Do for Bros!

Sometimes the smallest things can make the biggest difference , like growing mo's for the bro's! #Movemeber.
I am proudly part of this movement (MoBro.co/alivahed), not just for raising donation, but to remind everyone that we should all be aware of men's health issues. Fight for the good fight!

CRM, look in the rear-view mirror!

Customer Mateship Management has been defined in another post (here). In this post, I like to go back in time and have a look at classic Marketing, Sales, Support and CRM processes from customer life cycle point of view. Having these basics defined, helps me explain much easier why we need another stage in customer journey. Looking back to go forward!

In traditional customer life cycles, there are four main processes (*): 

• Marketing: The main purpose is selecting prospects from target market and turning them to leads or potential customers. (Target Market -> Lead)
• Sales: The primary objective is completing customer acquisition process and changing leads to actual customers. ( Lead -> Customer)
• Support: The main objective of this process is keeping customers satisfied by supporting sold products and services (Customer)
• CRM: Having CRM solutions implemented for the business, customers can continue their journey to the new stages, where more value provided for them:

1. In First stage, CRM solutions has been designed to turn customers to loyal customers, who return to business to buy new products and prefer using the same services even though there are similar (or even cheaper or better) products or services from competitors. (Target Market-> Loyal Customer)
2. From mid 90s, having loyal customers is not the end of the road for a business, they had to try to turn at least a number of loyal customers to advocates, who consider business as their partner and promote their products and services without expecting ordinary partnership benefits. Having advocates helps businesses to extend their markets and acquire new customers without expensive marketing projects. (Target Market -> Advocates)

You can see that the first three processes are limited to particular stages. However, CRM covers the whole customer life cycle from the beginning to the end, if we can define an "end" for customer relationship.

source: http://www.clicktools.com/what-is-clicktools/information-to-crm/

As I said before, having advocates is not the end of this cycle anymore and it is time to define new stages, which I proposed "Mateship" as a new final stage. To learn about mateship, please read my previous note in this subject(here)

Having all basic concepts covered, we can focus on the road ahead or CMM concept and model. I will answer to the question "Why a business needs mates?" in the next topic.

To be continued...


(*) Marketing, Sales, Support and CRM process have other objectives and responsibilities that in our context there is no need to cover them.

CRM presentation slides

Although, I ran out of time to cover the second part of my presentation, it was a good night for me to see a number of Persian IT professionals in Sydney.

My next CRM presentation

I have a presentation about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) on 28/8/2013 in the next Syper meetup. 

CRM is a concept, strategy, model and a set of tools and techniques which helps companies to manage and improve interactions with their customers. CRM contributes more value to the relationship with customers to enhance customer loyalty.  CRM software solutions used to implement this concept. To this end they have to be highly customisable and adoptable. They need to support various communication channels and integrate with other software applications and database. These are main factors that make CRM deployment projects hard and high-risk, in a way most of them fail to deliver desirable outcomes. However, by using business analysis and project management methodologies and best-practices effectively, success rate of these projects improves significantly.

In my presentation I am going to give a talk about CRM concept, CRM solutions, CRM deployment projects, why they fail and how to be successful in them?

For more information please visit Syper blog or Syper group LinkedIn Page

CMM: Customer Mateship Management

1. Everybody loves CRM, everybody knows CRM and everybody hasan almost the same understanding of “Customer relationship Management” concept, but in implementation, it is a completely different story. There are different approaches to using CRM for different businesses and CRM solution providers.
2. Extensions of the CRM concept include  ZRM, XRM, CXM, CRM 2.0, e-CRM, m-CRM related to citizen relationship, CRM in Social Media, and CRM built based on web 2.0 Concepts, web and mobile technologies. But all of them focus on technology rather than customers, where everybody knows CRM is a Customer Centric Solution not a Technology Centric System.  
3. Once upon a time managing relationship with customers wa a strategic goal; it is now a basic and routine task of any customer company. In the current brutal business environment, a business is at a distinct disadvantage (if not doomed) if it doesn’t implement the CRM concept. 

Based on the above assumptions, if CRM implementation is important, if Technology is not the main issue and if having a CRM is a prerequisite for a business, what can a business  do to keep a competitive advantage with its competitors? What’s next?

I reckon it is time to introduce a new concept and it’s the customer’s turn: Customer Mateship 

Management!

(source)

What I mean by “Mateship” is the level of equality, loyalty and friendship (1) between a business and its customers, in which they can call each other “Mate”!

Mateship has 3 important aspects:

• Equality: It should be a win-win relation between both parties. By maintaining the relationship equal, both sides gain additional value.
• Loyalty: It is a two-way relation and by providing customised services and one-to-one relation, the business can provide loyalty to its customers, not just the customer demonstrating loyalty to a business.
• Friendship:  By being equal and loyal to each other, relationship type will upgraded to friendship and “A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.  John D. Rockefeller (2)”

Implementing CMM does not require a change to the CRM software. In future posts I will give you some suggestions to make your customers your mates by using a flexible CRM solution like Tall Emu CRM.

To be continued … 

Computer Programmer!

Source: http://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/4043449/Computer+Programmer/

Perfect Week!

What a week!?

• Monday: I was in Syper monthly meet-up and enjoyed a great presentation of  by Nima Mir Sotoudeh in "What ITIL mean for IT Preofessionals".
• Tuesday:  I am going to be in the Australian SQL Server meeting about "Developing a Test driven solution for BI and ETL" by Geff Orr.
• Wednesday : Be in Oracle "Cloudworld 2013" Conference.
• Thursday: I will be in meet-up and presentation of Sydney Business Analysts group and will hear  listen to Mike  Crawford presentation about "Communication skills for business analysts"
• Friday: what do   would you expect !? Who goes to a professional meeting on a Friday afternoon!? 

Furthermore, I've started my new project on Designing a BI subsystem for TE CRM, and I am really excited about that.

Indeed, I have a perfect week!

That's all. 

Persian Style!

It is the a fact that one of the most important aspect of software engineering is "People".
In Project management when you are dealing with team building and team management, in Business and system analysis when you are analyzing business requirements, in Software implementation when you are training users and customizing software products and in Software development when you are simply a member of a team... You are working with people!

We have different people all around the world. Each part of the world based on their culture, understanding of technology, complexity of social interactions, political and economical issues end even religious beliefs has different opinion  point of view on software development and deployment process and we - as software engineers- should consider this diversity . Dr. Orit Hazzan in her book- "Human aspects of Software Engineering"- covers some of the most important issues on this subject.

Now, based on this ground rule, I want to move forward and talk about a specific type of software engineering, Persian Style!

I think the key characteristics of  Persian Software Business are:

1. Communication is mostly based on face-to-face interactions rather than non-direct styles (i.e. email or fax).
2. Turn over in project teams are considerably high. 
3. Software resource cost in development project is almost negligible.
4. It is hard to build a moderate relation among a team members.
5. It is easy to access to the latest tools and Technics.
6. External factors' effect in projects are more than world's norms.
7. Customers expectation of software products are high and  uncertain.
8. Software project cost and time is  are hard to estimate.
9. Intention to use modern methodologies are extremely high.
10. Customers' interference in software development is common.   
11. Lake of structured documentation is a common problem. 

These factors  lead us to the particular type of software engineering which I named "Persian Software Engineering". 

I will cover this subject and the its usage in international software markets in the future posts.

to be continued...

3 "Be"s!

(*)

Having 15+ years of work experience, I can summarise my whole achievements into 3 dot points:

1- Be Professional!
All days go to work as it your first day of your work and you need to show yourself; try to do your best, as much as you can. It doesn't matter whether you run your own business or not; what really matter is to work as you work for yourself. Like a professional athlete always do your best for the team.

2- Be Part of the Game!
Learning dose not have any boundaries! You should always keep read, observe and perceive the changes. Look carefully how other professionals work and live. Learn from other companies; Deduce the competitors.

3- Be Patient!
"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" (**). So, learn how to be hardy in hard time! learn how keep calm in difficult situations. Being patient dose not mean to be slow; in the classic tale of rabbit and turtle, it is good to be rab-tle!

Have fun!

*: Source: http://rugbyreus.blogspot.com.au
**: Quote by Chinese philosopher Laozi

Prolouge

As an introduction to main blog posts, I want to mention some important notes:

• English is my second language, so having grammatical or literary mistakes in my posts are almost inevitable. I hope by readers feedback, I improve my English writing skill.
• As a professional blogger, I know it take some time to find my theme, so in the beginning you my see inconsistency between my notes.
• I'll try to publish new content, but there will be some posts translated from my previous weblog (My previous weblog is a an award winning corporate blog in software business, software engineering and CRM solutions) 
• I belive in producing new content, but occasionally you will see some posts in reviewing or shareing other bloggers content as well.

There is noting else to say, let's begin! officially!

Ali

   

Hello world!

G'day;

I've been blogging for more than 9 years in Software Engineering subjects, all posts were written in Persian (here). Now it is time to start writing in English.You will read here mostly about Software Project Management,Business Analysis and CRM Solutions. 

To know more about me, you can follow me on my LinkedIn account: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alivahed

Ali