When we say “app,” you have to mean “application software,” a computer program that does things important or meaningful for you. The cloud is nothing more that saying the app is web based, that you can access it with your computing device as long as there’s internet connection. From apps to data storage, many people do not realize they are already using the cloud to fulfil computing activities with their smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops. Lastly, just think of telephony as combining talking with someone while using your computing device connected to the Internet employing Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP.

I have been in the space of cloud based telephony apps since I got involved in co-owning and operating a small call center in 2007. No one in our circle knew how to manage and maintain, much more program or code an open source, Asterisk based telephony application software. It would be too expensive to start the small call center by hiring expensive IT people on a full time basis. Also, we didn’t know if we would survive a year of operations; if not, all those expensive computer servers that should run the premise based telephony app will have been sold off at prices below a fire sale. So, we looked to cloud based apps and found one that met our monthly monetary budgets.

The call center business didn’t last long because of partner differences. Oh, I won’t get into the details of what happened; the bottom line of what went wrong were my best friends going into business with each other. Later, entrepreneur-friends would tell me that scenario is the hardest formula to make things work. It would have been better to go to business with your father, sister or cousin; at least, blood relations would still force you to talk and make sense with each other.

After the call center fiasco, I dabbled in other things before I got in touch with the vendor of the cloud based telephony app and became its country representative, selling annual subscriptions to small and medium sized call centers. I was pirated to join a publicly listed U.S. company that also sold annual subscriptions of its cloud based telephony app but didn’t stay too long as its prices were just way beyond its target market of SMEs. I went back to the first vendor until I joined my first open source application software company in 2012 – GoAutoDial Inc.

Recently, a large telecommunications company has been looking into the cloud based telephony app of GoAutoDial, which is good because there is no one in the Philippines that provides a good telephony web app like GoAutoDial; it’s not just the app but the entire business model of the app. And that model benefits any small business owner to set up its own call center team, telemarketing reps, voice blast campaigns, and so many more without spending thousands of dollars at the onset. What GoAutoDial did was to open its telephony web app free of use, and the only cost to the small organization is the cost of the call billed every six seconds, not the entire minute.

There are other opportunities coming in – pubic seminars, summits, continuing to help small businesses, advocating the global small call center industry, supporting open source software, country-wide installation of GoAutoDial in a developing country, and so on. I’m 49 years old and have been working full time for the past 28 years. I started with old school I.T. (think DEC PDP-11, Pascal, Turbo C++, Sharp MZ-80A, Novell Netware v2.1, and Server NT, to say the least), stayed for seven years, moved to direct selling for eight years with Jockey, Avon and Personal Collection, did a gig with Mega Magazine for a year as its General Manager, moved to pseudo-telecom Broadband Philippines, and ended up in the call center industry since 2002. I have continued to have the entrepreneurial spirit since 2007.

Welcome back, Raffy!

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Have you already planned for 2013?

Planning need not be scientific or require an MBA degree. The simplest plan on a piece of paper is already a big step of three. The next two are execution and adjustment. So, what needs to be planned for your small business? Here are some ideas for you:

Evaluate 2012

As a small business owner, you need to dig a little into what transpired this 2012. Start listing your big successes and big failures with complete sentences beginning with “The company succeeded in fill-in-the-blanks because…” or “The company failed in fill-in-the-blanks because…” Then, move to the small successes and failures and repeat the method of listing each down. Once you exhaust yourself, In each bullet point, big and small, ask why it succeeded or failed and each answer each one with “because…” Go up back the list, big and small, read your answers out loud, ask why again, then answer again with “because…” Repeat this “go up back the list” step until you’ve exhausted yourself of answers. You can have only one or two answers per success and failure, or more. The last step is to read the list over and over again until you realize the “real answer” to why something you did in 2012 succeeded or failed. In the problem solving world, we call this the “Why-Why Analysis.” Simple, eh?

OODA Loop

Another technique to use is using four simple words to guide you to create new projects for 2013: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (then, loop back). In short, an OODA Loop. Wikipedia describes it as:

The OODA loop (for observe, orient, decide, and act) is a concept originally applied to the combat operations process, often at the strategic level in military operations. It is now also often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The concept was developed by military strategist and USAF Colonel John Boyd.

So, a month before you turn to 2013 (Have you noticed it’s December already?), OBSERVE your small business by writing down the industry it belongs to, the market landscape it belongs (i.e. geography, category, etc.), its products and services, its location, the way it does things (its processes) and its financial capacity which includes human resources. All these need to be written down, whether you use a simple notepad or a complex worksheet. We’re talking about implicit guidance and controls, unfolding circumstances, outside information and unfolding interaction with your small business’s environment.

Next, ORIENT yourself with the activities of your customer in relation to your small business’s products and services and the intentions of your competitors, taking into account EACH observed item (from the previous step). These include culture, tradition, heritage, new information, previous experience, and so on.

Once you have created an orientation list of each observed item, DECIDE on what you should do per orientation item and ACT on each decision.

RITA and The Customer

Do you have a Vision-Mission-Values (VMV) statement? If you don’t, then your favourite song must be “Three Blind Mice.” Do it now and have your entire organization buy in on it.

Have you determined your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT)? Not really? “Three Blind Mice” again. Your partners and employees in your company should be involved in creating a SWOT Analysis. Better if a few of your customers and suppliers have their say, too.

Do you know RITA? That stands for “Recruitment Is The Answer.” I’m not talking about multilevel networking. Every small business recruits customers by enticing them to buy or subscribe to its products and services. That goes the same way for you. Because like anything in life, everything happens in a cycle: you market your product to a prospect, your prospect buys your product for the first time, your customer is happy with your product and buys again, and your customer stops buying even if the reason is outside of your control. That last statement is alarming because you don’t have a crystal ball to know the reasons why. Most customers never really express their real reason. So, even if sales are good, you can’t stop or even lessen your “recruit new customers” activities. Create RITA projects, eliminate unsuccessful RITAs, and adjust or update existing RITAs. One example is telemarketing. Even marketing through message blasting helps a whole lot. Keep lots of RITAs in your small business.

My simplest definition of “customer service” is “a promise to deliver.” Customer service has never been about lip service and all those wonderful spiels you paid sales gurus to create for you. The moment of truth is when your customer has a conversation with you. Whatever the outcome should be, whether it’s just a need for information, a check in the status of their purchase, or a complaint, your role in customer service is to make sure you deliver what you said you will do. So, leaving a vague response isn’t covering your ass – it will kill your relationship with your customer and say goodbye to that person or entity forever. Create your customer service programs for 2013 with the simple philosophy that everyone involved with a customer should know that they are always promising to deliver. This means everyone in your small business, including yourself, must go within company policy or out of everyone’s way to support the customer rep. That least-paid employee facing your customer is the star of your organization, not you.

The Last Action Hero

Stop reading your Mills and Boon novels. Stop playing those MMORPGs. Stop clubbing every night. Every small business owner needs their own hobby and recreation but goodness! Don’t overdo it.

Start reading books and magazines about your small business. Hate bookstores? Buy a Kindle or iPad and start buying e-books and e-magazine subscriptions. Amazon.com has tons of e-books that are free and are about sales, marketing, customer service, your industry, your geographic location, etc. There are even great titles and white papers that just cost $0.99 in iTunes.

Start attending professional events like symposiums, short talks, conferences and conventions, exhibits and expositions, networking cocktails, and so on. Don’t just look for free or cheap, look at the quality and content of the event. Sometimes, paying for more also results in more and when you compare apples to apples or break it down into cost-to-generated lead, the expensive event comes out the winner over the cheap ones. Also, become a member of business-oriented groups like chambers of commerce.

Start using technology to enhance your ability to get RITA. Facebook and LinkedIn are free to use but heck! Getting people to like your page does not result in a sale; nor does sharing articles and posting blogs every day. Digital marketing is so overcrowded that to get people to notice you, you’ve got to raise the stakes too much that it’s either overkill or going to kill your budget. Have you ever heard of pay-as-you-go e-mail marketing by Vertical Response that costs an average of just $0.01 or one cent per e-mail message sent? How about running a telemarketing campaign using Voice Blasting by GoAutoDial Cloud that doesn’t require you to hire telemarketers and only costs $0.006 to run an 18 second telemarketing message (Egad! Only $6.00 to call 1,000 people?) Do you know what a Customer Relationship Management or CRM application software is? Try Really Simple Systems, Zoho CRM or open-source Sugar CRM which are great cloud based CRM solutions for the small business owner. There are thousands of cloud or web based business application software, products and services out there that millions of small business owners are already using. Take time to find the right ones that fit your need.

I hope you get the drift because I’m stopping here before this gets to be a Leo Tolstoy novel.

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P.S.In the above article, what can be used in your small business can also be used in your personal life. Think about it!

Title photo is a free stock photo licensed under RGBStock.com

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After listening to them espouse their not-so-interesting thought in ten paragraphs, my usual quip is: “Why not set up a school?”

“A school? What on earth for?”

Since time-a-memorial, the large, multinational call center companies in the Philippines always mentioned the challenge (“complain” was a better word to describe it) that the ratio of qualified reps to the total number of applicants have always revolved around 1:10. Yep, that’s one hired person for every ten applicants. Besides verbal English communication skills, education acquired in the collegiate levels increase the ability of the applicant to get hired. Other life-acquired skills like common sense, patience, respect, and honesty, to say the least, add value to being recruited and hired.

Sun Star’s online news today quoted Philippine Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz as saying there were 22,144 vacancies in the call center industry in October, 2012, alone. If we do simple math and multiply that by 12 months, that’s 265,728 job openings in this industry with raging hormones. But we go back to how many qualify – even if 2.6 million apply, only 265,000 will get the job.

Therein lies the opportunity for a school owner and the entrepreneur.

Existing colleges and universities have to establish a call center degree, akin to a finishing a degree in hotel and restaurant management (HRM). In the latter, the student goes through education and training in all functions and positions as if you were working for a hotel or a medium-to-large size restaurant. From cleaning the room to kitchen work and front desk functions, when the HRM student looks for a job, he or she applies as a well rounded applicant who knows the ins and outs of any kind of hotel or restaurant job. For some, they are entitled as management trainees rather than just a waiter or a cook. Likewise, if a school had a bachelors degree in call center studies (call it whatever you want) and every student goes through all the possible functions and position in a real, live call center company, they graduate with the possibility of being hired as management trainees, too.

Entrepreneurs who do not own a school but would like to enter this niche world of preparing young people to get hired right away can set up a finishing school with a focus on fast-tracking the call center bachelors degree in a few months, including skills not necessarily taught in school like patience, respect, e-mail etiquette, advance written and verbal English skills, and a host of others.

For these two endeavours – think about the many board review schools who espouse their hit rates in the number of their students who pass – your reputation of the number of students being hired will be your best marketing campaign to woo more of the young to study with your collegiate or training school.

Ask the executives from the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) and non-members in the same industry, and a majority will tell you the demand for more call center seats is still higher than the supply, as it has always been more than a decade ago when this industry reached puberty.

Think about it!

References: Sun Star Sunday, November 11, 2012 online news.

Photo from rgbstock.com

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I recently gave a half-an-hour talk to a diverse group of entrepreneurs, small business owners, and managers of small and medium enterprises on the application of call center technology in non-call center organizations. Being just half-and-hour, I concentrated on existing, usable and real technologies that a small business owner can afford to use. There may be better, more complex solutions out there but heck! The small business owner can’t afford to risk every penny for something he or she is going to try to use the first time.

First, the cloud. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, Blogspot, Tumblr, Flickr, iCloud, Google Drive, SkyDrive – we’re all now using the cloud. iTunes for your music and movies, Amazon Kindle ebooks, all kinds of apps to access magazine subscriptions downloaded straight to your tablet, online games – where in the world will you be today if it weren’t for the Internet. There are those rare friends who defy today’s social norms and refuse to create a Facebook account. One friend relented last year and he’s now happy as a clam reuniting with lost friends and acquaintances.

Like yesterday’s hackers who gave away their programs to the world in the days of Commodore 64, Apple II+, TRS-80 and IBM PC, today’s freewares are in the form of cloud based application software which we fondly call “apps.” Some apps are downloaded but still rely on the internet for content; still cloud based. For many consumers and small business owners, if it’s not free to use, it may not be worth it. So, the cloud is the best place for a small business owner to compete head-on with its industry giants.

Next come the customer conversations. I’m sure you’ve all tried SMS blasts and you’ve tried your hand in Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn Groups, Pinterest accounts, and a host of so many web based apps that might help you compete head-on. Guess what? It’s free but the results come very, very slow.

You see, text-message blasting is like fliering at the corner street; and we all know how much of an interest fliering generates – about one percent if you’re lucky. With social media, people just don’t respond well to your invitations to “like” pages and join groups. Okay, so what if they liked your page? What next? You think they’ll be dazzled with your repetitious posts of advertising upon advertising? Have you ever thought of asking around exactly what interests people in Facebook?

Going back to my short presentation, I mentioned that there were two things a small business owner needs to get his or her hands into: (1) a cloud based app that can (2) provide multiple, simultaneous customer conversations. With the cloud based app, I reiterated freeware and free apps. So, it’s got to be free to use. Like all conversations with customers, this doesn’t come free but it can come cheap or affordable for the small business owner.

What if you had a way to call 100 telephone numbers simultaneously at time? In those 100 calls, each person that answers gets to listen to a 10-second pre-recorded message, a marketing spiel if you may. The spiel has got to be catchy, enticing, inviting, exciting. Think of the pre-recorded message as something that goes like this: “Hi there. This is XYZ Company. We’re giving away a dozen Apple iPad 4s this month. Would you like to join? Press “1” if you would like to join. Otherwise, press “0” or simply hang-up.” How many people do you think will press “1”? Okay, let’s add another five seconds. “Press “2” if you would like to talk to our sales rep.” Hmm. Sounds interesting, right? Now, where would press “2” go? It can go to the next available person who’s mobile phone is not busy. It can also go to a few of your office-based reps either using landline phones or the internet via VoIP or voice over the internet (Voice over Internet Protocol, to be exact.) It can also land in a voicemail inbox which simply says, “At the tone, please leave your full name, city, state, zip, and e-mail address to join the promo.”

“I’m a director of a non-profit organization. How the heck can I use that?”

A similar query made me smile because that’s precisely where I wanted my audience to go to. I didn’t know their backgrounds from Adam or Eve but I was 100 percent sure this type of technology works well for much about any kind of organization, business or not, for-profit or otherwise – like a school.

In some countries, a local or regional calamity such as a typhoon or hurricane means the suspension of classes. However, many students are required to listen to news radio or the weather channel (if there was one in your country). Since I was a kid, that’s exactly what I did. Till now, the system remains the same. C’mon! The school has the entire database of its enrolees, plus their parents’ mobile numbers, yet it still makes the student wait for news from external sources. Is there some way by which the school does its job to call all the students instead of listening to conflicting news from various sources?

A call center application software has an auto-dial feature (well, some I know). Load a contact list into its database system, define the rules and parameters to calling, record the message that will be played once someone answers the phone, and you’re good to go. Now, this app has to be cloud based or it makes no sense to buy an expensive machine (server), acquire telephone lines plus the necessary equipment it comes along with, and purchase the software. But most cloud based apps like this, sometimes called a telephony solution, are expensive and not within the reach of the school’s budget. On top of all the upfront expense is the cost of calling.

In January this year, I decided to quit working for a multinational company (MNC) and join a small business whose single product was to do just that, and more. But having been at the other side of the fence, meaning being a small business owner who once used solutions that was expensive, I and my new partners were bent on advocating the needs of the small business owner or small organization for that matter. So, in the same month, we launched our cloud based telephony solution with a twist – it was free to use, just like Facebook or LinkedIn. Unlike our nearest competitor, there were no long-term contracts to sign, no hefty deposits to pay, no monthly subscription fees and no large set up fees. It was simply, free! And because small organizations do not have large budgets, we created a “pay as you go” model on the calls. Like how many consumers can afford prepaid mobile phone payments, so did we pattern our billing on the prepaid method. If your budget is $500, then $500 it all you’re going to pay. After that, you can stop your telephone campaign, assess what had just happened, and decide to continue or start a new campaign a few months later. Everything is still intact – your contact list, your databases, your recordings – everything. We call this telephony solution www.justgocloud.com.

Going back to the school example, that precisely what is going to happen. Before a calamity, the school uploads the student database into the telephony solution, configures all the calling rules, and wait for a calamity to happen. When it does, right in the comforts of your home, you log into www.justgocloud.com and at a flick of your mouse, click to start the auto-dial activity.

Got 8,000 students? www.justgocloud.com can call all of them in less than an hour. How? All the telephony solution has to do is increase the number of telephone lines dedicated to you so you’ve got the auto-dialer dialing, say, 100 simultaneous calls at a time. How long is each call? It probably takes 10 seconds or less to announce there are no classes today, with the option of pressing “1” just to make sure the person answering the phone understood the message, and that key-press is recorded into the database so that you have statistical reports to use and confirm numbers. How about unanswered calls or busy signals? That’s where your rules come in. How many times should www.justgocloud.com retry (or recycle) calling the number? Three times? Your rules, not the solution’s.

“Okay, you’ve got me interested. How much will this cost?”

Now, that depends on the country where you’re in. For example, calling out to U.S. and Canadian phones will cost you two cents (US$0.02) per minute billed at six second intervals. This means if your call only lasts 12 seconds, then www.justgocloud.com doesn’t charge you the entire two cents; rather it’s point-four-cents or $0.004 using the six second interval billing method. The Philippines? It costs $0.16365 per minute for a landline call or using the 12 second call example, a mere $0.03273 or PhP 1.35 at PhP 41.35 to a US dollar conversion rate. Not bad, right? With immediate confirmation (remember the press “1”). Australia landline?  AU$0.0067 for the 12-second call. German landlines? DEM 0.0061 at 12 seconds. I can go on but the point is, it’s not expensive.

Political parties? Same thing. Only this time, you’re after voters. Non-profit organizations running after new donors or hospitals and clinics automating reminder calls do the same thing. This isn’t a new technology, mind you. Auto-dialers have been there for some time. However, putting it into the cloud and giving usage away for free is something new.

You need to start creating new customers and manage your raving fans. Use an auto-dialer to relay your message clearly, and give an option to reroute the call back to you anywhere you and your team of reps are. At the end of your SMS blast and social media campaigns, the best thing to make your point is to talk. A verbal message is a hundred times more effective than a text-based message.

www.justgocloud.com is free to sign up and free to use. When you’re ready, prepay what you budgeted and use it all up. When you’re done, you can stop anytime and start again later on. That’s what on-demand is really about – only when you need it. If you need more information, please go to www.goautodial.com/cloud. You can also download some reading materials – How to Make It Very Easy to Use the Cloud and GoAutoDial Brochure Summer 2012 Edition. If you need assistance, e-mail me at sales@justgocloud.com anytime.

Photo is a free stock photo from RGB Stock

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Well, we all know how popular and distracting Facebook is to the average person. The height and popularity of Farmville has withered inside Facebook, and people are now more attuned to browsing for personal and local news shared by their network of Facebook friends and acquaintances, flicking their fingers up and down on their tablets and smartphones.

So, how can this cloud computing phenomenon appeal to your business taste buds?

Social Media Networking and Marketing

Don’t you have rules in your company? I mean, when an employee is late or absent, what happens? If two people have a brawl in the workplace, do you just brush it aside? How about the job each one is tasked to do?

Like all things that has to do with your business, using social media in the workplace comes under the umbrella of rules and guidelines you set. If there is a scope and limitation dictum of a new project, so does social media have its policies. If you’re not familiar on how to implement a good social media policy in the workplace, hire someone to do so.

“So, what can social media do for my business?” For one, your network of good friends is a ripe source of WOM marketing. Everybody’s actions in Facebook are of three things: to post, to share and to comment. In your case, you post something and your network of friends share and comment, hoping the sharing action replicates itself infinitely.

But if you allow your staff and associates to do the same, then the ripple effect becomes a Tsunami. Marketing a single product or service spreads along the web. Use the other social media and social news sites, it’s like watching “The Day After Tomorrow’s” 25 meter high tidal wave hit a population bigger than New York City.

Keep in mind two sources of your post: your blog and other people’s blog. “What about my company website?” That’s your catalog. Your blog is your company newspaper; which means you’ve got to create new content at least once a week. Creating content is another topic and you should be mindful of creating what’s new and interesting versus singing the same tune over and over again. However, if you can’t create new content, you can always use other people’s content and share it – articles and essays that speak about your industry or product category without mentioning your competitor’s brand.

So, don’t distrust your staff that using social media in the workplace means playing Farmville. Establish a social media policy much the same as you set the rules and ethics of being employed and working in an office. Provide content to which they can share. Content need not be articles only; they can provide interesting sayings, photo-quotations, postcards and videos that’s direct or carries a subliminal message about what your company does or the product and service you carry.

Talk is Cheap!

Text messaging and social media are all about words and pictures, which means these media are used to market your products and services, not close a sale. Especially for businesses that sell to other businesses, the art of closing a sale is as personal as the Avon Lady. Without that means, the sale is not going to materialize.

A sale is a relationship. A sale is a conversation. A sale is personal.

A sale is not message blasting your customer to death, hoping that many of them will respond with the same enthusiasm you have about your company and your products and services. If you’ve done flyering at the street corner, you know very well a single-digit response is already a good sign your copywrite is good. But that’s a one in a million chance.

People working in a company make the decision to buy, not a machine. People in the home make the decision to buy, not the brick and mortar edifice. Therefore, after all the logic presented, the decision to buy is still somewhat subjective.

You can’t sell your products and services without talking. After marketing comes the selling part, and selling means talking. So, you’ve got to find an inexpensive solution that allows you and your workforce to talk to your customers. If the geography limits your intent to provide a face-to-face encounter, then the next best thing is the telephone. Not everyone has or uses Skype or Viber, be wary of that. Not everyone chats through an online messenger app or Facebook chat. The telephone is still the best medium to touch base with your customer – if there are 7 billion people in the world, statistics show more than 5.6 billion people own a mobile phone [1] or about 80 percent.

I’ll do an injustice to the company I work at if I don’t mention its customer contact product. GoAutoDial Inc. provides a cloud based customer contact app for free. It’s a call center-grade solution which means it’s more than just your ordinary PBX in the web – automatic call distribution, IVR features, predictive dialing, 100 percent recording, live call monitoring with barging capabilities, dozens of predefined reports and statistics, and a whole caboodle of nifty features. Free means free sign up, no long-term contract tie-ins, no deposits, no monthly subscription and no set up fees. It’s a “pay as you go” solution, meaning you prepay what you need to use. Because there are no contracts, you can start and stop anytime, and then start and stop again and again – the realistic scenario of a small business conducting telephone-based sales, marketing, service and support seasonal campaigns. It’s pure web based – no app to download – and so you and your staff need not be confined in a single location. There’s a snow blizzard now? No problem. You can still do your sales, marketing, service and support work from home. In a vacation but want to keep tabs of what’s happening with your business? Grab some free time away from the spouse and kids, find a wi-fi hotspot, login to GoAutoDial’s www.justgocloud.com web app, and monitor everything. It’s an anytime, anywhere web app you can’t be curious enough to find out if it truly is a solution for your small business.

So, whatever kind of technology you decide to use for uninterruptible customer communications, make sure it’s truly cost-effective, operations-efficient and customer friendly. Cloud based apps are your best bet for the cheap yet fantastic solutions. After one or two years of getting your feet wet in this type of technology, then decide to continue using the cloud based solution or consider withdrawing a large amount of cash to buy a premise based or onsite version which you need to amortize across a few years. Be careful with the latter – it’s a big dent on your cash reserves but if done correctly, it can save you the expense of a cloud based solution in the long term.

Telecommuting is Not Only Sexy, It Actually Works

I have been telecommuting since 2009 when I started representing a cloud based business solutions company from Canada. Though I rented desk space in my friend’s office at the start, I let it go three months later as I was hardly there anyway. So, my small office, home office (SOHO) set up consists solely of my computer notebook which I hook up to a 19-inch LCD monitor, wireless keyboard and wireless mouse when I’m at home. I have a 1.5 Terabyte HD though I realize only my videos and music files occupy most of the space ever since I’ve used cloud as my hard drive. Like many traditional business scenarios, I still have my 3-in-1 printer-copier-scanner to provide on-demand flyers and brochures during my customer visits. When the drudgery of the everyday scene of my SOHO bores the creative daylights from me, I bring my notebook and head off to a nearby Starbucks or bar.

I’ve used both traditional and online media to market and advertise. Google Adwords, blogs, social media marketing, and social news contributions occupy much of my online activities. For the traditional medium, I hired a freelance publicist to get me an article spread in the leading dailies and magazines, though most of my leads still come from my online sources.

I’ve employed both independent or freelance, commission-only staff and salaried employees as a means to conduct lead generation and field sales work for me. I’m careful on both – freelance people have a tendency of not prioritizing my company when they see something else that generates a quick buck while salaried employees might slack on work knowing they’ll be paid anyway. But both types of associates work from home. With some, I subsidize their internet access and pay for telephone bills, transportation and representation – to a limit, of course. Most are door openers, not sales closers, but there are hotshots who come and go promising to close the deal on their own.

I meet my freelance or salaried workforce in coffee shops. An hour’s meeting is just about enough time to provide that face-to-face motivation no online medium can give. It happens twice a month. Then, I have a quarterly, four-hour planning session with everyone in an enclosed function room of a restaurant or hotel. The rest are all done remotely.

Because I work from home, I juggle my work and my personal errands and responsibilities without a time-of-day restriction. Unlike your normal run of the mill routine where you devote mid morning till late afternoon for office work, I’d rather do my grocery rush when the supermarket opens than after-office hours that’s like a mad dash of cars in the major freeways. But I need to catch up on work when more personal runs happen and if that’s late at night, then it’s late at night.

It all boils down to maturity – one’s ability to be disciplined and focused in work at home even when the spouse, kids, grandparents, dogs, cats and anybody and anything else that can create a distraction from the work you are doing. Whether there’s a safe room to work or the dining table is it, you control your environment in telecommuting, not the people or animals around you. That’s what I mean by maturity. Allowing your performance-based staff to work from home with set rules, guidelines, quotas and ethics will allow you not only the savings of maintaining a brick-and-mortar office but more personal time on your hands and less worry about the daily grind.

If it works for me and for many more small business owners out there, it definitely will work for you, too. Keep an open mind, keep abreast of the latest technological tools, understand your wants versus the real needs (i.e. a dream is a prestigious office that you can brag or show off to your friends), keep the balance sheet balanced, hire the right people and pay accordingly, and know your market. Above all, have a business plan that’s well suited to use the power of the cloud, cloud computing and telecommuting.

Good luck!

Photo by ianqui at Flickr.com

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In the past, setting up your small business meant renting a bare office space. The cost to that not only involves paying monthly rent on the space but paying a month or more of security deposit plus advances. And office space location is important – ponying up larger “total rent” expense can bring you to a prestigious building address while cheapscates get relegated near the sleazy side of town.

Then, there are permits, ranging from operational to labor, office sanitation and hygiene, and a host of many others. Either you do it yourself (again, how much is your time worth?) or hire someone to do it for you. Standard business permits from the likes of securities and trade agencies are a must, but establishing an office where employees will be using it as a workplace requires more than the standard. In some countries, the national or federal, state or province, city and even the sub-city or area government units all require you to get permits from each one of them.

Recruitment and hiring not only meant the unbiased activity of looking into the skills and experience of the person but as well as the biased look and nature of the prospective employee. Let’s be truthful – look and character has always been an unspoken part of the decision for hiring. Why? There’s that physical part of the business where people should complement the office and it’s ambience, plus adhere to its customers service principles, including culture. If you’re lucky, a few days is all you need; otherwise, get ready to go through the entire process for a month.

Office furniture and fixtures, including some minor interior construction and the art of decorating your new office means another large upfront cost. Beautiful partitions, unique workplace tables and chairs can mean a large hole in your pocket. Buying second hand items might not look good to fit. Again, how do you decide on which path to go to?

Now comes office equipment, meaning computer hardware and required accessories, telephone PBX machines and handset units, mobile phones, copiers and printers. Add skilled people to monitor, manage and troubleshoot all these. Even if many of these capital expense items are one-time spread across some number of years (meaning you can amortize it in your accounting system), the point is you have a large amount of upfront cash to produce even before operating your new business. In today’s wired world, acquiring technology is a need, not just a want or “nice to have.” It’s not about “hi-tech is being sexy” but rather “hi-tech is being competitive.”

Can the cloud replace all these?

Yes.

First and foremost, what really is “The Cloud?”

Some know it to be that temporary void where syncing one’s iPad and their MacBook happens. Others acknowledge it as the centralized repository of information where authorized people can access it anytime using web browsers. The tech savvy business person will cite is as a virtualization method all the office automation services needed for his office to operate and access, again, is by way of the internet. The IT person will say it subscribing to a private infrastructure in a secure data center where all the apps or application software, and raw data and processed information are all stored.

The cloud is pretty much all of the above and much, much more. The latter involves geek-speak that would probably result in nose-bleeds for too much jargon each sentence in the dozens of paragraph for the hundreds of “much, much more” only two people in the world would understand all of them. LOL! For us ordinary business folks, the cloud does mean everything I wrote above because I worded it in a way even I understood what I wrote.

No More Rent Expense

Whether your employees transform their family rooms as their offices, subscribe to a virtual office provider at the least cost possible, or go renegade and hop from one coffee shop to another, the mid-size office space is not anymore a necessity. Your entire workforce can work from home or anywhere there is internet access. This is even the near-perfect set up for part of your business that doesn’t need customer-facing transactions.

But if your business requires you to meet with prospective customers and must bring them to your office, then just use the facilities of the virtual office provider or outsource the services of a suitable place like a small function room of a hotel or restaurant. If meeting prospective customers happen not too often – the phone works – then you have a bigger reason not to require the office space rent.

If you handle physical products, you can rent a small-enough storage unit which is conveniently accessible to you, your supplier’s delivery group, and your employees who are in charge of handling the products. In a manufacturing environment, if you can outsource everything including shipping and handling, then you’re back to the reasons why you don’t need an office space.

Of course, team meetings are important. The daily grind requires you to conduct conference calls and group video conferencing. For this, you can use www.freeconference.com or Skype, good examples of web based free apps. Professionalize this function and you’re still not going to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars by purchasing overpriced hardware and software. For example, you can use www.justgocloud.com, a free-to-use web app that gives you the power of a virtual PBX, and more (and more of justgocloud.com later). Using www.justgocloud.com as your cloud based PBX system means your entire workforce can simply use their computer as their telephones as a more productive means to communicate and transact business with your customers, suppliers and each other. I call this “The power of cloud based conversations.”

Once a quarter or more frequently, you can conduct meet teams or your entire workforce because eye contact and body language add to the effect of motivating your workforce. Or with training which doesn’t really happen very often, you don’t need to spend on office space that’s sleeping the rest of the period when no sales rallies and training are occurring. In fact, talking about training, many business owners have begun outsourcing it to web based providers. The biggest gain to using web based training is akin to the individualized instructions of schools – it all depends on the pace of your employee. Not everyone has the knack to learn at the same speed. For web based training, each of your employees adjust according to his or her learning pace and convenience, thus increasing learning comprehension.

The Least Amount of Permits

Without acquiring a leased office space, the number of permits required may drop to just a few. Going cloud means going virtual, too. So, when you use a virtual office service, the service provider (or landlord) already has the required certifications and permits to operate an office facility. Not only does it save you on the cost of certifying your business, but you don’t need to spend your valuable time with processing permits or more money to pay someone else to do it for you.

Recruitment and Hiring is Easier, and Better

As a business owner, doing all the activities involved in recruiting and hiring your office based employees is laborious and time consuming. Like many alternatives to DIY, one of the better ways is to outsource the recruitment portion to a search and staffing company while you only deal with the hiring process. The traditional way of recruiting is done face-to-face, with the search and staffing company cull their database of CV or resumes to find a dozen or less matches, phoning them to see if they’re available or interested to work for you, and then scheduling to interview them to assess what’s written on paper is correct. The same goes for your hiring process. Once you’ve decided on a shortlist, you go through the same motion until you’ve decided on one person for the job.

Did you know that there are hundreds, if not thousands of recruitment and hiring services in the internet that’s either free or comes with a minimal fee? A simple online job board is where aspirants submit their resumes through the website and you conduct your recruitment and hiring process on your own. There are the not-too-known online job boards that are free to use, or require a minimal fee. Separately, you can also require all applicants to go through an online exam to better filter the list to “really qualified” applicants. As with online recruitment solutions, there are also online service providers that offer background investigation to your shortlist. Like bloomberg.com and a host of many online financial news and service sites, online service providers are also replacing the tradition-bound middleman in the search and staffing industry.

If your business doesn’t require face time with your customers, then there’s no need to go through the trouble of meeting up to hire your new employees. In fact, you’ve just widened your leads because you are not anymore bound by a small geographic location. If your sales team need only to speak to customers over the phone and communicate by e-mail or other message-bound means, again, there’s no point of keeping a small prospect list of applicants because of geography. And here’s one more: you’re opening the doors to home bound moms and dads who can take care of the family and still have a decent paying job.

One thing that also comes into mind is increasing the number of home based employees you need to hire but cutting their work hours by half. Why? Tardiness and absenteeism. In a regular office environment, you may not be able to do that. But in a home based working model, you can now create shifts per employee if your business doesn’t warrant a one-on-one relationship with your customers. The other benefit is redundancy. If one employee is absent or goes on vacation leave, you don’t need to burden another employee with additional work. Simply ask one or more of your employees to extend his work hours. Extending work hours is not additional work – there’s a difference to “adding work.” Besides, the extended hours means more income for the employee and there’s a bigger chance of happily accepting it than grudgingly.

My last suggestion under this category is a list of requirements you need to enforce with your home based workforce. Rather than make this already-long writeup even long, you can find this list in a previous article I wrote entitled “How to Employ At-Home Agents for Your Business.”

No More Office Furniture and Fixtures Means Huge Savings

It’s an obvious savings to not renting office space. So, you can now use that big savings on marketing, sales materials, additional employees, additional employee benefits or even subsidize the cost of doing work of each employee in their home office. Whatever you decide, the totality benefits your business.

Find a Real Cloud Solution

The cloud service or solution replaces many of the hardware, software and staff it costs to own and operate your own data storage, customer contact system (by phone and messages), human resources system, office accounting system, and a host of other enterprise systems. There are many free services which provides access through desktops, notebooks or laptops, tablets and mobile phones. However, free doesn’t necessarily mean “everything on it” but there are some who do.

You don’t have to be a geek to understand what’s available. Many business owners who are not tech savvy often make the mistake of getting involved in the cloud based app that doesn’t fit their business model. One reason for this happening is starting with the app before the business process. As the business owner, you know your business process inside and out. Start with that. Try slicing the entire process into one or two levels down. Then, for each item in each level, find the cloud solution that fits your process.

For example, I mentioned www.justgocloud.com a while back as a replacement to the PBX machine. Instead of buying and maintaining a piece of equipment you are not familiar with, outsource its functionality with a cloud based version like www.justgocloud.com. Instead of spending money on capital expense, you’re converting everything to an operational expense. There are some that disagree with the notion of saving money by not buying something you will use for your business because owning is so different from renting. But as a start up business owner or one who is starting a new sales, marketing, service or support campaign, you do not have that magic crystal ball that will tell you your endeavor will become successful and continue for three years. That being said (or written), a calculated risk to initiate your campaign means renting, not owning. After a period of a few months or so, you will know or have that “gut feel” that your endeavor will continue for more than a year. That’s the only time you should decide to invest on capital equipment.

Going back to my example, www.justgocloud.com is a replacement of your office PBX but in a better form. For one, it’s easy to configure, just like learning how to use your iPhone, which by the way doesn’t come with a user’s manual. Being a cloud based system, adding and changing profiles and functions can be done anywhere you have internet access. Your entire home based workforce also have access to it though in limited means depending on how you configured it to function. The cloud means using the internet; therefore, everyone doesn’t need a subscribed telephone line to talk to customers, suppliers and each other – you are employing the use of VoIP or simply “voice over the internet.” The big difference with Vonage and the like, www.justgocloud.com is full of features large call center companies normally require, giving you now the power beyond simple PBX function, like calls are intelligently routed to the right person at the right time, all calls are recorded (which is good for order-entry conversations), you have access to dozens of predefined productivity reports and call statistics so you have the leverage to change the way you do business to make you and your team more competitive, efficient and results-effective, people with admin rights can monitor live calls on whisper mode (you can talk and only your employee will hear you, not the customer at the end of the other line) or barge mode (both your employee and customer can hear you talk), and so much more features and functions.

“Is it expensive?” Actually, it’s free! Unlike its competitors, www.justgocloud.com will not require you to sign a term-based contract, ask you for upfront deposits per user license, require you to pay a monthly subscription per license, or tell you you have to pay an upfront one-time set up fee before you can start using the cloud based app. For you to begin testing it or quickly go live, www.justgocloud.com comes with 120 minutes free. When you need more talk-time minutes, simply pay online (you can also wire transfer the amount of prepaid minutes you require). That’s what a cloud based business app should be, not the greedy-looking versions that ask you to pay-up before you use it, which also feels like you’re already buying the system, not leasing or subscribing to it.

In Summary

The glaring end result of using cloud based application software and services is savings. The next in the row are efficiency, convenience and the effective delivery of goods and services to your customer. The “anytime, anywhere” paradigm is today’s customer demand – your customers demand you to be awake 24×7. Without the cloud, you would have to set this up traditionally and very costly. Hence, after cost-savings, efficiency, convenience and effective delivery, old customers become more loyal that they repeat orders in increasing frequency, new customers become happy that they are quickly transformed as loyal customers, and the art of creating customers for life becomes a reality. With that, you leverage the cloud to generate more sales, increase revenue and the best income stream possible.

Cloud computing is the way to go. GoAutoDial Inc., the developers of www.justgocloud.com, blogged about it with the title “Why Small Business Owners Take More Vacation Time Today,” citing statistics that “small business owners plan to work remotely for an average of 18 days this summer.” The study also added, “Telephone and video conferencing have become ingrained in the work habits of small business owners, since nearly half of the survey respondents say traditional, in-person meetings are becoming less relevant.”

At the end of thinking about it, researching and planning your cloud strategy, you will realize that you may be implementing one that involves a few different cloud based applications and vendors. That’s okay. Each cloud solution has its own expert or key advantage and, like most things in the world, there is no one person, group or product that can do it all. Use the best but also consider cost and ease of usage. In my almost three decades of working, I’ve come to repeat this undying adage of how it should be in the business world, whether you’re talking about products or services:

The intent of the product, service or organization is to always make it “very easy” – very easy to start, very easy to use or stay, and very easy to earn or gain from. Simple. If the product or service doesn’t match all three rules, forget it. It’s only going to be a headache, operationally, financially or worse – both!

References: Cloud computing could produce jobs boost to Northern Ireland | Explaining Cloud Services in Layman’s Terms | How to Employ At-Home Agents for Your Business | Cloud Computing Defined

Photo by staticontheairwaves at Flickr.com

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So, before I continue dabbling in what I do, let me present Global Services’ January 2012 issue of its magazine and survey that may or will impact the call center industry in the Philippines, especially between the end-users and the vendors like myself. Please refer to the “Source” (below) for access to the digital magazine.

–oOo–

2012 will have moderate increases in outsourced services, including outsourced call center services; two-thirds of survey respondents see a positive year.

The second semester of 2011 saw significant downtrends in IT spending, especially for start-ups and expansions of small and mid-sized call centers in the Philippines. I should know because I lost six contract for my cloud-based call center solution in that period not from competitors but from the decision to forego the set up or simply abandon the entire plan for fear of the impact of the global recession in the U.S. From my rough-and-tumble survey, I’ve been hearing a more positive outlook for the first semester of 2012, and buried plans of 2011 are being dug up for implementation early this year.

–oOo–

Reducing operational costs is still the key driver to outsourcing, followed by creating more bandwidth for strategic growth – the core value propositions of outsourcing remain unchanged. However, the importance of cloud-based delivery models promising to make outsourcing more effective remains the least important priority this 2012. Cloud computing is a “game changer” because of its disruptive nature. That’s probably why it’s considered the least important priority as a business driver for 2012. Still, half of the respondents feel the need to rethink issues in light of adopting cloud-based models but they are uncertain on how to adopt it. So, the traditional way of doing it is to wait until acceptance of cloud-based solutions becomes the norm; then, they’ll start integrating it into their strategies and operations.

The small and mid-sized businesses, especially the SMB (or SME) call centers, have always been the early adaptors of new technology like cloud computing. The large enterprises, always cautious and in the waiting game stages, will now have to slowly integrate cloud-based solutions to their operations; they actually have no choice anymore. However, in-country regulations and industry laws still bar many from adopting the cloud on a large-scale endeavor. An example is a rule or two of the Philippine central banking board, though vague as many bankers say, that prohibit banks from implementing social media as a transactional means. So, an outsourced vendor of call center services is totally out of the picture.

–oOo–

One glaring inhibitor to outsourcing is the assumption that it entails new upfront investments to manage the outsourced relationship, together with reduced budgets. Add the changes to the organization – how will the client’s remaining employees adopt to outsourcing? Will they take the burden of change? So, only if it can be done with less investment and less change will outsourcing be a major driver in business.

America and the rest of the First World nations need to understand that outsourcing is a change that will only go faster; it won’t go away. Therefore, to counter this change, new skills have to be implemented and training the old workforce is key to adopting to the flat and outsourced world. U.S. President Barack Obama’s battle-cry of bringing back the jobs from the outsourcing countries is foolhardy; he needs to hold hands with the academic institutions of the U.S. and collaborate to re-train its unemployed in creating a new job order for America. Note that even if unemployment dipped a little bit in the U.S., real statistics will show you a spike in unemployment for those who served in the military ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. These heroes now back in the states are jobless.

–oOo–

About reduced budgets, these cuts really would be on capital investments and not on operating expense related activities. Therefore, the focus to use outsourcing as a cost-reduction tool will continue in 2012. US and Europe IT spends are expected to decrease to 5.5 percent in 2012, from estimated growth of 11 percent. So, buyers are increasingly trying to consolidate their IT services as portfolio and thereby arrive at cost savings.

The fiscal demands of the business will always outweigh national sentiments and political maneuvering. Cost reduction has and will always be the major if not the biggest reason to outsource. Consolidation has been ongoing for the past years, i.e. large consumer products companies that once outsourced service and support functions have brought it back and be managed internally, insourced yet still using cheaper labor elsewhere. IT solutions to consolidate and integrate insourcing continues to be a tool to enhancing and updating the processes.

–oOo–

Significant increase in IT spends in outsourcing are likely to come from emerging companies and economies. In Q1 2012, 350 companies are expected to invest more than $1B in IT. The main reason behind this is they comprehend that IT impacts their business performance and that there are many benefits to by spending on moving applications to the cloud.

The Philippines, surpassing India in 2010 as the top outsourced call center country in the world, continues to increase this industry by about 25 percent per annum since five or more years ago. This will continue in 2012 with the inclusion of more IT investments involving the use of cloud computing tools and applications. The merger of premise-based and cloud-based solutions will heighten this year with cloud solutions surpassing traditional enterprise systems for some.

–oOo–

The growth areas for BPO in 2012 are:

1. Industry-specific processes
2. Analytics outsourcing
3. Customer care

Customer care will always be at this list; it is something that will never go away. However, more of the business processes once needed to be internally driven have not seeped its way out to the outsourcing company. This even includes analytics and business intelligence functions that allow businesses to keep score of its delivery mechanisms, products and services, to its consumers.

–oOo–

BPO is more of an ongoing expense not a discretionary expense. Companies will continue to look for ways to cut costs out of their operations. Earlier buyers approach revolved primarily around cost cutting without due consideration on the long term perspective, or the approaches will take 2-3 years to see some benefits. In 2012, they will look for a balanced set of outcome or decisions that will help realize some of the short term objective without compromising on long term benefit.

This year, cost-savings due to labor rates is just one of the major reasons to outsource. Outsourcing companies and IT vendors will now have to work hand-in-hand to develop integrated systems and solutions that can immediately convince client-buyers of outsourcing services to select them. The delivery system of the outsourcing companies will now include in-depth reengineering and recommendation of changes of the client-buyer’s business processes than traditional hand-to-mouth delivery services of yesterday.

–oOo–

By outsourcing several business processes and IT systems to one provider, companies can free up cost and management resources while acquiring the strategic flexibility and capability for growth and to embrace the trends to drive competitive differentiation. Therefore, the role of the service integrator will continue to rise. The cloud brings a set of third parties into the mix whose services cut across traditional lines. The cloud has magnified the issues of a multi-sourced environment and strategic sourcing has become not just an integral but a critical part of IT and business strategy agendas. It is not just cloud services; it is all services IT provides to enable the business.

Cloud-based vendors will now become major resources of consolidated delivery services to free up more of the resources of outsourcing vendors and client-buyers. If before that objective was met only on the mindset of “doing what you do great” yet continuing to employ duplicate workforce functions, this year will see a total elimination of the duplication, and trusting the outsourcing vendor to provide error-free and on-time delivery of services.

–oOo–

In the last two years, enterprises prefer working with credible outsourcers who focus on effectiveness than efficiencies. It is about partnering with vendors who have demonstrated that they can create business value – e.g. increase the client’s revenue by architecting new product and services and skin-in-the-game contracts. Now that cost savings due to offshoring and simple process optimization are done, buyers are seeking more value. They want service providers to contribute in ways that will impact their business.

Vendors will now have to up the ante in delivering more for the same price. Cloud solutions will help ensure profits at both ends.

–oOo–

Banking BPO have seen a rising cost of servicing each loan last year. So, they are looking at 2012 to standardize loan origination and convert fixed costs to variable costs. The majority of set ups and expansions in banking BPO will be in Asia Pacific and CEE. We have (also) witnessed a 20% rise in real estate outsourcing services to middle market firms over the past three years. These firms are outsourcing at a faster pace as a means to create operational nimbleness and gain strategic competitive advantage. They also want the services available to larger companies to help their competitive position.

More industries that have relied in traditional means of outsourced services are now gearing up to shop outside their comfort zones.

–oOo–

Call centers with the right people, process and technology will be in a great position to deliver solutions that organization do not have the ability to invest in delivering, or would take years to develop their own operating best practices.

Where silos existed before, a criss-cross and mesh of collaborations will start to happen inside the call center in order to meet the growing demands of client-buyers and its consumers.

–oOo–

Traditionally, call centers are limited by their geography to a job-recruiting radius of about 50 miles, and the hiring constraints that come with that geographical location. Hence, 2012 will see the need for creating a home-based or at-home labor pool that will drive operating efficiency. This model provides a wider hiring footprint with the corporate hub focused on hiring and training that improve work and life balances for the at-home workforce. This concept will ultimately overcome the rigid scheduling challenges of call center-based operations while complementing existing in-center customer care support, providing various types of talent, shifts and scale for seasonality and call volume, regardless of location. So, the suggestion is to include at least 10-20 percent at-home labor force.

Though at-home services have existed for decades, recent acceptance and implementation of cloud-based solutions will fast-track the use of the at-home labor pool. Recruitment and IT systems will need to change to accommodate this change. New processes will be implemented to reduce or eliminate chaos. Above all these, the cloud will be the biggest support system.

–oOo–

A lot of contact centers will be moving to the cloud – both hardware and software. CRM software is already going to the cloud. The global market for cloud services is predicted to surge to US$148.8B in 2014 from US $68.3 billion in 2010. This shows that there will be a huge transformation in the business model of any organization. The cloud service providers should work aggressively on finding out the solutions to cloud security as its one of the biggest issues when we talk about cloud.

As I mentioned above, small and medium-sized businesses and outsourcers have already been in the cloud since last year or more. 2012 will see the larger players start to accept and integrate cloud-based solutions to become a key ingredient in making themselves more competitive and profitable.

–oOo–

Most of services offered by software vendors today will soon be offered as “as-a-Service” because it gives cost efficiency which is acceptable to most of the customers. As such, enterprises will eventually be forced to standardize their processes (for competitive-parity business functions), to embrace the lowest-cost solutions in order to ensure that underlying cost structures meet industry averages. As a result, clients will need to clearly identify business processes providing competitive parity, along with their underlying IT services, for analyzing “as a service” potential.

The cloud has forced vendors to convert capital-intesive investments that end users have to pony-up to a recurring yet smaller expense to the bottom line. Even hardware-based investments will begin to become “as-a-service” offer than traditional downpayment and amortized payments for something that can become obsolete in a year. Most services, outsourced or otherwise, are now shifting to the “as-a-service” model.

–oOo–

In BPO, high performing businesses will continue to extract significantly more value out of their investments if they approach outsourcing as a partnership with their service providers. Buyers are looking at outsourcing as a driver of business value – to help operate their businesses better and to deliver measurable business outcomes – and that is best achieved with a true business partner. To that end, we expect clients to be much more discerning about their outsourcing providers.

I belong to the outbound, telemarketing-type of outsourced call center service providers for a decade. Traditionally, it’s always been a hand-to-mouth, “do everything for me” type of service to sell a client’s product or service, as the client sits and waits for the confirmed orders to arrive. Last year, I’ve witnessed many clients have begun to work hand-in-hand with the outsourced call centers, including but not limited to onsite training (which was once a telephone-based engagement only) and new delivery processes that were developed together and not just by the client. The assessment process of the client have now become more exact or discerning; so, gone are the “wait and see” attitude of clients towards the outsourced call center.

–oOo–

Providers will need to possess industry, technical and functional knowledge. They will need the proven ability to deliver end-to-end processes and deploy analytics in order to identify opportunities to improve and add value to a client’s business. And they need a strong transformational capability by making change management a priority. Therefore, outcome oriented model is becoming the norm. Certain services which are at the bottom of the value chain are becoming increasingly commoditized putting margin pressures on traditional large outsourcing services companies.

Call centers were traditionally seen as a do-it-all type of business, operating under the idea that the technical knowledge need not be brought down to the outsourced call center. Today, clients are shopping around for outsourced call centers that have more of the technical and functional knowlege. An example is for the call center to hire experienced or licensed real estate brokers just to conduct cold calling to prospects; before, call center reps simply relied on the script and delivered this like myna birds.

–oOo–

Enterprise mobility, cloud computing, managed services, machine-to-machine communications, and product engineering service are some of the areas that will witness growth in 2012.

IT vendors need to bring computing power from the PC to the cloud and now to a mobile computing platform such as smartphones. The call center may see the advent of service delivery through the mobile phone.

–oOo–

European and US enterprises will continue to battle rising costs and productivity issues. The hunt is for service providers that can add value and bring a mix of everything-low cost, innovation and overall efficiency.

Cost-reduction is still King, but value-added services at the same or reduced price will be a common-ground battle for the contract.

–oOo–

Healthcare is expected to consume a significant chunk of outsourcing services. Traditional areas like banking and financial services will see growing demand for e-banking, online authentication and automation services. Hospitality is another opportunity area; a growing number of hotels will use technology like GDS (Global Distribution Systems) and IDS (Internet Distribution Systems) to increase online visibility and enable guests to book online. In addition, hotels are looking at outsourcing non-core technology functions like managed services, internet marketing and loyalty management. The bottomline for service providers? They need to have improved domain knowledge (i.e. industry-specific operational knowledge) to be able to play in different verticals.

Consolidation and better yet remote service delivery models through the use of the cloud will become the common factor in providing more for less.

–oOo–

Many organizations want to leverage cloud, SaaS and mobility tools but don’t have the domain visibility to select the best ones or the integration experience. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are starting to invest heavily in cloud, SaaS and enterprise mobility technology. However, few of these businesses have the technical expertise to develop this technology in-house.

Educating the market on what exactly the cloud, SaaS and mobility technologies can do for their business, whether small or large enterprise type, is still a wanting thing vendors need to spend on just to get the deal closed.

–oOo–

2012 will be the year in which cloud sourcing supplants traditional outsourcing. Thereís no question that cloud computing has transformed the way companies do business. Organizations are now sourcing complete business solutions through the public cloud using a combination of cloud applications, platforms and infrastructure. We expect that outsourcing companies will become more specialized in 2012 and will include some cloud-based tools in their offerings.

Whereas cloud-based call center solutions were using the traditional model, i.e. long-term contract, upfront payments, cloud vendors with newer models like prepaid or pay-as-you-go, start-and-stop anytime and freeware but with the same full suite of functionality, will become the deal breaker for servicing more call center customers.

–oOo–

The return on investment for BPO is no longer generated from the reduced cost of a transaction but rather from staffing quality and flexibility, tools, process improvement and innovation that remains inherent in the culture of third party global service providers.

Obviously, with the global economic earthquake happening everywhere, transactional cost just won’t bring back the black ink on the financial health of businesses. A consolidated, collaborative and integrated approach to outsourcing that affects the bottom line are what enterprises will be looking for this year.

–oOo–

Pressure on suppliers will continue, meaning that pricing will be flat – but not down – compared to 2010/11 levels. Moreover, weak exchange rates and weakness of the U.S. dollar, will put increased pressure on suppliers. This could be a good time for businesses to get good deals on contract terms. Increasingly, outsourcing will move away from staff augmentation/time and materials toward output-based pricing and managed services.

The “terms and conditions” will now be dictated by the business owner, not the vendor. So, call center solutions providers need to be prepared to deal with these new conditions business are looking for, especially for cloud-based services.

–oOo–

Eastern Europe and Central and South America are surging and buyers will increasingly utilize existing supplier’s Global Delivery Models to provide time-zone coverage and realize true 24x7x365 support. Offshore players will also continue to expand and/or setup operations in new geographies, such as Brazil, Poland, China, Mexico and Colombia.

The voice-based, English language outsourcing business will continue to propel the Philippines as the number one country in the world (see Why the Philippines is the World’s Top Call Center Country) However, non-voice outsourced services community have been growing and language-specific requirements will be going to new economies in Europe and south of the U.S.

–oOo–

CONCLUSION: 2012 will be the year in which cloud sourcing supplants traditional outsourcing. There’s no question that cloud computing has transformed the way companies do business. There are now two million users of Salesforce.com around the world and 25 million users of Google Apps. Organizations are now sourcing complete business solutions through the public cloud using a combination of cloud applications, platforms and infrastructure. There are good reasons why this happening. Public cloud services give companies much more granular control over their IT environments. They also offer a much cheaper alternative to traditional outsourcing – some businesses can cut their costs by as much as 85% by going down the cloud sourcing route.

Source: Global Services Outlook 2012

Title photo by henrylvreyes at Flickr.com | Emerald Avenue, call center avenue of Manila

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Historically, the Philippines has always been an occupied country. Spain ruled the islands for 333 years, followed by 45 years with the United States in 1898 with a brief period of occupation by the Japanese during World War II until it was liberated by the United States again. On July 4, 1946, the United States granted the Philippines its independence as a sovereign country. Since then, American culture has always taken a frontline in the lifestyle of the modern Filipino.

The most obvious reason why Filipinos excel in the call center world is their excellent verbal and written communication skills in English. The country is in itself the only English-speaking nation in East Asia. Though there are 120 up to 175 disparate languages (or locally known as dialects) in the country, English stands out as the common one. It is the language of choice used in schools for all levels. No matter where you go in the Philippines, when you speak English to the locals, they will respond back in an understandable manner. When Filipinos speak English, we have one of the most neutral speaking styles in the world. Filipinos talk in a smooth way that most Americans immediately understand, with a describable “calm” manner of speaking.

The Philippines’ style of doing business has always mimicked the United States. Our form of government, accounting practices, and legal policies, to name a few, are very similar to the American system. Even the country’s lifestyle reverberates “American” as loudly as it can: Starbucks, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Krispy Kreme, TGI Friday’s, Hard Rock Cafe, to say the least, are prevalent in the urban areas. It is not difficult for an American to insert himself into Philippine society simply because everything you see is as American as it can be.

Being considered a developing country, Filipinos always find ways to fix things and use them until they get old or broken, or troubleshoot problems until there are no escapable solutions available anymore. This trait makes Filipinos frugal with the things they own and do, at home and the workplace. Hence, creativity, sound judgment and common sense are often used in resolving issues and fixing broken things regardless of each one’s craft or expertise.

The culture of the Philippines is all about respect for the elder, including elder brothers and sisters. Filipinos are non-confrontational and are generally considered to be a submissive lot. Everyone who is older is considered a big brother, big sister, aunt, uncle or grandparent, translated into its native language or dialect. The words “po” and “ho” (and its versions in the hundred-plus dialects) are always inserted in a sentence to signify respect to the elder, much like putting the Japanese suffix “san” in people’s names. So, it is common practice for Filipinos to address Americans with “sir” or “ma’am” repeatedly, and in almost every sentence. It’s just the way Filipinos talk.

Now, put these characteristics and traits inside the call center and you’ve got one of the most respectful, “the customer is always right,” and “try as much as you can to solve it” type of service delivery in the world. The Philippine culture fits perfectly with the demands of customer service in the call center world. When an irate customer yells, the Filipino always says “I’m sorry” and continues to be respectful through the course of the entire conversation. When a customer complains, the Filipino finds all means available to fix the problem, sometimes going out of his way to do so.

Outsourcing customer service and technical support to the Philippines is probably one of the best decisions a U.S.-based company can do. Only new technology – systems and procedures – including the client’s style of doing business, stand out as something the American company needs to teach the Filipino. Other than that, everything else about communication and customer service is in place. In a world where fiscal demands outweigh the natural order of things, a U.S. company’s best bet is to use the Philippines as its primary means to outsource; because you can’t go wrong with an American culture and system already in place for the past 100 years.

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I wrote this article early last year while I was employed with a Utah-based hosted call center technology company. It was one of the only two blogs they had (and still have) that spoke of the Philippines and its call center industry. The other is entitled Call Center Outsourcing 2.0.

For the image, the painting is entitled “Mano po, Lola” by Jasmin Orosa. “Mano po” is an old, traditional and respective way of greeting the elderly in the Philippines, followed by taking the back of the hand of the elder and gently placing it on your forehead. You can purchase the original acrylic painting at Saatchionline.com.

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Think about it! The moment a tourist boards a plane bound for the Philippines, the customer experience begins and ends the moment he steps back into an airplane bound for his country of origin. Is the customer experience what we’d like it to be if we were in his or her shoes? Today, I will stand by my observation that the customer experience in Philippine tourism experience is at its low side, not necessarily worst.

Boss! D’ Plane! D’ Plane!

The tourism department and travel service companies take a detailed look into every moment of contact with the customer, from the check-in counter, waiting at the gate, method of boarding, walking through the walkway tube, entering the plane, finding his or her seat, storing the luggage, sitting down, getting comfortable, waiting for everyone to board, waiting more for the control tower to give the go signal to taxi into the runway, takeoff, in-flight services like meals, drinks, reading materials, internet access, landing, taxi to the arrival gate, getting the luggage, walking out of the plane, walking inside the tube, looking for immigration, lining up for immigration procedures, talking to the immigration officer, looking for the luggage carousel, getting the luggage, proceeding to customs, conversations with the customs officer, getting transportation, waiting for transportation, and eventually leaving the airport.

That’s just arrival. Did I miss anything?

Recently, the original international airport terminal, called NAIA 1 (Ninoy Aquino International Airport, Terminal 1), was tagged as the worst airport in the world by a poll made by The Guide to Sleeping in Airports, a successor to the Budget Traveller’s Guide to Sleeping in Airports that has been online since 1994. This travel site were created by Donna McSherry, a 30-something Canadian-born travel agent specializing in South America. Though it was not something that came out of a global news entity like CNN, still, this travel site gets millions of hits a month, if not per week, that the “no vote of confidence” stung the country as a whole. Even Filipino Efren Peñaflorida, the CNN Hero of 2009 who started the novel idea of the pushcart classrooms, was robbed in the airport premises of Terminal 2 while he and his colleague were waiting for a car to pick them up.

NAIA-1 terminal manager Dante Basanta was quoted by GMA News Online as saying, “It’s rather unfair, (dahil) because we are working so hard to improve the services and facilities at the premier airport.” He touted the improvements to include refurbished ceilings, upholstered seats, and a more spacious arrival area. He added, “We cannot compete with other airports kasi hindi naman masyadong modern ang airport natin. We can only do so much with the old facilities.” Well, there you go. The obvious reason why NAIA Terminal 1 will continue to be what it is today. Do you think selling the airport terminal is the answer to this problem? Isn’t that just a “Band Aid” solution?

Where do you think P’Noy should start re-engineering the tourism industry?

Despite the tourist arrival targets of the Department of Tourism, the sad reality is that even the local population couldn’t mistake tagging their airport as worse than what they’ve seen in other countries. We can continue the flow of customer experience with dozens more of the “Moments of Truth,” those customer contact points where the tourist experience spells a huge difference between being satisfied and not at all. Under the Tourism Act of 2009, the Department of Tourism manages 13 operating units and 8 attached agencies and corporations (see Organization of the Department).

Twenty-one direct-report groups and not one can fix the errors of the country’s customer-tourist experience?

Hire a Customer Champion, Not Another Politician

If the Department of Tourism were a large enterprise conglomerate and considered all its potential tourists in the world as its customer, everyone in the department will begin their customer care campaign by understanding and knowing the needs of the client first before any recruitment and hiring, infrastructure installation, hardware and software implementation, process flow execution, quality assurance and control monitoring, and a host of other functioning groups and activities that support their one, new mission: providing the best customer care to the client. Brick and mortar, and wonderfully-made products and services don’t matter without the customer loving everything about the experience.

The products and services of the department may be varied but it must operate like a customer contact division that provides both onsite and offsite services, from traditional over-the-counter transactions to telephone-based help desk support and online means including social media. Its stores are the airports, embassy offices, tourist kiosks, tourist service desk, and many more. It sells the ultimate travel experience like it owned Thomas Cook, the 100-year-old iconic travel agency group which began creating chartered excursions and unique vacation packages. A clear understanding what the customer wants is the key factor to succeeding and transforming the Philippines into a great tourist destination, and not because of only one famous beach, but for its entirety. The experience need not be flawless at the start but constant and consistent upgrades should be part of the job.

The department has to undergo a rash, brash and immediate reeducation of its priorities; it is not about the airport nor is it the slogans and nice videos espousing how beautiful the country is. It is and has always been focused on the customer. “The Customer is King!” “The Customer is Always Right!” “A Complaint is a Gift!” “Customer First!” This is how the tourism champions should think about their jobs. The rest – people, place and process, notwithstanding the product – will fall into place once everyone in the department understands their new mission in life. Think Steve Jobs, his tunnel vision and his consistency of doing things since his garage days. Think Jan Carlzon and his book Moments of Truth, his story when he was president of Scandinavian Airlines wherein he turned the lackluster, state-run airline into a profitable business that won the rave of customers, worldwide. A “Moment of truth” is the notion that a service company’s overall performance is the sum of countless interactions between customers and employees, the so-called moments of truth that either help to retain a customer or send him to the competition.

Stop Policing and Controlling!

The Philippines has always been a controlling type of culture, fixing things by instituting more policing and control rather than getting into the real problem and implementing solutions geared towards lesser problem escalation, more on-the-spot decision-making to help the customer, a knowledgebase of recurring inquiries and problems, customer surprise, and so on. For example, my corporate mentor and Canadian-born John Novosad used to wonder why there was always three people inside the cashier’s booth of a typical store, and finding out later on that one’s for cashiering (the obvious function of the cashier’s booth), another checks what the cashier punched into the cash register versus the actual products, and the last person does the work of the second person (again) before bagging the items and stapling the plastic bag ten times (just to make sure it’s difficult to shoplift). Policing and controlling has never been part of the customer experience – it’s an extreme activity more focused on catching thieves and crooks than it is to serve the customer. It never motivates the frontline customer representatives to do their darn best, knowing they’re being watched behind their backs. Too much cost is being implemented in these two disadvantageous facets of managing the customer experience which could have just been given back to the customer. The mindset of serving the tourist as a VIP customer in the Philippines has to be re-engineered.

Get the Contact Center Industry Involved!

There are a lot of competent men and women in the contact center industry, the fastest-rising industry in the Philippines today, that can help lead, manage and assist the department tasked to correctly sell the country as a premier tourist destination and (then) service these customers at every contact point and customer interaction – every moment of truth – in the entire customer experience. Even the entry-level customer service rep or agent in a typical contact center can tell you how to best serve the customer needs of the tourist visiting the Philippines for the first time. Why? Because they’ve been doing a similar job every day, talking to 50 or hundreds of customers each day, their blood flowing with “The Customer is King!” slogans, philosophies, principles, guidelines, processes and ethics. Many of them live and breath “Customer First!”

One battle-cry I’ve always harped on many of the things I’ve done in my professional life is “To make it very easy for the customer,” a statement that first began with my involvement in customer service led by another corporate mentor, Tonet Rivera, in a direct selling company. The first is “very easy to start” where the customer experience of enlisting tourists to visit the country begins; “very easy to stay” means every moment of truth once they set their foot on Philippine soil; “very easy to earn or gain” doesn’t mean earning money but gaining a wealth of knowledge and understanding about the Philippines, and wanting to come back for more of that experience.

Last Word

I am but a small voice in the concern for making the customer experience of the tourists we are luring to visit the Philippines. We all need to pitch our ideas to P’Noy, the CEO of Philippine government and the person who can start the customer experience revolution in Philippine tourism. Going to and collaborating with the contact center industry segment of the country as a single source of knowledge and professional competency is just one solution. There is a wealth of more ideas that can continue to pour into the national government so it can decide how to attack the problem. Whereas the country was once bestowed the label “Pearl of the Orient Seas,” the country can win back that pride if only it concentrated and focused on the customer’s experience, those moments of truth that make or break tourism, and ingesting “The Customer is King!” Cool Aid that’s consistent with how tourists have usually come to describe the Filipino: always smiling, passionate, resilient, lovers of food, life, romance and festivities, musically inclined, and religious, to name a few positive traits.

“The Tourist is King!” As simple as that.

Title Photo from the Department of Tourism

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My First Apple

Apple II magazine advertisement

My memory of Apple dates back to the days of Apple II Plus, circa 1981. I never got to own the first Apple II when it became popular in Asia because I started the personal computer love with the Sharp MZ-80A, the cassette-driven personal computer that used the once-popular Z80 CPU chip. However, the first personal computer I owned was a Commodore 64 (yep, the 64 meant 64 kilobytes of memory or RAM) connected to my Sony KV1420 colored television with a 5¼-inch floppy disk drive that had its own MOS 6509 CPU, a rarity in its days. Later, my Dad bought me an Apple II Plus clone where he too later spent countless nights playing Karateka, Prince of Persia and Taipan. The Apple II Plus was indescribably the first personal computer to be cloned, with as many as more than 190 versions all around the world – who could forget Franklin’s ACE, Pineapple, the oversized Agat from Russia, and the ITT 2020 that was popular in Europe, to name a few. In the Philippines, most of the clones came from (you guessed it!) China.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage in 1975

I was hooked as a computer hacker only in the sense that we hackers hacked the innards of our personal, stand-alone computer – instruction sets of the operating system, the disk operating system (DOS), and even the peripherals one had to buy to expand the capabilities of your PC like graphics cards, CP/M cards and 128K cards. I was even part of those guys who at one point in their lives slept in dark computer labs hacking university mainframe- and mini-computers. In my hacker world during those days, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates were part of my roster of kings. Though I’ve already read about the Altair computer six years after it was introduced, the Apple II and its successors (before the IIc and IIe came out) were all about open architecture – every the excited amateur was able to tinker with the motherboard, including programming EPROMs to soup-up the Apple. The IBM PC and its successor PC/AT even mimicked Apple’s open architecture. Open was good for hackers, not for businesses. That was the turning point of converting the personal computer into a business machine; and computers were then screwed tightly only for authorized repairman to open, troubleshoot, fix and close it back shut faster than you can spell Mississippi!

The Simplicity of Form and Use

Reading about Steve Jobs through the years was always a wonder because I kept waiting for him to throw his fits of professional fury (“This is a piece of shit!”) or express his boredom in front of boards of directors and men in gray flannel suits. He lights up, however, when it involves rock stars and creative geniuses, more so when it comes to the craziest art deco which he bought for the Redwood office of NeXT. He would invite selected press people to take a sneak-peak at his next invention long before it would be publicly unveiled, only to pull the square-shaped cover to reveal a block of concrete, revealing to the surprised journalist that the cement block demonstrates how his NeXT computer will be shaped to look like.

Steve was about form and the simplicity of use. He may have gotten his simplistic philosophies from his trip in India where he wore the traditional sarong attire instead of his hippie jeans and t-shirts, slept in abandoned places and shaved his head; or his hanging around the Hare Krishna center in California, his admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, his frequent visits to Zen-like centers, and his hippie life in a California commune where he met the future mother of his daughter, Lisa, the name of the Apple computer that preceded what became a global phenomenon – the Apple Macintosh.

The Survivor Hypnotist

Steve Jobs and his NeXT Computer

The ups-and-downs of Steve’s career somehow happened much earlier than mine. Steve is a survivor, getting free meals by having to walk seven miles or sleeping in abandoned buildings and haggling for the price of food during his trip to India. He’s also an impressionable person – he would do his best to impress people but only to those he knows he can gain something from, present day or in the future. Even in his hippie days, many men and women got swayed with his ideas of earthbound or outer space; like his college buddy Dan Kottke who went with him to India and after days of acquiring lice and dysentery would just keep uttering, “Dear God, if I ever get through this, I’ll be a good person, I promise.” The charisma of being swayed, swooped and taken by Steve was like being put in a trance.

Tunnel Vision of the Visionary

I’ve always seen Steve as a product development person and never as CEO material. Boards of Directors got it when they ousted him into Siberia (not literally) during the days of John Sculley, the Pepsi guy who Steve recruited to run Apple for him, using the now famous line, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Between the visionary and the suit, the latter won the graces of the board when word of Steve’s autocratic nature blew up to proportions during the development of the Macintosh computer. Steve, having a tunnel vision in products, alienated himself from almost everyone in the Mac team and outside. Thus, a power struggle erupted between John and Steve, and in the spring of 1985, the Apple board sided with John. Steve was history and he was sent packing to solitude in a building far, far away from where the action was. A few months later, Steve resigned.

Steve Jobs and John Sculley

NeXT Computer was a management and financial disaster. Steve was still a great visionary, way out in space in his creative genius for knowing what the market would need for a computing device – simplicity with power and creative chutzpah. The NeXT Cube was never more than a piece of black equipment that was just too expensive for the corporate world or your everyday consumer. But what glared back to the industry giants was the operating system, the precursor to the Mac OS. Hence, after John Sculley’s demise due to disappointing sales results (at one point, Apple was about to put in the auction block), two more CEOs succeeded John with the likes of Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio. It was Gil who got Steve Jobs back into Apple as an advisor, not knowing that a power play was in the works by Steve with the Apple board and Gil was eventually fired and Steve replacing him as interim CEO. As a requisite for coming back to Apple, the latter had to pony up $429 million in cash which went to the initial investors of NeXT and 1.5 million Apple shares that went solely to Steve Jobs. It was here where NeXTSTEP, the NeXT operating system, became the foundation for the development of Mac OS instead of BeOS. The latter was a multimedia platform that never achieved the market share it was aiming for.

A Visionary Mogul for Creative Products

Talk about a “power play” drama well compared to the “Barbarian at the Gates!” (No pun intended about the Microsoft founder.) Steve was a visionary mogul for creative products, a master of the corporate board, and an inspirational speaker who can woo a following like everyone was drinking the same CoolAid. For one thing, he matured and grew up when it came to corporate life but maintained the zest of tunnel vision for product development and marketing.

Pixar homage at The Nerdery

But back during the tumultuous time at NeXT, when Steve had sold almost all his Apple shares to sustain his new endeavors and a lifestyle of the wealthy, he also bought a fledging company named Pixar from George Lucas when the latter gave up the patience to wait for the next graphical technology to be implemented in film. Pixar was part of Lucasfilm whose objective was to develop technology that could aid on special effects. Always a lover of hardware, Steve thought Pixar had opportunity if it successfully produced a graphics-oriented animation machine that could be incorporated into NeXT. After years of losing money funding the company, Steve was already looking for a buyer of Pixar. Then came the Disney contract which gave Pixar several years of film projects, starting with Toy Story. It was only when Disney decided to distribute Toy Story did Steve decide to hang on to Pixar. The film eventually went on to gross more than $300 million worldwide and history tells the tale of another Steve Jobs tunnel vision success. In 2006, Disney bought Pixar for a whooping $7.4 billion, making Steve, who was a majority stakeholder of Pixar, Disney’s largest individual shareholder and a board member.

Nice Guys Come Last

The glaring characteristics to Steve Jobs’ rise and fall are his tunnel vision to market wants, sticking to your gut, learning to dance with the men and women of power, hiring the best, being obscenely direct, learning the art of motivational speaking, minding your own business, and continuing to be a product and marketing guy even if you were CEO. The last, where some would contradict me, is being an all-around visionary asshole. I mean, is being a good Samaritan and nice guy a quality most successful CEOs in the world need to have? Steve Jobs may have given us several “I” products that changed the way we see the digital world but he couldn’t have done that if he was an all-around nice guy.

Consistency is Key to Success

There are only some, not all, of the Steve Jobs charisma we can carry on into our daily lives because we also need to be who people know us to have been all these years. Consistency with positive adjustments is key in half the success we want to achieve; the other half is intellect, knowledge, intuition and host of other qualities that drive our professional and working careers upwards. Steve Jobs was consistent; despite his failures, he never changed the way he was. He continued running development teams and corporations the same way as he started Apple in his garage with the other Steve, and up to the day he formally retired from his beloved Apple and his recent demise. He never succumbed to the run of the mill and kept his stance on his personal belief of what the world wanted. Of course, there was a love and hate relationship that the whole world had on Steve. Some may have not known about his brash antics but that is now coming out again as the world eulogizes on the last, true, great visionary of computing hardware for the masses.

I will miss what Steve Jobs could have continued to create if he were still alive today. There has always been that fancy in many of us to go with or help the misunderstood when others shun them away for fear of embarrassment or a co-conspirator to the errors of such men and women. Creativity when presented to ordinary people are many times misunderstood proposals; without a champion like Steve Jobs fighting against the established norms of life will we not have products that uniquely blend into our lives like love and marriage does to couples all over.

Rest in peace, Steven Paul Jobs. May you stand with the greatest of all men and women the world today misses and may we learn well from the history of your life you left us to study for all generations to come.

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Story sources: Sony | The Economic Times | All About Steve Jobs.com | Wikipedia 1, 2, 3 | ABC News

Photos sources:

Photo by mgmax at Flickr.com | Steve Jobs and his NeXT Computer
Photo by eduardofeo at Flickr.com | Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage in 1975
Photo by sa_steve at Flickr.com | Apple II magazine advertisement
Photo by BackWest at Flickr.com | Steve Jobs and John Sculley
Photo by nerdery at Flickr.com | Pixar homage at The Nerdery

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