Business Development: Interacting with Clients
Performance objective - To demonstrate the skills and ability required to interact with clients on a business level.
Assessment description - Following on from the business research and analysis work of Assessment, it is time to focus on customer needs and market opportunities, and how these needs and opportunities can be achieved innovatively.
This work will need to be presented the business owners (Bob and Jeff). To start to embed internal professional practice, you take the approach that the founders are new clients and that therefore the whole process must be professional and thorough.
Procedure-
1. Read the Case Study
2. Prepare draft proposals and discuss with the owners (your assessor)
3. Rework as required
4. Present your findings to the owners on customer needs and market opportunities, and how these can be achieved innovatively
5. Negotiate any proposed changes
6. Update and document as required.
CASE STUDY
You have been hired as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for a small company "Hosted Desktop Solutions" (HDS), which provides hosted "open-source" IT solutions to small and medium sized businesses.
You have been researching client service needs and new business opportunities and have found the following:
- Customers who have been with HDS for some time prefer to deal with staff who they have come to know and trust
- They do not like dealing with new IT staff, particularly if they are inexperienced. Older clients generally have a good idea of the issues and have more knowledge than junior support staff
- Older customers want to talk directly to support staff
- Older customers want staff to be working when they are working
- Service emails need to be to be acknowledged as quickly as possible. If a auto responder is used there must be a service ID number included
- Older clients expect to be recognised/acknowledged when contacting HDS by phone (does HDS need to implement phone/computer based CRM?)
- More IT literate customers want highly customisable solutions, or the ability for changes to be made efficiently and effectively with little additional cost
- The clearest area for new business is in social media delivery. However while clients would like to manage their social media activities more effectively it is not an area they wish to devote resources to, often thinking that a young staff member can do this for them
- There are always opportunities to develop "extranets" and "intranets" for clients. However, most clients think that having a web site is good enough and lacki knowledge of these kinds of implementations and the costs involved, often thinking they will be larger than what they would be in reality.
- Changes to project timelines and costs are difficult for customers, as they are also for the business (how can HDS better manage timeframes and costs without impacting on delivered quality?)
- Informal policies and procedures are inadequate for the increased growth
- Roles and responsibilities are increasingly poorly defined, so that some key outputs are being overlooked
- The website, for example, a key result area for the business, has not been updated for some time so that outdated key marketing and communication information continues to be presented. Everyone seems too busy to fix it, and who would do it anyway?
- As well, administrative response turn-arounds are getting longer and increasingly inaccurate, with client and project documentation not being kept uptodate. This affects the invoicing of clients.
- IT client service response turn-arounds are also getting longer, placing customer relationship pressures on old clients as the needs of new clients is prioritized. New clients require more attention and as resources are stretched both new and old clients are becoming frustrated.
- Project margins are therefore declining
- Systems to manage client service both in administration and IT are frayed
- Cash flows are under pressure due to late payments due to late client deliveries while outgoings are increasing trying to deliver client projects on time
- Research and development, a key result area for future revenue streams, is declining.
- Internal infrastructure is overused, under-maintained and struggling to meet performance demands
- Strategic settings have become confused casuing staff to misunderstand what is trying to be achieved. This affects organisational culture, resulting in it becoming directionless: "What are we doing; Where are we going"?
- Jeff and Bob are so busy that their interaction with staff which was once warm, friendly and consultative is now short, swift, demanding and directive.
- Everybody is aware that something has to be done, but nobody knows what so that this instability is further eroding organisational performance
Background
You have been hired as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for a small company "Hosted Desktop Solutions" (HDS), which provides hosted "open-source" IT solutions to small and medium sized businesses.
HDS is a small full service company located in the Sydney IT hub of North Ryde. It will install hardware, software, configure and manage systems, create websites, intranets and extranets. Clients currently come from design companies and other individual companies who do not see a need to internally manage their IT infrastructure as it is not a core result area.
The company's two founders (brothers Bob and Jeff) are still very hands on in all aspects of the business, including still looking after foundation clients.
There is a small 2 person administration team, a senior and junior IT technician. Marketing and Customer Relationship Management are still handled by the founders.
The company is still delivering some hosted services from equipment within the premises. As well as developing open source solutions for clients, the company has also started to develop and deploy its own applications. Again most of this work is carried out by the founders.
The company is undergoing significant growth as "cloud" computing is becoming more acceptable, and affordable, for businesses small and large.
The company has indentified significant opportunities to expand the depth and breadth of its "cloud" computing services, particularly into the education sector. These services are expected to increase revenues from current customers, increase the company's market share, and create opportunities to enter other markets.
However, other larger more well known competitors are also making inroads into these markets. While these companies do not offer the same level of high quality customer service that HDS is renowned for, they can offer very competitive pricing, and are often preferred by the bigger customers that HDS is trying secure.
Additionally while the market for cloud computing services is expanding, actual IT expenditure is not. So while the company is having resource capacity issues across all areas of the business (knowledge management, planning, human, IT infrastructure, organisational, budgets) revenues are not increasing sufficiently to enable additional resource investment; staff are feeling the strain.
HDS still operates under a "small family business" culture. Roles and responsibilities are ill-defined. Strategic planning is ad hoc at best. So, while Jeff and Bob have some idea where they are heading, staff generally feel uncertain about where the company is going and their future in the company. Tactical decision making is also often usurped by pressing operational service delivery requirements, which adds to the current sense of instability in the workplace culture.
There are only two levels of skills and capability within the company, most staff are in junior to mid level roles (apart from the senior technician, who nevertheless, does not have significant management responsibilities) with Bob and Jeff performing all the higher level management functions across the business.
As the founders deal with increasing operational workloads, research and development activities are becoming stymied and delayed and development milestones are not being met. In addition, Jeff and Bob's ability to maintain industry currency, awareness of future directions, understanding the market through industry and competitor analysis is declining by the constant operational pressures. For an IT company, not understanding, or being able to meet market requirements can signal impending failure, (just think of Nokia and its delay into smart phones resulting in a huge drop in market share from what was once the world's top selling mobile phone manufactures). Additionally, budgets are becoming stretched due to establishment overheads for new, larger clients, who, as yet have not returned sufficient income to cover their establishment costs.
As the company tries to maintain organisational performance levels, and as resources become more and more strained to manage the increasing workloads, staff morale is declining and the once warm family work culture is starting to fracture.
With the company's growth, and the founders growing capacity management issues impacting customer service quality and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Bob and Jeff have decided to bring in to the company a senior resource, the Chief Information Officer (CIO), to assist the company's growth into a larger company. Additionally a mid-level cross-functional support role is also to be created, reporting to the CIO.
The new Chief Information Officer will have key internal and external strategic, tactical, and operational responsibilities to help enable the business to manage growth sustainably. The role is primarily focused on:
- Alleviating some of Bob's and Jeff's tactical and operational decision making
- Managing internal operations across all areas
- Contributing to IT deployment into larger companies
- Contributing to application development
- Assisting the founders with strategic planning
The idea is give Bob and Jeff the opportunity:
- To focus on internal strategic activities to enable the business to continue to grow and innovate while still maintaining a culture that is caring and supportive, as well as effective and efficient.
- To focus on strategic activities to take advantage of industry developments and favourable market opportunities/conditions
- To focus on the application development strategy which is often delayed and interrupted by new, larger, and ever increasing service delivery requirements that only the founders currently have the experience to efficiently and effectively manage initially.
words: 1500.
Harvard Referencing.
Number of References: above 8.