Tanny Tan's Profile

Tools can provide a marginal advantage to a company of any size. But given where we are in our evolutionary stage we have much bigger fish to fry.

Start for free and earn your right to ask for budget.

Don’t focus on the value of the tool. Quantify the value of the outcome you will deliver.

Enroll your Customers and Competitors to help you

If you are at a large company with many divisions etc and no consensus, then try to pick one division/country and make them a hero. Don’t try to get everyone to agree on a set of metrics.

silo’s can break if you are able to show value

Start small. Show some value. Go bigger

less distracting backgrounds - because most of your scene will be the same distance from your lens you might find yourself with less (or no) backgrounds to have to scan before you snap your shot.

shadows - I love shooting from up high at the start or end of a day when shadows are at their longest.

new perspectives - sometimes it is difficult to photograph familiar objects in a way that keeps them looking fresh and interesting. I’m thinking of iconic buildings or structures for example. Shooting from up high can reveal things about those objects that no one may have seen before

avoid shooting in straight up, high noon daylight

Look for areas where the daylight is modified by the surroundings so you can actually shoot in directional light. Buildings are great light modifiers. In towns and cities, buildings cast shadows and act as reflectors

pose your subject in an alley or a common area between buildings using one to knock down the harsh daylight and the other to provide directional fill light. A white or light colored building can make an absolutely huge light source and give you light quality every bit as good as you could have from a softbox.

Angles are very important in photography in an condition but especially so in daylight. If I have no other option I will turn my subject back to the sun and shoot backlit.

What I do in these extreme cases is expose for the shadow side of the subject and let the background go high key. That’s a nice way of saying the background burns out due to overexposure. You can tweak this a little by doing a c

You can use the sky as a huge soft light source if you have that classic high, thin overcast. The contrast of direct sunlight is knocked down without affecting the overall quantity of light very much at all.

build a good picture of the journeys that customers travel along your channel chains, all around the customer lifecycle, and identify where these break down and undermine your customer experience.

make sure that your vision, metrics and channel activity are firmly customer-centred, focusing on the greatest needs that customers actually have.

service providers that see their stores as simply sales outlets and measure them as such will not succeed. So much of their role - as firms such as Apple have realised - is as a showcase for all channels, targeting experience and expertise to enhance the brand and drive an sales.

“Transformation is what companies do when they are in charge. But now business leaders can't predict ahead so they are restructuring

Be prepared for customer behaviour to change – and not necessarily in predictable ways.

You have to be ready for customers' irrational responses. What are your customers new concerns? They are in protection mode, not risk-taking mode.

“Thrift as a theme has been running for about 12 months.

Big purchases are being delayed. People are willing to spend, but want to downshift.

Top of the CEO list of priorities is cutting operating costs. They need to cut costs everywhere – people, capital, IT, marketing, everywhere,

“CIOs are having to interpret this. At the top of their list of business issues is business process improvement followed by reducing enterprise costs followed by improving enterprise workforce effectiveness. CRM still makes a play, but it isn't top of mind completely. For technology priorities, busines intelligence is number one as CEOs need to understand what is going on. Also important are enterprise applications, such as ERP and CRM.”

It's tempting to assume that organisations will fall back on tried and trusted technologies and become more risk-averse, but this would be an error, according to Raskino. “The customers that you win and keep will be determined by ability to exploit electronic, mobile and Web 2.0 technologies over the next few years,” he said, citing ecommerce, mobile technology and Web 2.0 as key areas of investment."

Web 2.0 will force a more open culture. You don't have a choice: corporates must be more open

PR agencies will use Web 2.0 to the max to rehabilitate brands over the next couple of years.“

most people have CRM tools they don't fully use Exploit social communications and Web 2.0 to knock doors down. This stuff is dirt cheap. Use it.”

pinpointing what you want to achieve though each channel and whether the efficiencies of scale are there

treat all your different channels differently, rather than differentiating on price, and look at all of them from your customers’ perspective

Most people are so busy sticking measures on things that don’t lead to what they want, they move the business away from what they want.

It ties into understanding the customer experience and journey. If, ultimately, you haven’t delivered a good experience, you haven't worked out your journey and the customers don’t want what you’ve got; then you haven't got a business anyway - you’re just running around chasing targets."

Whatever your strategy, in these challenging economic times it pays to remember that less is more – it’s where you cut back that counts.

Cutting out the waste doesn’t mean just altering the number of people producing output. It’s about making a step change in productivity and delivering a better service but at a cheaper cost."

today's call centres are equally motivated by customer satisfaction

avoidable contact is where call centres have recognised trends in customer contact, have drilled down through those interactions to understand the triggers – or root causes – and have put in place policy, system or call handling process changes that mean customers are no longer troubled by that particular query. The result? Happier customers and, because businesses are receiving fewer calls, less expenditure in the call centre.

went back to the beginning of the customer journey, looking for the source of potential queries and responding to them before the customers themselves were forced to make contact.

done this through partnership working both within and outside

speak to your staff. Create an agent panel or carry out agent surveys to discover the most common customer calls.

ook for the problems that occur during the customer journey; talk to agents, departments or partners outside the contact centre; work to develop options for routing that journey differently through policy, system or call handling process changes.

Go back to the beginning of the customer journey and tell people what you intend to do differently.

quantify any changes you make.