Week 8 Synchronization = better customer experience:

Synchronization = better customer experience:
The two case studies in this week’s reading bring out a clear picture how important is synchronization for a organization to have better customer relationship and its own costs management. I was more impressed with Sawhney’s article which mentioned about how important is to synchronize to have better customer relationship and also how would it affect the company’s cost if proper synch is not done.
I think this more of a common sense rather than any technological aspect or any high end process involved. In customers perspective it’s fairly simple: Their satisfaction is the first priority. It has to be as simple and clear as possible. Organizations cannot expect people to understand their process and accept the outcome. People are not concerned about the internal process and I would like to mention the example Michel gave us in his guest lecture. How Telstra didn’t have the synch with its phone and internet departments. Being a customer I myself will be annoyed to be asked to call different departments of the same company to sort this issue if the company staff can’t handle this. And an issue as simple as moving places is not shared in a common database; I only wonder how the company handles the complex problems. In company perspective synchronization is as important as anything else. Apart from customer dissatisfaction, it increases the running cost, delivery issues, and source duplication as Sawhney mentions. I could understand that company has too many issues to face like different departments operating hours, geographical locations, people involved and many other issues but justification of not synchronizing with common database and platform cannot be acceptable as end of the day the customer relationship and their revenue is what is affected.
The technology synchronization is what I believe more important in Sawhney’s article. This is where I believe the data mining and data integration component come into play. Consider a sales or marketing department in an organization, if we don’t have accurate data or the latest trend information, the chances of launching successful product in the market will only be history. In Michel’s lecture Customer centric enterprise is defined as “ empowering employees with customers data and insight through end to end business process to ensure BEST decisions are made for BOTH the customers and the company “ I think this cannot be achieved without proper synchronization.