on life, business, technology & all that

Usability and user centered design for long has been ragarded as a second priority by software companies and consumer product companies. In the recent times the focus has started to shift to better the existing models.

Steve Krug’s book “Don’t make me think” probably was the first one that started a new phase in usability design and usability as a discipline started to emerge.

The idea is simple. A user should not have to read a 100 page manual and take a training course to get started using a product, but take a look around and you find all the enterprise softwares take weeks and months of training just to get the users comfortable with the idea of using a SAP or an Oracle.

Companies spend millions of dollars in licensing enterprise software and then some more on training their employees to sue this software, most times all the features and so called flexibility that these enterprisey softwares provide is never used by these companies, but they do make the software difficult to use.

Learning stress is something that every organization needs to evaluate when buying a enterprise software. If a lean software would make it easier for their employees to get their job done than that should be prefered over a “infinite feature enterprise” software that scares the hell out of your employees.

Enterprise software will never take a enterprise anywhere if the employees are never going to use it, and user adoption for many enterprise software projects end up beiing low enough to not justify the huge investments.

Software shouldn’t be another full time job your employees need to do, they don’t need to learn, read, operate, make mistake, upgrade, learn again, ask, ask some more, ask “whos the right guy to ask this?”, ask “how do i”, ask “where is the IT guy?” or say “this software sucks”.

Stay lean, stay agile, get the work done. Simple is beautiful.

So What is Cocoon syndrome?

A company creates products and services so that they can sell it to as many customers as possible. The number of clients grow each day and the revenues start flowing higher, with each passing month the revenues keep growing bigger, but suddenly you realize that all though the margins remains same, the profit-revenue ratio as gone down.

Cocoon syndrome is your unstructured growth killing you.

But what happened there?

What happens is that as the number of clients increase, the expenses to provide support operations increase, that takes away your margins, further if market pressure makes you cut down your profit margins, all your profit might just go away in maintaining your previous client, on the contrary if the prices go up but if you have lots of clients in your earlier plans, again your profit margin sinks because you need to provide support to them at a lower price.

This is serious issue with many businesses.

The answer to this issue is to keep your operating costs low, keep your support costs minimal, and keep the minimal support staff.

But you can’t afford giving bad customer support can you?

Learn From Google.

Google in its advertising program services millions of customers. With most customers it earns just few dollars. It’s a volume game for them.

Google cannot afford to have a call center agent for every 20 clients, they need to automate support, in a way clients themselves prefer using the automated system rather than calling an agent or emailing.

How can we help?

To remain in the business you need to scale up, but scaling up does not mean more support staff. You need carefully designed support staff automation.

We increase a company HQ (happiness quotient) and free them from the worry of how a small bunch of support staff will manage thousands of customers.

* We Analyze, priorities and strategize
* We create automation of your support function
* We do it in a way, your clients prefer using automated
system
* we reduce support costs by 15% to 70%

The investment you make with us will be recovered within 3 months by itself no matter what business you are in. If not, we will quietly put the money back in your pocket.
Email: punit@appliedeye.com to know more.

Visit us at AppliedEye.com