In praise of simplicity

"Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do" - Steve Jobs

This man walked the talk. He lived by every word he said here and changed the world. I am a die-hard fan of Steve Jobs. He is the one idol I draw inspiration from every single day. The day Steve Jobs died I was inconsolable. It was heartbreaking and an irrevocable loss. The world had not lost a person, the world had somewhere lost a part of its imagination, its creativity, its guts and its zeal. It was the loss of a genius, a guru, a visionary, a legend. They don't make like him often.

Ever since my first entrepreneurial venture, his words "The only way to do great work is to love what you do" - have stayed with me and I chose a field I am absolutely passionate about. It is amazing how a person you have never met can influence and inspire you so much. I have probably devoured every piece of information that is available on him online or offline. This was the man with the Midas touch who changed the rules of the game. He revolutionised several industries including computers, films animation and music. I have always wondered how this man would have transformed my field of business- how he would have used his magic wand on Enterprise Systems.

As a true disciple of this genius I have tried to inculcate his beliefs, values, visions and teachings at CloudIO. In business, you most frequently encounter tough situations, crossroads, hurdles and road blocks. The answers may sometimes be straight forward but at times are also puzzling . This is when you turn around to the world to find a cue, to find a way forward; you consult experts, talk to peers, read case studies, and emulate success models. I often turn to Apple and try to understand their philosophy and success mantra. Over the years it has helped me gain incredible insight to some key business deliverable.

I want to share these insights and how they have helped us at CloudIO. It would really be a lengthy blog if I were to talk about all of them here. So I have made it into a series where each part of the series will talk about one key deliverable. This is my tribute to the genius..

In this part I am going to write about Simplicity of Design, a virtue Steve Jobs was extremely passionate about.

In his book, "Insanely Simple" - The Obsession that drives Apple's Success, author Ken Segall writes about ten elements of simplicity that have driven Apple's success. This book gives a great peep into how Steve Jobs was passionate about simplifying the minutest details related to every aspect of business- be it design, products, or connecting with customers.

I have tried to fit these principles in some of the work we do and with respect to simplicity of design the one solution that is very close to my heart is our Customer WorkCenter solution.

Customer WorkCenter are crucial for the success of any call center. If the call center executive has easy and quick access to information he can handle a call with ease and please the customer he is dealing with. It is therefore essential to have a work center application with easy and comfortable navigation.

Our customer call center effectively handles the needs of the call center team and equips them to in turn address the needs of their customers. The application is committed to simplicity on the technology level as well as the usability and user experience level.

The solution is 100% meta data driven and built with a 100% configurable user interface. It is built with audit logging capability and single sign on capability and is compatible with any J2EE container (Oracle WebLogic, Apache Tomcat, IBM WebSphere, etc). The native multi-user language makes it easy to set it up in any location. It also supports all modern browsers. The solution is protected from release upgrades and takes native support for creation of graphic rich dashboard.

The application's design prowess can also be experienced at the UI-level. It is designed with a rich user interface that provides uncomplicated and swift navigation of data. A unique 360 degree view in the application furnishes detailed information about a customer in one screen, making it easy for the users to handle support calls effectively and respond quickly.

In terms of usability the solution delivers par excellence as the screens are user configurable with facility to bookmark and support event driven action. It is equipped with short key support and allows high speed data entry. The data can also be presented in Excel like grid format allowing personalizing of fields, labels and headings at super user level. The pagination experience is exemplary and makes navigation easy. Our application is IVR ready and also provides a tablet friendly UI.

Moreover the simplicity of our design and the technology used allows our work center applications to be built on any existing ERP without much fuss or downtime. The applications can also be configured to leverage the information from customer's existing CRM. Once built the solution can be deployed across all business platforms and can work on cloud as well as on-premise.

CloudIO's Customer WorkCenter has been successfully deployed for different clients and has made a remarkable difference to their Customer Support team. In a particular case, one of our customers was able to bring down their most lengthy customer center's call time from 27 minutes to 7 minutes! Now that's what great designs can do!!!