• You are here ===>
• Home
• >
• Services
• >
• Technology Consulting

We live in a connected digital world. Look around you. This week, I have received a text message from my motor vehicle repair centre confirming a date for a vehicle service, I recieved an email about my Starbucks card, advising of a special tasting at my local coffee shop, I browse the web with my laptop at hotspots and have the charge sent direct to my T-Mobile mobile phone bill and I receive live schedule information on Edinburgh City buses at bus stops. This all happened this week. And it's only set to increase.

What ties these services together? It's convergence. Finally after years of promises, converged media and devices is a real option for millions of us. Never before has so much information been packaged, integrated and presented across channels and devices, often in real time. Alerts, comfort messages, offers & promotions, advisories, etc.

What makes it relevant and manageable is the personalisation. The messages come in a form, at a time, in a location and with content that helps make my daily life a little easier. 12 minutes before the number 26 bus comes? OK, I'll go get my Grande Skinny Latte, rather than wait. When is that service scheduled? I'll just check my phone inbox.

What's really amazing is how 'normal' this starts to become. If we all stopped and thought about it we'd be shouting at each other - "Look how cool this is!!!!" but we go on with our day, "Yup, the plumber has just been to check the radiators and he recorded his time on a mobile device little larger than my phone and I signed the screen. Oh yes, this is just normal." Are you kidding me? How did we move from not being able to programme video recorders to having trades-people record their time on digital devices and automatically bill us?

Yup, it's a connected world. And if you think it's cool today, just wait and see what's round the corner.

There has never been a time when an organisation did not need some form of strategy for managing technology. Arguably, these days, defining and sticking to a strategy is harder than it has ever been. This is due to a number of factors such as the rapid pace of technology innovation, the complexity of services now being created for engaging with customers and the richness of content (both organisation and customer generated) being delivered by the technology. Technology models are moving on too. Software as a Service (SaaS) allows rich applications to be delivered to remote locations, where previously some form of local processing (other than a browser) would have been required. Hosted applications allow large offices to be independent of data and communications management. These can be challenges or opportunities. Allow us to help you define a technology strategy for the twenty first century.

Once, a simple model such as, replace all desktop systems every four years might have been sufficient. Now, the choices are not just limited to timescale. Should we self-host or get a partner to host? Should we consolidate call centres or unify them?

It's about deciding what you should be doing as a business and passing non-core services to expert partners. This is not a new message, but the extent of how far you can drive this message through your IT infrastructure is radically different to the situation only a few years ago. Not sure what backup system to buy? Why not subscribe to an online secure backup solution, incrementally backing up your files whilst you get on with more important things. Not sure how to get a new IVR system into the budget this year? Turn it from a capital cost into a revenue cost and buy it from a service provider over the wire, and pay for what you need. More options, more complexity. SBS Direct can help you to plan and organise technology models to cope with different refresh scenarios.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is the process of delivering a package of services at the point of customer interface, to the delight of customers. Rather than CRM applications which are targeted squarely at managing customers, CEM is focused on the experience of customers rather than the marketing plan of the brand. That doesn't mean that CEM is not commercial, just that it drives success in a different way, through improved customer outcomes. It's a bit glib, however, a positive customer experience tends to be rewarded with more customer business.

Technology has a big role to play in CEM. With blogs, wikis and numerous self publishing options, customers can communicate in more ways than ever. They are also more demanding and more discriminating. Lapses in service provision not only lead to frustration, they can also lead to publication! With increasing amounts of self-service technology and assisted service options, it can be hard to deliver excellence across all channels all of the time, however with our help, consistent service provision can be maintained in high-traffic and complex channel interactions.

There are many more factors to consider in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than the cost of the technology. TCO is a particularly in vogue term at the moment and it means different things to different people. For some it means evaluating the cost of services plus managing and maintaining the technology rather than just the asset cost. However, there is also a wider interpretation, looking at the Cost and Value of Ownership and asking how it is contributing to corporate goals. With hosted technology services, premises based equipment is most certainly not the only way to go, plus when you consider the opportunity costs associated with a particular development, internal may not be the way to go. Plus how deliverable is your technology model? What risks are there to successful deployment. This wider interpretation of TCO gives a truer insight into the value technology gives the organisation.