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Transcript of MINDSHARE November 2014
MINDSHARE 1 November 2014
Research And Consultancy Enterprise IMT Ghaziabad
Research and Consultancy Enterprise,
IMT Ghaziabad
Research and Consultancy Enterprise (RACE), formed in 2007 is the official consulting club of IMT Ghaziabad. It is exclusively managed by the students of IMT Ghaziabad under the mentorship of IMT faculty. Its main objective is to maximize the value of the clients by providing insights to their specific problems. RACE offers solutions in five different verticals: Marketing, Finance, Human Resources, Operations and IT. RACE has provided consulting solutions to a number of reputed firms; AMUL, SAF (South Asia Foundation), Grasim, Bob Martin, Test Funda being a few of the clients. The current core team of RACE has 10 members from the 2013-15 batch and 13 members from the 2014-16 batch. The average industry work experience of the team is around 2.5 years. The members have previously worked with well-known companies in various sectors ranging from IT/ITES, Core manufacturing, Oil and Gas, FMCG and BFSI.
Activities: We at RACE have a vision to channelize the efforts of students interested in consulting by providing a common platform for industry and faculty interactions. The club anchors these
efforts by conducting various events and workshops from time to time for aspirants to learn and imbibe necessary consulting skills. Our major responsibilities include interacting with professionals, implementing operational consultancy projects for IMT Ghaziabad, conducting consulting workshops and bringing relevant short term corporate projects. We also organize various guest lecture from many reputed and keynote industry speakers bringing about the awareness related to consulting profile and its nuances. We have associations with various start-ups for providing industry exposure to students in terms of internship opportunities. One of the key and worth mentioning initiative which RACE has undertaken recently is the development of the Hello IMT Mobile app. This app is an attempt to bring all the relevant information for students, ranging from important announcements, and mess menu, utilities and services contact details on a single platform accessible to all at the click of a button.
MINDSHARE 2 November 2014
Research And Consultancy Enterprise IMT Ghaziabad
Contents
Why companies should care about e-care? 3
The Impact of Analytics on Consulting 5
Life as a Consultant: Exclusive interview with Marquis from McKinsey 6
How consulting helps firm simplify and organize their Cloud Services 9
Supplier Risk Management: The ripple effect 10
Consultant’s Lingo 11
DILBERT 12
Guesstimate?? 12
MINDSHARE 3 November 2014
Research And Consultancy Enterprise IMT Ghaziabad
Why companies
should care about e-
care? By Raffaella Bianchi, Davide Schiavotto, Daniel Svoboda
Digital customer service is now a strategic imperative, but its adoption is hampered by weaknesses in delivery strategies and incomplete measurement of its effectiveness.
A European telecommunications
company wanted to lower the cost of its
customer service operations but worried about
the potential loss of revenue from the cross-
selling that its traditional call centers did so well.
In investigating its options, the company learned
that 70 percent of existing customer-service
contacts could be delivered through digital
solutions that had proved effective in other
industries. By migrating part of its customer-
service operations to similar digital-care
programs with a smart strategic approach, the
company lowered the unit’s costs by as much as
30 percent, with no loss of revenue.
Already well-established in banking and financial
services, digital customer care—so-called e-
care—is now making inroads in other industries.
E-care involves the delivery of customer service
via web-based user accounts, social networks,
mobile phone, and the Internet rather than call
centers or facilities open to the public such as
retail stores or service counters. Such digital
services are increasingly demanded by
customers, who are already using digital
platforms to research and review products, as
well as broadcast their service frustrations. And it
makes sense from a financial perspective, too: e-
care has the potential to significantly lower the
cost of customer service operations while
increasing customer satisfaction.
Of course, it’s not simply a matter of adding
digital options to traditional customer-service
channels. In our experience, e-care must be
approached as a one- to two-year multistage
transformation, undertaken with the same degree
of planning and rigor as a major product launch
or other strategic initiative and backed by heavy
initial C-suite support. In addition, careful
thought must be given to the degree of
digitization desired: digital care can be fully self-
serve or involve a mix of live customer-service
agents; not all options need to be available on
every digital platform, and e-care should not be
implemented as aggressively as where there is
significant potential for upselling. Yet we believe
that the rewards of adopting e-care are worth the
effort, and virtually every consumer-facing
industry requiring extensive customer-
relationship management—from cable operators
and consumer electronics to healthcare and
utilities—can benefit.
Getting from here to e-care
Digital customer service has become a significant
factor in both purchase and service transactions:
roughly 70 percent of telecommunications
purchase journeys occur in part or in whole
online, as do 90 percent of service
journeys.1 Digital customer service also provides
superior customer satisfaction: our research
shows that 76 percent of telecommunications
customers are satisfied with a customer service
journey that is fully digital, compared with 57
percent satisfaction for interactions through
traditional channels (exhibit). When you
consider that migration to e-care can, in our
MINDSHARE 4 November 2014
Research And Consultancy Enterprise IMT Ghaziabad
experience, reduce call volumes and operating
expenses by 25 to 30 percent, its benefits seem
obvious.
Yet these statistics mask the fact that few
purchase journeys or service interactions are
handled entirely digitally: according to our
survey, while 41 percent of service interactions
with telecommunications companies begin on an
e-care platform, just 15 percent are digital from
start to finish. Additionally, the rigorous fact-
based management that accompanies traditional
customer-service delivery is often absent from e-
care. In our survey, we found that less than 40
percent of companies track key performance
indicators related to customer experience for
mobile channels and only 50 to 60 percent do for
online interactions. In contrast, a typical call
center tracks more than five metrics to manage
customer experience.
The problem is that companies from customer-
facing industries that deploy multiple customer
service channels too often assess the effectiveness
of e-care by measuring individual channels, when
customers today often move from one channel to
another as they try to resolve service issues. They
may start looking for an answer on the company’s
website before switching to its mobile app,
posting a comment or question via social media,
and then finally turning to the call center if they
have been unable to find an answer elsewhere.
That’s why it’s critical to measure the
multichannel effectiveness of e-care—something
many companies still are not capable of doing.
For instance, how many customer-service calls no
longer need to go to a call center because the
customer’s problems have been resolved through
digital options? How many customers are seeking
service through digital channels only, instead of
using a mix of call centers and digital channels?
How many service requests are initiated in one
channel and completed in another, thus
effectively increasing cost per request?
Customer-service managers should be asking for
this kind of data and examining it monthly, if not
more often, as they judge the effectiveness of e-
care efforts. The paradox is that while 70 percent
of customer-care contacts at telecommunications
companies are digital, they have produced only a
small share of cost savings.
Taking a systematic approach to e-care can not
only reduce costs and improve service but also
bring a company closer to its customers, who now
actively use digital platforms to research and
review products, purchase services, and
communicate problems. Digital customer service
increases customer satisfaction, but it cannot
simply be bolted on to traditional customer-
service channels. The transition to e-care is a one-
to two-year multistage project that must have
substantial C-suite support at the outset. But we
believe that adopting e-care is worth the effort
and that virtually every consumer-facing industry
that has high customer-relationship needs can
benefit from it.
MINDSHARE 5 November 2014
Research And Consultancy Enterprise IMT Ghaziabad
The Impact of
Analytics on
Consulting By Karan Ahuja, Zenesys
Anyone who has read the book “McKinsey Way” on consulting will recall that author Ethan Rasiel strongly emphasizes that consulting solutions need to be fact based, firmly structured and hypothesis driven. So the very first task for a consultant is to seek out the facts.
Back in the early days of consulting, fact
gathering was a manual process. Information had
to be gathered meticulously by conducting client
interviews on the shop floor, all the way up to the
board level and then from subject matter experts
in the industry.
In the last decade or so, a vast amount of
information has become available in form of
syndicated reports and in open domain on the
Internet. This basically has made way for
secondary research or desk research. Consultants
in this era started spending less time on direct
interviews and more on gathering facts through
secondary research. This saved time and
generally gave a higher confidence in the data.
For example, consultants no longer have to
interview sales team at Gillette to determine how
many razor blades they are selling. They can
easily find such information by conducting a few
searches or by buying an industry report on
worldwide razor market.
In the third wave of fact gathering process,
analytics is fast becoming the game changer. To
be precise, analytics is not replacing the fact
gathering process, but rather, it’s taking basic
level facts and giving us the ability to triangulate
new insights in a semi-automated manner.
Let us walk through an example to illustrate how
this is happening. Let us assume that Gillette
hires a consultant to determine the potential sales
for a new kind of razor in Brazil.
Here, one approach would be to build a
framework that would need the following inputs
as the facts (in Brazil):
1. Existing Gillette market share
2. Brand strength
3. Total razor market potential in Brazil
4. Economic conditions and trends
5. Consumer buying behavior and trends
6. Price sensitivity for
consumer/consumable goods.
Item 1, is probably the fastest obtained by asking
Gillette. However, the rest are much more
complex and involved if it were to be done
manually. However, with analytics, determining
brand strength, economic trends, consumer
trends and price sensitivity is not only easy but
much more powerful. All this data can be
consolidated to come up with innovative
predictive models to estimate the potential sales
and the same models can be replicated with
updated facts across new domains (regions or
industries).
If you were a consulting firm specializing in
consumer goods then you would be well advised
to constantly keep abreast of items 4, 5 and 6
because when you get another market entry
project, you have the most up to date facts.
Practically all consulting firms are investing
heavily in analytics and creating “readymade”
online libraries of “fact streams”.
The good news for consulting aspirants in India is
that most of the MBA students are also past
software engineers or have some sort of an IT
background. This is a great help in learning,
developing and understanding how to apply
analytics in consulting.
To get started, learn statistical programming
languages such as R, STATA or SAS. Then train
yourselves in visualization software such as
Tableau, Qlik, Datawatch or Tibco Spotfire.
MINDSHARE 6 November 2014
Research And Consultancy Enterprise IMT Ghaziabad
Life as a
Consultant:
Exclusive interview
with Marquis from
McKinsey
Please note, the personal views and
opinions expressed are strictly those
of the interviewee and do not reflect
the views of the interviewee’s
employers or affiliated entities.
1. For the benefit of readers, can you
give us a summary of your
background?
I’m originally from a small town in Virginia and,
through some miracle, I ended up at Princeton
University, where I earned an A.B. in Computer
Science. After college, I worked as a Software
Engineer for a couple of companies (a internet
consulting firm in NYC and a software and
systems engineering firm in the DC area), focused
primarily on Java development. While at the
second company, I earned my first graduate
degree, an M.S. in Management of Information
Technology from the University of Virginia, as the
first step toward stepping from behind a
computer to learning about management. After
five years as a Software Engineer, I attended the
Stanford Graduate School of Business and
completed a joint-degree program, earning an
MBA and an M.A. in Education. Following
business school, I spent a couple of years as a
consultant at McKinsey & Company, where I
worked on projects in a range of
industries/functions. In late 2008, I left
McKinsey and started an exciting new gig in
Chicago, where I’ve been for two months now.
2. What sparked your interest in
McKinsey as a career? Can you tell us
about your recruiting experience with
the firm?
My interest in McKinsey was sparked prior to
applying to business school as I researched the
management consulting industry. During this
research, I found that McK had a reputation for
creating CEO’s and other business and
organizational leaders, which is what I aspired to
become. Also, I learned that it was known for
tackling mission critical issues for its clients,
which also appealed to me. Finally, I thought that
having a stint at McKinsey would do wonders for
my own professional brand since my first
employer collapsed after the dot-com bubble
burst and my second employer was too small for
anyone to have ever heard of.
My recruiting experience with the Firm was very
straight-forward and positive overall. It started
during the first year at Stanford by attending
several events and getting to know people, which
confirmed my liking for the place. I was dinged
for the summer internship after second-round
interviews, but several people from McK stayed in
touch with me during that summer, which made
me put McK back at the top of my list for the full-
time recruiting process. Fortunately, I did better
the second time around and was able to secure a
full-time offer. My experience was so good that I
devoted significant attention to recruiting once I
joined the Firm in order to have a positive impact
on the recruiting of other candidates.
MINDSHARE 7 November 2014
Research And Consultancy Enterprise IMT Ghaziabad
3. What do you think are the most
important lessons you took away
from McKinsey?
It’s difficult to give a short answer to this question
because I learned a lot in my years at McK. A few
lessons that come to mind are:
1. The Consulting Toolkit — Structured
problem solving, analytics, frameworks to think
about business issues, methods to effective
present/lay-out arguments/analyses, etc
2. Ways to leverage both EQ (emotional
quotient) and IQ (intellectual quotient) —
I’ve heard it said that EQ gets you through life and
IQ gets you through school. I’ve always been a
killer EQ guy, but McK taught me how to
effectively leverage IQ to be even more effective.
3. Importance of developing a network of
supporters within an organization/office/etc.
4. Ability to get spun up on a particular company,
industry, function, or topic very quickly
and develop a perspective on it.
5. Understanding of the impact of professional
presence and tools to develop that presence.
6. Importance of maintaining a strong work-life
balance (I was terrible at it, so I learned from the
downside of it…more on this below).
4. Any last words of advice to
prospective consultants?
As you can imagine, many of my reader requests
are for advice about consulting, so I’ve thought
and written about this a LOT. You know that
consulting people like to use structure whenever
possible, right? So, I’ll break this into two parts:
getting the job and then nailing the job.
Winning an offer in consulting is no easy feat, so
prospective applicants need to be on point from
the beginning. Here are a few lessons that I
learned along the way in my own process:
1. Start preparing for case interviews as early
as possible (case prep guides, practice
cases, mental math exercises, etc)
2. Do as much due diligence on the
different firms as possible(leverage
company websites, recruiting sessions,
industry publications, etc)
3. Develop your “Why Company X is a fit
for me” and “Why I am a fit for
Company X” stories early on and continue
to sharpen them as you find out more about
the firms during the due diligence process.
4. Take stock of your professional, educational,
and life experiences and figure out how to
concisely describe them in depth (this will be
helpful in the fit interviews).
5. Remember that you have a lot to offer
wherever you end up, so, if you don’t get a
consulting offer, the world will not end, your
life will not be over, and it doesn’t mean that
you’re not a high-quality candidate.
Once a person gets their consulting offer, they
should immediately shift their mindset to
preparing to do well at the job. To address this
point, I’ll leverage some content I wrote for an
entry a while back because the readers here might
find it useful. With that in mind, my top-10 list of
tips for soon-to-be consultants are:
1. Be confident, but humble
2. Get really good at Excel modeling (or any
other core skill to the job) as early as
possible
3. Always present the best “you” as possible
4. Be prepared to be pushed
5. Don’t be afraid to seek help when
needed
6. Build a support network within your
office as early as possible
7. Show enthusiasm and interest
8. Always execute on deliverables
MINDSHARE 8 November 2014
Research And Consultancy Enterprise IMT Ghaziabad
9. Don’t be afraid to be active/vocal in team
settings
10. Sign up for frequent flier, hotel loyalty, and
rewards credit cards as early as possible (if
you’re going to be living out of a suitcase, you
might as well benefit from it, right?)
And, one last piece of advice…be prepared for the
strain that the job can put on real-life
relationships with significant others, family,
friends, colleagues, etc. I underestimated this
point going in and was totally unprepared for the
difficult process of balancing the job with the
personal relationships I valued. I still wonder
how things might have turned out differently if I’d
been more prepared for this issue from the
beginning.
MINDSHARE 9 November 2014
Research And Consultancy Enterprise IMT Ghaziabad
How consulting
helps firms simplify
and organize their
Cloud Services By Erin Hichman
To make a grand generalization: Everyone, at one
time or other in his or her life, has come to the
realization that over the years a collection of some
sort has grown to the point of disorganization and
resulted in redundant items. Let’s take shoes as
an example. You buy a pair here and a pair there
over months and years. One day you are able to
see past your desire for just one more pair, and in
a moment of weakness assess your current
supply.
The assessment is alarming. You realize your
shoes are stored throughout various rooms and
floors in the house, including but not limited to
ten pairs of black dress shoes, counting two that,
oddly enough, are exactly the same only different
sizes (Why different sizes? What was I thinking
when I made this purchase?) and that there is a
clear lack of a pair of comfortable flip-flops.
Replace shoes with cloud services and uses, and
you have a picture of what many companies in the
US are dealing with today. Since the “rise of
cloud” (2007 to 2009), companies in the US have
surely and steadily been adding a cloud service
here and a cloud service there. These cloud
service additions have been within the confines of
a department or group without insight into other
groups and outside of the IT department’s view.
The practice of adding cloud services in silos and
based on specific department needs often results
in overlapping and many different contracts with
the same vendors. Adding cloud services in an ad
hoc fashion without an overarching cloud
strategy is inefficient, difficult to manage and
often occurs without consideration of IT security
guidelines.
The result of many years of cloud services and
uses additions has left many US companies with
an expanding, hard-to-manage, overlapping and
ungoverned cloud environment. Needless to say,
this is not an ideal scenario for the IT
department.
To unravel this mess of cloud services and uses,
companies in the US are turning to consulting
firms to understand how to create a manageable
cloud environment that aligns with company and
IT policies. Consulting firms begin where we
began with the shoe assessment example—
evaluating what a company currently has and
identifying redundancies and filling gaps.
Consulting firms’ knowledge of enterprise-level
operations coupled with a broad view of cloud (as
opposed to a cloud vendor, which only focuses on
one piece of the puzzle) allows them to eliminate
overlapping services and vendor agreements and
develop processes and procedures to create a
cohesive cloud ecosystem that is transparent and
in-line with company and IT guidelines.
Working with a consulting firm on developing an
ideal cloud landscape for a company will not only
keep the CIO happy, but will allow the company
to take full advantage of the efficiencies cloud has
to offer, while simultaneously achieving much
needed “spring cleaning” of cloud services.
MINDSHARE 10 November 2014
Research And Consultancy Enterprise IMT Ghaziabad
Supplier Risk
Management: The
ripple effect By Pallavi V. Challa, IMT Ghaziabad
Supplier Risk management is an evolving
practice in operations management.
Organizations which are highly dependent on
suppliers to attain business goals, such as
government agencies, financial institutions,
retailers and manufacturers use outsourcing and
lean supply chain initiatives to reduce overall
costs and expand into new markets, apart from
assessing the effects of a supplier being acquired,
going bankrupt or suddenly closing operations.
Consulting firms such as McKinsey, Boston
Consulting Group (BCG), Bain and Co., Deloitte,
Pricewaterhouse Cooper (Pwc) provide solutions
to various firms to reduce and monitor supplier
risk. According to a study conducted by BCG,
there are five broad levers for the success of
supplier risk management (SRM):
1. Top level management engagement:
Senior management must actively support SRM
and communicate the same to the top level
management. SRM reviews must be held
periodically and generally follow a standard
format with clear guidelines and procedures in
case potential problems are highlighted.
2. Supplier segmentation on the basis of
risk: Companies generally contract with
hundreds and thousands of suppliers; it is not
possible to manage detailed risk assessment and
mitigation strategies for all of them.
Organizations should pick the suppliers to focus
on through a formalized process, divide vendors
into different categories on the basis of financial
health, components supplied, industry outlook,
and time to switch to substitute supplier, supplier
value add and power. High risk suppliers must be
review often, so that quick action can be taken on
identified issues. More frequent the risk
assessment, more successful the risk
identification.
3. Rigorously Measure and Manage Risk:
Collecting cross functional data, such as
frequency of key personnel leaving, disaster
management of suppliers, makes the risk
assessment process more rigorous.
4. Collaborate with Key Suppliers: BCG
consultants feel that few companies can single-
handedly take on the cost managing risk across
the entire supply chain. Disruptions in a
lean supply chain can lead to immediate
financial and operational problems.
5. Tools and Training provided to
managers: Every company recognizes that
supplier risk management is essential; however,
few educate their managers on how to do it well.
Support from technological tools is also lacking in
many companies.
As supply chains grow and become more global,
more interconnected, they have become more
vulnerable, with less margin to absorb the effects
of disruptions and delays. Deloitte has been
named a leader by the Kennedy Vanguard of
Supply Chain Risk Management Consulting
Providers in Kennedy’s Supply Chain Risk
Management Consulting, 2012-2015 report
covering the supply chain risk market.
As the supply chain risks grow more costly, more
comprehensive and resilient approaches are
required to manage that risk. Leading consulting
firms are now being approached o help
organizations deal with the dynamic challenges of
supply chain for increased efficiency, agility and
competitiveness.
MINDSHARE 11 November 2014
Research And Consultancy Enterprise IMT Ghaziabad
Consultant’s Lingo
5,000 mile view: a phrase used to describe a
high-level, summary view of the situation. 5,000
can be replaced by any large number to indicate
the same thing
80/20 rule: belief that 80% of the effects come
from 20% of the causes; in consulting, this term
is used to imply that 80% of an assignment can be
finished in 20% of the time.
Boil the ocean: as the name states, clearly an
impossible task. Generally, a project manager or
partner will say “Let’s not boil the ocean” as a
pretext for suggesting a ton of analyses that in
effect, often ends up boiling a very large lake, if
not exactly the ocean.
Bottoms-up: expression meaning to look at the
smallest units possible to initiate analysis (e.g.,
bottoms-up analysis of a company would start
with its lowest-level employees and then work its
way to upper management).
Buckets: categories; this is the extent of this
word’s definition, so it remains a mystery why
people choose to employ the former term; also
used as a transitive verb to mean ‘categorize’.
Low-hanging fruit: the initial opportunities,
areas of exploration, etc. that are easiest to cover;
intended to evoke visual imagery of fruit-laden
trees, suggesting that much remains beyond the
lowest boughs; syn. quick win.
MECE: mutually exclusive, collectively
exhaustive. A term originating at McKinsey and
common across management consulting firms,
it’s a grouping principle that in the words of
Wikipedia, “data in a group should be divided
into subgroups that comprehensively represent
that group (no gaps) without overlapping”.
Sniff test: as in evaluating food for rancidity,
this term is used when gauging the viability or
reasonableness of a particular analysis; var. smell
test
MINDSHARE 12 November 2014
Research And Consultancy Enterprise IMT Ghaziabad
DILBERT
Guesstimate??
1. Its noon, a professional thief in
downtown Manhattan has to decide
which one of the three stores is the most
convenient (meaning profitable) for him
to rob: a bakery, a flower shop, or a
luxury chandelier store. Assume that the
thief won’t be caught, which store should
he choose? What factors should he
consider in making the decision?
2. How many fish are there in all the world’s
seas? (Not including lakes, rivers, etc.)
3. It is the year 2005. Your client Lenovo is
in planning to set up BPO (Business
process outsourcing) call centers in India
and they need to know whether the talent
supply in India is sufficient for the next
five years, i.e. for the period 2005 – 2010.
You have been brought in by Lenovo to
figure out the pool of people available for
hiring for such call centers. How would
you go about the case?
Note: Guesstimate questions are usually asked in consulting job interviews. There is no fixed answer to
these questions, the interviewer is more interested in your logic and thought process than the final answer
you come up with.