Category: News, Updates and Features

From the layout of your organisation’s mobile app to the typeface your marketing team uses in email communications, your customers have an opinion about almost everything. No department is immune to criticism, including IT.

More often than not, customer feedback reflects legitimate concerns. But even when a comment is trivial, it isn’t always going to be what you want to hear. The important thing is that CIOs and IT managers have a plan for gathering and learning from that feedback. After all, the only way IT teams can improve is if they see their work through the eyes of someone else.

In an effort to improve the quality of your IT team’s work, here are four tips for uncovering more valuable insights from customers and staff.

1. Listen to your team

By the time an IT issue escalates from the customer service team to the IT department, chances are it is serious. Ask your team to maintain a list of the most common IT issues reported by both customers and business users, and make resolving these a priority.

2. Speak to your customer service and sales teams

The IT department is no longer a dark, back-office haven for so-called ‘technology geeks’. However, the fact is that most IT teams still spend more time interacting with computers than customers.

To find out what customers really think about your work, you need to stay in regular communication with your organisation’s front line staff: customer service and sales representatives. In what areas are customers struggling? What aspects of technology could be improved to deliver better customer experiences? What feedback could you incorporate into the next product release?

Because they talk to customers every day, customer service and sales representatives are uniquely positioned to capture – and share – customer feedback. To ensure continual improvement, be proactive about harnessing their knowledge in a productive way.

3. Meet with your marketing team

There’s no doubt that talking to customers is important. However, you can also gather actionable feedback by observing how people use your product and interact with your brand.

Ask your marketing team about customer behaviour analytics, such as time on site and bounce rates. What can you do as CIO to improve those analytics? Can you automate processes to streamline customer experiences, or update technologies to ensure consistent experiences across touch points?

As a starting point, Forrester research shows many marketing teams are struggling to meet customer expectations for consistent, engaging communications. If your marketing team reports similar difficulties, for example, you could take steps to address shortcomings in areas such as process automation and tools to support multi-channel communications. Don’t be afraid to ask how you and your team can add value.

4. Implement innovative customer feedback tools and processes

Your marketing and customer service teams may already use feedback forms and surveys for collecting customer feedback about products, services and processes.

As head of technology, CIOs should take the lead when it comes to ensuring these tools are integrated in a useful way. How is feedback stored and managed? Can you better exploit feedback to support continual improvement? Is there a more effective way for your customer service team to conduct telephone surveys?

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5. Remember to follow up

After you have put your customer feedback into action, be sure to follow up. Check with your IT team to make sure that customers are no longer reporting the same issues. Ask your customer service team if their resolution times have reduced. And stop by the chief marketing officer’s desk to find out whether their analytics have improved.

Measuring the impact of your changes will provide you with the data you need to inform future approaches and strengthen collaboration between teams.

What are your best tips for soliciting and managing customer feedback? Let us know in the comment section below.

High-performing CIOs are stepping up into enterprise leadership positions. For the first time, they are expected to influence business strategy, rather than just being handed strategies for implementation.

While it is true that these CIOs may find success focusing on their own teams, doing so can limit innovation and constrain the sharing of ideas. The most effective CIOs, therefore, recognise the importance of working with other teams.

Those that collaborate are more likely to deliver optimal value and relevance in business outcomes. To help get you started, here are four teams every CIO and IT manager should get to know better.

1. IT team

As every CIO knows, a motivated and talented IT team is worth its weight in gold. Harnessing the full potential of internal technical resources is critical to performance, particularly in a business environment characterised by agility and innovation.

With many competing priorities, building strong professional relationships with direct reports ensures all team members are working towards the same goals. If team members are too busy to make these goals a priority, consider outsourcing time-consuming IT tasks such as server and network maintenance.

A proactive approach to employee engagement, collaboration and manageable workloads can lead to:

• Improved IT team performance
• Reduced turnover
• Increased productivity

2. Customer service team

Delivering outstanding customer service is almost impossible without IT support. According to Gartner, half of all customer experience projects involve technology, with IT playing a vital role in execution and maintenance.

High-quality customer experiences and lightning-fast resolution times, therefore, depend on access to the right technologies. These might include:

• Integrated customer service systems that provide real-time access to customer information
• Repeatable workflows that speed up resolution times
• Cost-effective enterprise business telephony solutions to streamline customer service processes

With this in mind, it is worth meeting regularly with customer service representatives. Ask questions including:

• What are your biggest process-related headaches?
• Which customer queries take the longest to resolve? Why?
• What opportunities do you see for IT to help you do your job better?

The answers to these questions can help to pinpoint process shortcomings. They can also identify opportunities for IT to improve customer service capabilities.

3. Marketing team

With varied backgrounds and priorities, marketing and IT teams usually have different ideas on how to leverage technology to achieve corporate goals.

CIOs, for example, may consider marketing’s demand for the latest technologies unrealistic. Meanwhile, marketing executives may feel frustrated when IT prioritises technology investments that benefit the greatest number of users over the long-term – which usually excludes marketing software.

These attitudes need to change. As cloud, digital and mobile technologies become more widespread, marketing now relies on IT to extend its capabilities with technology.

This means that marketing teams need IT support to deliver the digital experiences that customers expect. Similarly, IT must tap into the marketing team’s expertise in customer engagement to develop more effective IT solutions.

By joining forces, CIOs and marketers are better equipped to:

• Understand their customers
• Identify the most appropriate technology solutions
• Implement technology in a way that improves the customer experience

4. Finance team

In most organisations, the finance team works with the CIO to expense future IT expenditure and infrastructure costs.

By working with the finance team to reduce costs through managed services or using more efficient, cost-saving communications products, CIOs can reduce operating expenses and redirect spending to where it is needed most.

What next?

At the end of the day, fostering a culture of communication requires a willingness to look beyond your own team to find answers.

Organisational change won’t happen overnight, but it will have long-term impact when supported by collaboration-focused CIOs and IT managers.

What do you do to support collaboration across teams? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

It is no secret that today’s IT managers and executives operate in a challenging environment. They must wrangle shrinking budgets, build high-performing teams and navigate fast-changing technologies – all while finding the time to influence their organisation at a strategic level.

The good news is that many of these difficulties are simple to resolve. This blog post will outline the top five challenges faced by today’s IT leaders, and provide actionable tips for how to overcome them.

1. Leading and educating teams

The average IT professional works 52 hours a week. However, with competing priorities – from endless meetings to keeping IT systems functioning – many CIOs and IT managers still struggle to find time to train and mentor others.

Without effective leadership and ongoing development, IT team performance suffers. This can make it challenging to complete day-to-day tasks, especially if team members aren’t up to date with the latest technologies.

As such, making time to implement strategies to enhance professional development can yield rich results. Are there tasks you can delegate or outsource to a third-party provider?

Don’t forget: it is easiest for CIOs to teach others if they have strong support systems and processes. This frees up time to commit to personal development for themselves and others.

2. Collaborating with business units

Just as Wilbur Wright could not have invented the first successful aircraft without Orville’s assistance, organisational teams cannot develop well-rounded initiatives in isolation. However, when it comes to collaboration in the office, competing priorities and departmental silos can cause tension.

Silicon Valley companies such as Facebook favour all-night hackathons for encouraging people from different parts of the business to work together. Other organisations have hired ‘liaison officer’ roles to facilitate collaboration across teams.

Our less extreme tips for fostering inter-department collaboration include:

• Actively encouraging feedback from other sections
• Co-locating teams that you want to work together
• Assigning people from different groups and work areas on projects
• Expanding the use of enterprise mobility and online collaboration tools

3. Managing disagreement with proposed business strategies

Developing effective, strategic IT plans involves dealing with supervisors across sections, noting their requirements and understanding their business drivers.

While some disagreements are inevitable, CIOs can minimise resistance by proactively seeking feedback and involving other executives at each stage of the strategy development process. Engaging a third-party to conduct a strategic IT review may also help ensure that all stakeholder interests are considered when planning for future technology investments.

4. Maximising return on IT investments

In a world of shrinking IT budgets, CIOs must figure out how to maintain operations while improving efficiency and moving systems to the cloud. This complex, dynamic activity is often best navigated with the support of an IT services provider.

The benefits of partnering with an expert IT services provider to deliver all aspects of IT are extensive. They include:

• Cost-effective pricing models resulting in reduced costs
• Reduced overheads and a competitive difference by accessing infrastructure-as-a-service
• More time for CIOs to focus on core business
• Innovative, efficient work practices that minimise risk
• Seamless administration of your IT systems and/or infrastructure.

5. Getting results from large-scale software implementations

It’s a rare software installation that doesn’t run into challenges. Successful deployment hinges not only on technical issues and change management but also ongoing factors that impact user adoption.

CIOs know that any IT solution also hinges on confidence in the chosen partner. Appointing a provider with solid background and experience is critical.  CIOs and IT leaders can avoid potential problems by selecting a vendor with:

• A proven record deploying similar business solutions
• Experts who can contribute to handling change-management processes
• Proven strategies for facilitating user adoption

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In today’s fast-changing IT world, even the most experienced CIOs and IT managers face challenges. Fortunately, there are endless strategies for addressing these issues with ease – including partnering with the right company to fulfil organisational requirements through high-quality, value-based IT services.

To find out how Virtuelle Group can help solve your biggest CIO headaches, contact us today.

When it comes to making an impact as a CIO, there is no single blueprint for success. As with any executive role, every CIO brings their unique personal characteristics and experience to the job.

The most productive, however, tend to share five attributes that maximise their ability to get things done. In our experience, being a productive IT leader depends on strong capabilities in a range of areas, including:

• Time management
• IT service management
• Project planning and delivery
• Software implementations

Success in these areas is made easier by these skills:

1. Organisational and time management

CIOs frequently juggle competing demands. Running meetings, leading decision making, negotiating budgets, resolving staff concerns and keeping the organisational IT machine ticking can combine to be a drain on the CIO’s limited time.

Many accept this perpetual time deficit as part of the territory. However, in the long term, it can lead to diminished productivity.

The most effective CIOs know that time management is not just about punctuality. It is also about implementing systems and processes that streamline everything from planning and prioritisation to expectation setting and reporting.

2. Detailed understanding of ERP and infrastructure

As the owner of the IT budget, CIOs need to fully understand their organisation’s technology and how it serves business needs. Knowing its shortcomings and strengths will help avoid costly oversights and purchasing blunders. Approaches for enhancing this understanding include:

• Regularly talking to all teams, including marketing, sales, finance and customer service to understand their pain points
• Setting a tangible technology vision that encourages sound and executable strategy
• Evaluating how technology can best be used to create value within and outside the organisation
• Investing in robust IT solutions that can cut operational costs and increase efficiency and responsiveness
• Fostering a productive relationship with an IT services provider to deepen knowledge of the latest ERP tools and infrastructure

3. Robust knowledge of vendors and service providers

Analyst firm Gartner predicted in 2005 that future IT careers would not be about technology, but rather managing a range of service providers – and this is exactly what has happened.

In light of this, IT professionals must be effective in managing vendors and third-party service providers. Cultivating relationships with providers will ensure CIOs can stay informed about the latest developments in ERP and infrastructure services.

The knowledge resulting from such relationships can lead to an improved capacity to align technology with business objectives.

Here are our top tips for engaging with vendors and service providers:

• Have a crystal-clear understanding of expectations and performance metrics to convey to potential providers
• Do your research by objectively assessing which IT requirements would benefit most from outsourcing
• Determine the cultural compatibility of potential providers by engaging with the process owners as well as the sales people
• Use a team approach in contract negotiations – involve managers and operational staff who will be working with the vendor
• Build a collaborative partnership with the supplier

4. Strategic, proactive thinking

Technology is now instrumental in supporting CIOs to carry out their key responsibilities around IT strategy, business productivity, conducting analytics and reporting, ensuring uptime and driving innovation. As a result, strategic thinking has gained a new dimension.

CIOs with a comprehensive strategic understanding are better positioned to:

• Enhance positive feedback and user experiences
• Increase productivity through cost savings
• Successfully execute strategy in line with business requirements

Technology must provide the digital infrastructure for efficient processes and proactive strategy. It should assist in deepening customer relationships and transform businesses into dynamic and mobile organisations.

With this in mind, the ability for CIOs to champion the role of technology in increasing productivity and profitability is significant.

5. Razor-sharp communication

As CIOs progress from tech-focused jobs to leadership positions, success increasingly depends on their ability to communicate. Our tips for effective communication include:

• Maintain a people-oriented outlook so messages can reach those at all levels with clarity
• Spend time developing trusted relationships with major customers
• Turn to departmental leaders to learn about what matters in the business — customers, products, markets and business processes
• Establish functional relationships with teams to uncover ways to exploit technology for smarter business communication

How the right IT services provider can help

A plethora of opportunities exist for CIOs to capitalise on the availability of reliable, easy-to-use, responsive IT services. In addition to making it easier for CIOs to be productive, engaging a top IT services provider can deliver impressive results, including:

• Reduced IT expenditure and upfront costs
• Slashed labour costs
• Minimal downtime
• Flexible system upgrades and maintenance
• Access to the latest enterprise-level technology
• Boosted productivity
• More accurate budgets
• A future-proof IT environment

What next?

While being tech savvy is an integral component of the CIO’s role, success hinges on a suite of personal and business skills and the support of industry experts. Honing these capabilities and understanding how to streamline processes is critical to a CIO’s success and, ultimately, to the success of the organisation.

Need help becoming more productive? Contact us today to discover how Virtuelle Group’s managed IT services can help.