Tag: Consumer Behaviour

Value Chain Redefined

~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

The concept of value chain is not new. It is time to give a new meaning to value chain for the year 2019 and onwards. A pandemic like COVID-19 have redefined value chain to a new dimension.

Classic Value Chain

A value chain is a set of activities to create a product or services with the objective of maximising profit and create a competitive advantage. You will find standard raw materials or resources as inputs and finished products or services as end products. Supporting activities like HR, IT and logistics exists to smooth the operations of this process.

Value Chain Redefined

From COVID-19, value chain are tightly coupled with itself for end to end visibility. Social responsibility and sustainability triggers the evolution of value chain. Digital Transformation displaces old value chain and create new ones. New paradigm are formed where Agile invoke the innovation of customer experience.

In a nutshell, do be prepared for the new chain by acquiring new skillset and mindset. It is no longer viable to retain your old value chain. It’s now or never.

Global TMS Localisation

~ Danny Kwok ~ 1 Comment

TMS (Transportation Management System) is a system that is specific to the local countries. It may be a challenge for many to solution this as a global system. However, the trick is to know which part to localise your global TMS. Here is a sneak preview on my cookbook to globalise your local TMS.

  • Your global TMS must be configurable to handle localisation.
  • There must be good TMS SME (subject matter expert) to guide the localisation.
  • TMS SME also act as key change agent to manage the localisation process.
  • Train local Champion in the business unit.
  • Outsource TMS solutions prudently and insource your localisation knowledge.
  • Localisation is more than system requirements, you must also understand cultures, habits and even local norms.

Many organisations do not have a formal localisation teams. Do invest to train your resources on the importance of localisation. Often, these requirements are not stated and only surface during usage. Thus, an experienced implementer will consider localisation for TMS.

Data for Sale

~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

Data is becoming a commodity as storage become cheaper and cheaper. Many information are now digitised and uploaded to Cloud. Many social media are encouraging content creation with various monetisation incentives. If you own the data, how do you sell it?

Ownership of Data

The ownership of data is something of a dispute as there is no clear legal stand as it differs from country to country. If data is really yours and transferable, you shall be able move it from place to place like physical thing. Unfortunately, data is intangible and the true owner often belongs to the platform you created. Common platforms are social media who harvest your data for their commercial usage. This is with the fact that most platforms provided free services for “acquiring” your data with very fine print of consent.

Data Broker and Data Banking

Since it is established that data mainly do not belong to you, how do you secure your data privacy and rights? Data Broker and Data Banking will emerge in future. Like currency, data is a value of trade and can be transferred and stored. These entities will act as intermediary to help you secure data. Imagine a futuristic version of your Cloud Drive that can seamlessly extract and secured your social media data and transfer anywhere.

Data Marketplace

A current version of Data Marketplace is the stock market. When there are Data Broker and Data Banking, suppliers and consumers will come together in a Data Marketplace. This is place where Data can be bought and sold. This is not new as many informal channels existed for such transactions. We will be looking forward to such future where data owners are can sell and be compensated with their data.

Coopetition the New Economy

~ Danny Kwok ~ 1 Comment

Competitions are a thing of a past as consumers became flicker minded and switch cost is lower due to advent of technologies e.g. having different video conferencing application in a mobile. Monopolies discourage innovations and create unfair pricing for consumers. Many countries even have laws regarding competition to prevent creation of monopoly e.g. Singapore Competition Act. A new breed of organization emerges where competitors works in cooperation across different regions. A world of coopetitors!

What is Coopetition?

Coopetition is a fusion of cooperation and competition. In today’s economy, monopolies are frown upon and even illegal. It is not unusual for competitors to collaborate and cooperate for mutual benefits. Many examples existed such as airlines alliances with their codeshare connection, automotive partnership that owes HERE maps and Alibaba network of merchants, suppliers and eCommerce shops.

What Cooperate yet Compete?

All these coopetitors have a common objective to increase competitive advantage, enlarge market share, extend market reach and coverage with the consumers. This would create a network effect globally as a single organization will take a longer period to achieve this. Moreover, technologies have disrupted barriers and amplified threats of market entrants to traditional industries. By sharing, these organisations can create greater value in combating these entrants. Vice versa, new startups can allied together to take on existing incumbents. Without coopeting, these objectives would be impossible.

COVID-19 Effects on Coopetition

Perhaps the best case study of Coopetition comes from COVID-19 pandemic. Covid Vaccines have taken less than a year to be developed compared to several years for a typical vaccine. It will be impossible unless information is shared and collaborated among old foes and competitors. Another example is the collaboration between transportation providers, Food and Beverages (F&B) businesses and food delivery during COVID-19 lockdown like ComfortDelivery in Singapore. Will your organization be mature to coopete against this new breed of alliances?

Customer Experience 101

~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

Customer Experience (CX) is an emerging trend in many organisations. Sales, customer service and customer support are being renamed into Customer Experience teams. However, are we ready for CX?

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience is a holistic management of customer touchpoints from infancy to “forever”. It is an integrated view to provide a positive and lifelong effect on overall consumer satisfaction. The experience combine the cognitive and affective state of mind to increase expectations beyond the customers needs. In layman terms, it is to make customers so happy and satisfied that they engage in a lifelong relationship with the organization. One such company that comes to mind would be Apple.

Why Customer Experience (CX)?

CX sounds like an idealist view and one wonders how this differs from a combination of presale, sales, customer support and customer service. As mentioned in my previous study of overall consumer satisfaction, there are different aspects of satisfaction components in consumer. All these satisfaction parts may lie in different parts of the organisation and beyond like third party vendors and logistics providers. CX aims to unite network together from these disparate systems, service providers and organisations into a single integrated experience.

Reality Bites

In reality, how many of us have really experience CX? It is common for loyal customers to be let down by services that are beyond the organisation such as third party logistics and vendors because these information are not shared. For many years, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) have been touted as the game changer for capturing customer relationships to achieve similar objectives. CX may suffer from the same verdict as CRM if many of these customer data remains in silo. Data analytics, machine learning and many other cloud technologies looks promising to change and make CX a success. By then, what will CX be rename to?

A lesson from The IT Crowd

~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

Hello. IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Source: The IT Crowd
Speaker: Roy Trenneman

On numerous occasions, we have a one liner requirement that require us to implement the request in our application system. Getting such a requirement always lead me to seek solace in a the famous funny classic show “The IT Crowd”. The phrase is one of my favorite in the show because I always feel like a reboot could be great!

Eager to Please
Source: Netflix

We are sometimes the result of our own action. It is natural to please the customers without know why they need it. Usually, the person conveying the message are not a suitable person to articulate the customer needs. Thus, do we “shoot the messenger”? Unfortunately, our old code of chivalry have prevents us from doing so. So, what are the next course of action we should consider?

Customer is Not always Right

Firstly, the organization must understand that customer is no longer always right. It is interesting to find that many demands are actually made from internal to implementation team with the thought that giving what customers wanted will please the customers. In summary, the purpose of giving is to please the customer. It is time to throw our old ways and consider a new way of handling requests.

Shooting the Messenger

A request should not always be translated to a task or action. This enlightenment means we must drop our chivalry and “shoot the messenger. Of course, this is not literally and meant that we must drop the practice of the reliance of passing the messages. With Cloud technologies, data can be easily be obtained to confirm or disprove requests. The key is to understand what customer really needs.

Customer Experience

After “shooting the messenger”, organizations shall turn towards a new role called Customer Experience (CX). This role is like an ambassador who learns, understand and even feel the customer wants and needs. The role go beyond passing message to needs analysis and “deep learning” to provide a positive experience aka consumer satisfaction (You could refer to my initial study on overall consumer satisfaction). Deep learning requires capture of data points to measure with the purpose of improving customer experience. So, is your organization agile enough to take the step to “shoot your messenger” and transform to Customer Experience?

Meanwhile, I can only stick to Netflix watching The IT Crowd.

A basic CX read, Customer Experience: What, How and Why Now

Chatbot is the New UI

~ Danny Kwok ~ 1 Comment

User Interface (UI) has always been a hot topic to simplify usage for system. Recent cloud technologies have evolve UI to a next level which is not seen in the past. We are now able to use machine learning to recognise natural language for Chatbot. How will Chatbot change our paradigm towards software development? Let us break Chatbot into basic components for easier understanding.

Machine Learning

Machine Learning (ML) have materialised AI (Artificial Intelligence) in action response logic in systems. This makes perfect sense to introduce machine learning framework into systems to handle predictable events with users.

Natural Language Processing

System response have been constrained by standard system logic processing. Natural Language Processing (NLP) gain a lot of breakthroughs with the addition of machine language framework with speech and voice recognition and natural language understanding.

Chatbot

The RE introduction of Chatbot is due to the advances made on the two fundamental concepts of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing in its ability to replace the UI. Users can really interact with minimum switch cost, decrease training time and high stickiness for superior Chatbot.

In 2021, we should expect to see a fierce battle of Chatbot in the future Cloud space due to COVID-19 pandemic and the need to distance and remote work from home. Do watch for more updates and review about Chatbot technologies.

How to view Google Analytics and Statistics in WordPress

~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

There are two ways to view your visitors for your website. Google analytics is a good comprehensive view of your visitors demographic and trending topics. However, you will require WordPress premium plan for Google Analytics integration. WordPress also provide a default statistics.

Google Analytics
  1. Desktop > Go to Google Analytics.
  2. Login with your Gmail account.
  3. Select the domain name if you have more than 1.
  4. Mobile > Download Google Analystics.
  5. Similarly, Login with your Gmail account.
  6. It will take about 24 hours to populate the data.
WordPress Statistics
  1. Go to My Sites > Stats.
  2. You can view Traffic, Insight or Ads.
  3. Traffic is similar to Google Analytics with less details.
  4. Insight is something related to WordPress and your posts vs the traffic. It will give you a clue to the type of content, tags and categories that will attract more audiences.
  5. Ads is another feature which Google Analytics will not have because WordAds is enabled by WordPress Premium Plan itself.

Overall, Google Analytics gives a detailed breakdown of traffic compared to WordPress stats. The advantages of WordPress stats are the correlation of traffic vs type of content. The Ads stats also give a good view of $$ made from your content. Of course, I will do a detailed review once I made my first $100 from Ads. 😁

Build your WordPress for SEO

~ Danny Kwok ~ 1 Comment

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a buzz word and trend in the past. It is still very relevant now and the approach to SEO is now ubiquitous. Here are some simple tweaks and know-how basics SEO for WordPress.

  1. WordPress and major content providers are SEO friendly. You do not really need setup anything to “enable” SEO.
  2. SEO is now language independent and Search Engine can link the same context to different spelling like Optimization vs Optimisation.
  3. Do try not to slang too much in your language, Search Engine is not really there hor (slang)!
  4. Choose device independent themes that are user friendly and mobile friendly. Usually, these themes are SEO friendly to allow Search Crawlers, Bots or Spiders in.
  5. If privacy is your concern, it it best to set entire site to private or else Search Engine can easily “crawl” any page.
  6. Write for interest or be relevant. SEO is just a technique to drive organic traffic. It is not intended to make users return to your website.
  7. Modern Search Engine can now detect fraudulent links, contents, fake keywords and even scams sites. If you are using SEO for monetary purpose, this may not be a good move.
  8. For advanced users who wants the good old webmaster SEO control, you can still get your WordPress sites verified easily with Google Search Console or Bing, Pinterest and Yandex.
  9. If all these tips are too overwhelming, you may look out for some step by step book like SEO 2020 Learn Search Engine Optimization With Smart Internet Marketing Strategies: Learn SEO with smart internet marketing strategies.

SEO is no longer a technical domain that only a few can master. The growth of SEO shows the value that a domain can evolve to be user friendly and ubiquitous. I will expect machine learning domain to be in similar direction to let us focus on the essentials more than figuring out how to implement it.

A Quick Recap of My Consumer Satisfaction Research

~ Danny Kwok ~ 5 Comments

It was 2009 when I had published my first paper Multi-Dimensionality of Overall Consumer Satisfaction – Socio-Technical Perspective. Fast forward more than a decade later, I feel it is a good time to do a quick recap to see if the gaps I identifies are still relevant for 2021 and beyond.

✅ Multi-channel Environment

Looking at current trend, Multi-channel environment have been the correct identified settings in the research direction. However, Multi-channel is now superseded by Omnichannel. This shows that the divide between online and offline contexts are now almost negligible and encompasses various physical location, virtual world, formats and applications. You could check out OmniChannel Marketing: The Roadmap to Create and Implement Omnichannel Strategy For Your Business for more information.

✅ Overall Consumer Satisfaction

A decade ago, the measurement of satisfaction was often done with satisfaction survey that was laborious and time consuming. With so many satisfaction types identified in the conceptual framework, it was nearly impossible to collect all these data. With the advancement of technology in data analytics, it is now easier to collect data to measure these satisfaction variables. The conceptual framework is more relevant and be measured in the real world.

Recap

Overall, I am happy to see that gap of multi-channel have been superseded by omnichannel and measurement of overall consumer satisfaction is made possible with data analytics. However, more can be done to made easier for users to setup on how we can improve overall consumer satisfaction across omnichannel. One such method is to use machine learning to compute the satisfaction index based on the identified satisfaction variables and suggest improvement recommendations.