No company likes a bad news headline: DO NO HARM and enhance the brand where you can.
There is an story about a young college graduate seeking the advice of a CEO. The CEO is asked, “What is the most difficult thing about managing an organization?” She responds, “Events.”
Not all publicity is good publicity. TJX (owner of TK Maxx and TJ Maxx), for instance, incurred a data breach discovered in 2007 that cost them over $1BN in cash and enormous brand damage because they failed to secure the credit card details of their customers. This unfortunate event occurred when hackers broke the wireless security of one of the TJX stores and accessed ~45m credit cards, undetected, for approximately two years.
Other types of events that can have real economic and brand impact include:
– Your web site ceasing to function during the normal course of business or at an inconvenient time (such as Google Docs or AWS going down, or CNN.com being unavailable when a major event occurs)
– The personal details or credentials of your customers are exposed (as happened to LinkedIn or Facebook)
– Technical issues discovered through an M&A integration event
– Theft or fraud that affect your customers or your IP
– Embarrassing mistakes (government officials in the UK losing a data stick containing citizen information)
– Accidental or deliberate breaches of the law or regulation (Google’s or Facebook’s original position on privacy in various jurisdictions of the EU)
– A brand incident involving Social Media (think of United Airline and their handling of guitars, or Comcast and their data installers falling asleep on the job – although this particular type of incident is outside the scope of this blog post)
Given that a “brand” is an explicit and implicit set of expectations of the company by current or prospective customers, there are two things that a technology exec must do:
1) DO NO HARM.
2) Partner with other executives to enhance the brand where possible.
The first principle relates to the basics, and means meeting the customers’ baseline expectations for a company. That is, keeping personal information and credit card information safe, and, supporting the infrastructure that allows customers to transact – making it fast, easy and available enough to support modern expectations. Such expectations vary from industry to industry and from company to company. Some companies, for instance, are able to tolerate a higher residual risk if the offerings are perceived as “cheap” and the offering is “good enough.” Other companies have much lower tolerance for residual risk, partly due to regulation or because the value of the brand is dependent on the perception of the technology that supports it. Imagine Amazon.com not working on cyber Monday, and you can see exactly why Amazon had to invent AWS for itself.
The second principle refers to the fact that defining customer experience (or fixing existing customer experience problems) requires cooperation with teams outside of the technology sphere. To do this requires strong, open and seamless relationships with your peers – and between your teams and your peers’ teams. This also demands goal congruence and common incentives that are determined by the CxO team, and in particular, the CEO.
The emergence of the Internet and various Social Media platforms have intensified competition in ways that were unexpected a few years ago. The consumer is in a more powerful position than ever because of the proliferation of unbiased information about the various offerings provided by companies. The switching costs for consumers are also low, and, fundamentally it is easy for a company to look bad in front of a large set of customers and much harder to look really good. And it is really easy for customers to find someone else to buy from.
Apart from price and the utility and quality of a product or service, the only remaining differentiator between companies these days is customer experience. Of course, your competitors realize that, and have raised the bar. This effect is ratcheted by rising customer expectations who have seen many companies improve their retail and services experiences over the years.
So, my questions for you are:
– have you adapted your customer experience to meet rising expectations and a changed competitive environment?
– is your technology infrastructure economic enough and built for rapid fluctuations in scale?
– can you provide 7x24x365 immediate feedback to a customer about any transaction or interaction online?
– are your customers waiting for too long in physical, telephone or real lines because of dusty process or technology?
– does your actual process impute the appropriate values of your brand?
If you don’t have very good answers, then it may be time for you to think about how to improve your infrastructure and work with your internal partners to get the infrastructure right – so that your CEO and Board know you are aligned with economics, performance and brand.
If this seems overwhelming, there are places to start.
|
Problem area(s) |
Improvement tactics |
|
Prevention of loss of financial, medical, private, account data Fraudulent transactions in customer accounts |
– Give customer tools such as two factor authentication using mobile device messaging – Flag suspicious transactions and notify customer – Start up internal security outreach program for programmers, web designers, executives, managers, etc. – Empower internal security remediation team – Collaborate with internal business partners to prevent mistakes – Have up to date policies that are published and enforced – Retire obsolete or problematic technologies (Flash?!) or systems – Reduce human involvement in process – Simplify processes – Follow an application and data architecture – Hire, buy or train qualified, experienced staff |
|
404 errors Web page or services unavailable Planned or unplanned Web Site or transaction downtime Site overwhelmed by volume |
– Be always open for business using failover and/or scaling strategies for uninterrupted service – Store uncompleted transactions using shopping cart – Test new features (or offerings) before rollout |
|
Spinning wheels with no expectation setting using helpful cues |
– Ensure responsiveness; appropriate cues – Implement fast email confirmation – Ensure longer transactions show percent completion – Program anticipatory actions when appropriate (e.g. automatic receipt) |
|
Customers wait in line, wait for a register, wait for a printout, and have no self service Employees use lots of paper, slow POS, and old PCs |
– Reimagine customer browsing and buying experience – Deploy mobile terminals – Automate workflow for employees (and customers) – Deploy seamless workflow – Deploy smart pre-processing – Make self service so good, you only need human service for exception handling |
Typical tactics to improve customer experience
Technology executives must champion efforts eliminate harm and enhance investments to the brand. They need to review planned introductions into production for brand impact and work with the development and testing organizations to ensure the requirements have been fulfilled and testing thoroughly for both sunny day and rainy day scenarios.
If you are the Top Tech Ops Exec, you must have in place at a minimum:
1) A strong data center strategy / relationship / operations that enables Disaster Recovery and testing
2) An experienced and adaptable Security and DLP team with up-to-date policies, processes and tools
3) Strong relationships and partnership with the business, development and testing organizations
4) A definition of the operational requirements with brand and customer experience items for development and testing
5) Solid customer experience and transactional monitoring tools
6) An ITIL program with Change Management, Service Design and Service Transition as key anchors
7) A company customer first culture, that is smart about the economic and functional choices that need to be made when designing customer experience and avoiding basic errors that expose the corporation to excessive residual risk
This is a large topic, and there is scope for a lot of digression into specific areas. Please join me in the conversation.
Mike Ross <TechOpsExec@gmail.com>.
#techopsexec
Relevant Examples
TJX data breach: At 45.6M card numbers, it's the biggest ever ... Cost of data breach at TJX soars to $256m Sony hack: Can Sony's brand recover from massive breach? Sony suffers second data breach with theft of 25m more user details Sony data breach clean up costs up to $171M
Tech Ops Exec 