfaction and designing a global strategy where all units realize their relationship with the Customer.

Companies with a 360º Customer Focus:

There are examples of companies from different sectors that master the Customer Culture in a very correct and smart way. The online-retail giant Amazon.com for instance was classified last year top #1 best company for customer service because as a first step they just focus their core business on what the customer wants, and then they start crafting and shaping the rest of their business processes based on that starting point. Okey, there’s a small detail I might be missing here: a big part of Jeff Bezos‘ daily attention and effort (Amazo’s founder and CEO) goes to improving the Amazon.com’s customer experience, starting from the Customer Service unit.

This leads me to Bob Thompson’s article: “What makes customer-focused companies different?” where 3 clear elements are identified as pillars of a successful customer-focused organization:

Leadership
Infrastructure
Action

To conclude Customer Care is not a department, it’s a strategy, a “core”, a set of behaviors, a culture.

Customer-oriented organizations feel continusouly indebted to the customer and seek his satisfaction.

Project Management Institute (PMI) Certifications

Mohammed El Hanini — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 21:22:46 +0000

If Project Management is one of your current interests you’d have for sure heard about the Project Management Institute (PMI) and its Certification PMP (Project Management Professional). But I’m thinking it might be worth to share with you a very general overview on the whole Certifications landscape the PMI currently is offering.

PMI Certifications:

PMP isn’t the only one but just one of 6 available Certifications, each fitting into a specific professional profile:

PMP (Project Management Professional): The actual Project Management Certification. If you don’t have previous experience in project leadership and management then you’d better forget about it. This is the most known PMI certification.
CAPM (Certified Associated Project Management): Designed for all those who don’t qualify for the PMP requirements due to for instance a lack of experience. Ideally the CAPM might result interesting to project team members and junior Project Managers.
PgMP (Program Management Professional): Similar to the PMP but focused on Program Management Professionals and/or those who are working on big strategic and multistreams projects.
PMI-RMP (Risk Management Professional: For potential Project Managers with a clear focus on high-risk projects.
PMI-SP (Scheduling Professional): A brand new PMI Certification that puts special stress on the scheduling skills and timing knowledge area of Project Management.
OPM3 (Organizational Project Management Maturity Model): This is a sort of recognized best-practice standards used for measuring and developping organizations’ internal capabilities in terms of Program Management and Project Management. This one is conceived for companies and organizations and aims to assess them and help them to develop a roadmap for improving their internal PM processes and performance.

This was a very short and quick overview on the PMI Certifications. I’ll see if in the future I can go more in details through each one of these..

The surprising truth about what motivates us

Mohammed El Hanini — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 20:16:40 +0000

I’ve come across this incredible video presentation made by RSA Animation a time ago but today I thought I’m gonna share it here with you.. Basically it’s about motivation and productivity, things that we think we know very well, while the truth is that after watching this video you might realize you’re going 100% aversily to the way you should follow..

The best 10 minutes ever invested watching a Youtube video

Let me please read your thoughts and reactions below in the comments!

Few words on Simplicity

Mohammed El Hanini — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 22:00:38 +0000

I thought today I’d share with you (the small readers’ community of this blog) this simple yet smart sentence:

The simplest version works the best, and the first version is never the simplest

- Roland Zwick -

The phrase reflects a universal truth: You need to work harder in order to reach simpler outputs. The simpler it is, the more beneficial/profitable it becomes.

ELHANINI.COM gets regenerated

Mohammed El Hanini — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 20:30:55 +0000

It’s been a while since I’m thinking wether to launch this business or not, but finally it got me. Want to know just why am I launching this blog? Keep reading.

Why I am starting out this?

There’s a variety of reasons behind the decision of launching the blog. To mention few examples almost on a daily basis I come across posts, articles and news related to my job or similar topics I’m tracking constantly (mainly on the net) and it’s a pitty I’m not able to share them in a proper way. The further I could go was simply spreading the link out through email! A bit primitive given the 2.0 society we’re living in.

Also the fact that my English is still improvable and “polishable” (as you must have already noticed) is standing behind the decision of running this blog in English.

What is this blog about?

The blog is going to cover many topics that are linked to each other in a certain way: you’ll find articles about SAP, ERP’s, Project Management, HR, Finance, Organizations, Processes, Outsourcing, etc. I might publish also from time to time some Off-Topic posts.

Sincerely yours,,,

Mohammed El Hanini