February 1, 2003

Success Through Service

Vendors need to understand how their technologies can address a vertical industry's specific service needs

by Barry Grushkin

Particularly in this weak economy, technology vendors should recognize that corporate decision makers don't buy technology; they buy opportunities to improve the way they do or manage businesses. The right information, knowledge, and procedures (often driven by new technologies) can create revolutions in corporate capabilities and profitability: For example, CRM technologies have changed the way organizations interact with their customers, and business intelligence (BI) tools are now indispensable to just about every major industry.

But especially in 2003, technology vendors need to be able to talk the business language of the vertical industries they wish to penetrate. Vendors need to carefully survey where the pain or gain in that industry is and create a carefully laid out, value-based argument as to how their products will improve the target company's way of doing business.

But no one company can be an expert in all industries. Many top technology firms — IBM, SAS, and Microsoft — have achieved success through aggressive partnering strategies.

Determining Your Partners

One of the key ways to determine which industries you should attempt to penetrate and which partners you'll need is to focus on how your technology supports a marketable service.

Think of technology as an enabler of services or subservices. A company generally has many processes in place to serve both its external customers and internal needs. All solutions combine technical and business-service capabilities. For example, a financial services brokerage support system may consist of portfolio analysis, trade execution, margin analysis, risk assessment, customer discovery, and other functions that can be performed by automated systems, personnel, or a combination of the two. Clearly, human and technological aptitudes should be recognized as complementary parts of a service delivery capability.

Call centers, for example, that give service representatives the maximum amount of integrated information about their clients help to make the corporation seem more like a person than a labyrinthine bureaucracy. This perception has tremendous value.

The whole idea of a 360-degree view of customers is to provide service representatives access to all pertinent customer information from all channels (phone, email, Internet, and face-to face), as well as important predictive information (such as what product the customer is likely to buy or trade up to, as well as where, when, and why the customer will buy).

Technologies that allow for any of these types or subtypes of service capabilities — especially services with proven track records — let corporate decision makers see the value in sticking their necks out to buy them.

In this cash-starved economy, companies want to know in detail how a technology will affect the bottom line. Horizontal vendors, with general and widely applicable technologies, must partner with groups that can pinpoint the exact corporate services or subservices they can address within the gamut of corporate needs — supply chain, manufacturing, customer management, corporate organization, and so forth.

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