Top 10 Resources for Search Engine Optimizers

Having been in the search-marketing field for quite some time, I typically write about topics that assume readers are familiar with SEO (define). Lately, I've had requests for some information on SEO basics to get Web sites to rank better in search engine results. That got me thinking that in any field, there are always newbies looking for access to good information and resources.

If you're relatively new to SEO or just about to undertake SEO on your Web site for the first time, you're likely looking for some key resources. For the benefit of SEO newbies, here's a short list of some top online resources for SEO -- in no particular order.

* Google Webmaster Guidelines. Right from the horse's mouth, these are the guidelines Google suggests you follow to help your site rank in its listings.

* Yahoo Search Content Quality Guidelines. Same concept as with Google, but for Yahoo.

* MSN Guidelines for Successful Indexing. See above.

* Google Keyword Tool. This is the best and cheapest (free) tool around to help you identify potential keywords to optimize your site for. Supplement the information on volume with the advertiser competition estimates to get a sense for how much competition you might face for those terms in the organic listings. Although the competition estimates are for paid search advertisers, typically a term with a high amount of paid search competition will also have steep organic ranking competition.

* SEOmoz Tools. An ever-growing list of handy tools for search marketers, SEOmoz helps you to do just about anything when it comes to SEO, including measure the SEO strength of your site (Trifecta tool), find out how well your site is targeted to your keywords (Term Target tool), and evaluate the feasibility of achieving ranking those keywords (Keyword Difficulty tool), as well as check site inclusion, back links, PageRank, and much more with the SEO ToolBox. The only downer is that for access to the advanced features of the tools, you have to pay a subscription fee.

* SEO Book.com tools. Downloading these free tools to your computer can reduce the labor required to evaluate and track your SEO efforts. SEO for Firefox automatically displays the relevant SEO info for each site (e.g. PR, inbound links, etc.) alongside your search engine results, the Rank Checker automates the pesky tacking of positioning, and the Keyword Tool (while not the greatest) gives you a long list of links to keyword tools to get suggestions for your search term.

* Bruce Clay Search Engine Relationship Chart. Learn how the search engines are connected to each other. Knowing who the big engines are can help you focus your SEO efforts and avoid wasting time on improving your rankings in an engine that is really fed results from another.

* SEO Chat Forums. This is a key forum for exclusively SEO-related topics and discussions with information for rookies and veterans alike. SEO Chat also has an abundance of useful tools and articles. Newbies should check out a recent posting: An SEO's Experience: 21 Rules for Performing SEO.

* SEMPO Learning Center. The Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization is dedicated to providing education in the area of search marketing. Although it's supposed to be for pros, the information in its learning center is directed more at those starting out in the field. The SEMPO Institute offers online training in all aspects of search marketing, including both beginner and advanced courses in search engine optimizations.

* Intro to Search Engine Optimization. A great Search 101 primer on Search Engine Watch (ClickZ's sister site) by one of the most recognizable names in search, Danny Sullivan, formerly of SEW. Read this to get a good overall sense for what SEO is, how it works, what are the key factors used to rank sites, and more.


source:- clickz.com/

Digital Surgeons Now Providing Magento Commerce Development for Powerhouse Ecommerce Websites

Web development firm Digital Surgeons takes on the East Coast ecommerce industry with the announcement of their Magento Commerce development services. Already with a healthy menu of website design, programming, branding, and search engine marketing services at their finger tips, this dynamic group is now mastering the Ecommerce art form known as Magento.

Magento Commerce is a PHP ecommerce platform with all the versatility of open source code, as well as unprecedented control over online store features and functions. Magento popularity is growing at a rapid rate for reasons that make a great deal of sense. The store keeper gets all kinds of say about how the store looks and functions. The administrative section is logical, clear, and very easy to use. The store layout is built to be all about the customer in every detail.

This ecommerce platform delivers much more than your average shopping cart software. Magento includes a content management system for building new website content pages and managing newsletters; a micro-site builder for high focus marketing of multiple locations and store divisions; an impressive array of marketing tools and options; and a scaleable php site structure that is more than ready for company growth.

The professional service and support that goes with Magento is a very welcome benefit, one previously unheard of with other open source ecommerce platforms. Help with all kinds of questions, integration, start up, and custom website development is available from a lively forum community of users; the Magento development team; and from quality Magento Partners that have learned the software inside out.

Digital Surgeons is a full service Connecticut marketing agency with deep experience in the world of ecommerce websites, search engine marketing, and conversion enhancement. Magento Commerce fits perfectly with the firm’s talents, with a suitcase full of the best search engine optimization tools available and an SEO friendly structure that is highly uncommon with most ‘out of the box’ shopping carts. This platform is built from the ground up with Conversion to Sale as the main focus. Proven marketing elements, based on exhaustive research, are woven into the Magento storefront, incorporating everything that makes a consumer friendly experience.

The php ecommerce team at Digital Surgeons crafts custom ecommerce websites for their clients geared toward each unique consumer audience and industry. Magento Commerce is seamlessly woven into this website tapestry for a powerful online store that sells, and sells well.

Custom development to integrate with other essential software systems, or to further expand on Magento’s capabilities, is a Digital Surgeons specialty. The company also arranges professional ecommerce hosting services and provides in-depth training on the administration of the website for their clients.


source:- webwire.com/

Report: Beware of 'chaos' SharePoint Can Create

A report from Forrester is warning customers to consider carefully how they plan to use Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server product, which they say can wreak havoc in an IT organization when used as a custom application development platform.

The recently published report, "Now Is The Time To Determine SharePoint's Place In Your Application Development Strategy," outlines how, while SharePoint can be extremely useful for creating company intranets, companies should be careful when using it to create custom applications because the product lacks features -- such as in application lifecycle management (ALM) and enterprise application integration (EAI) -- that other, more proven development platforms have.

Also, SharePoint is misunderstood in general, and while it allows users to create their own applications and customize SharePoint intranet sites quite easily, this can turn into a quagmire of complexity for the organization when it comes to managing and supporting those applications, the report said.

This complexity causes IT teams to become busy trying to "fill the product's gaps in application life-cycle management and enterprise integration as they create policies to prevent a new chaos of user-generated applications," according to the report, written by Forrester analysts John Rymer and Rob Koplowitz.

The problem becomes further complicated by the lack of people who have advanced development skills for SharePoint, they said.

In the report they outline several customer scenarios in which custom development on SharePoint got out of hand and became more than a company's IT staff could handle.

In one, a so-called SharePoint "power user" inspired "a reshuffling of IT," analysts wrote. The user built several popular custom applications using SharePoint, assuming that the development and operational organizations could support them. However, they couldn't because it required "specialized skills that neither organization possessed," according to the report.

The firm had to hire a new IT specialist to fill in the gap and expand SharePoint's role in the company's application-development strategy, according to a report.

Microsoft originally conceived SharePoint as a portal product on which companies could build Web sites. But with its release as part of the 2007 Office System, Microsoft has expanded the product to become a hub for collaboration, document-management and business intelligence, not to mention a development platform for building custom intranet sites and other applications.

SharePoint adoption has grown faster than even Microsoft could anticipate, which could have something to do with the lack of people with the skillset to deal with the product. The quick uptake also could have pushed SharePoint into uses that Microsoft hadn't yet prepared the product to deal with.

"I don't think that even Microsoft could predict the adoption rates that SharePoint is seeing," said Andrew Brust, chief, new technology of IT consulting firm twentysix New York.

Indeed, in their report, Rymer and Koplowitz note that Forrester's clients said SharePoint's growth "has caught many application development managers by surprise." They compare the headaches SharePoint sites create for IT managers to how Lotus Notes databases were in the 1990s. Both products allow for the explosion of custom sites and applications that IT departments can have a hard time managing.

In Microsoft's defense, Brust said the company recognizes that SharePoint has some technology gaps and is working hard to fill them, noting that solving the problem of SharePoint's limited ALM capability in particular is the sort of thing "Microsoft lives for."

He also noted that other Microsoft products -- such as BizTalk for EAI and Visual Studio Team System for ALM -- can help IT departments work with SharePoint in the meantime.

In their report, Rymer and Koplowitz noted that while Microsoft is working to fill the gaps in the product, organizations should carefully consider before deployment how they will use SharePoint, if at all, in their organizations.

They suggested companies choose one of three scenarios for SharePoint to make the product work as effectively as possible.

One is to use the product as merely an application for collaboration and sharing information and not as a development platform at all, they said. The second scenario is as both an application and an intranet platform for which the company fills in product gaps -- which in addition to ALM and EAI include issues surrounding the reliability, availability and scalability of the product.

The third and most complicated scenario for an organization would be to use SharePoint as both an application and an enterprise portal at the core of a company's application-development strategy, analysts said. However, organizations must choose this option knowing it will require heavy lifting on the part of the IT team, and also eventually require a transition away from other portal or intranet software that may currently exist in the organization, according to the report.

source:- pcworld.com/

ROI Tools and Methodology Help Siemens Demonstrate Benefits of Unified Communications Solutions

After engaging with Glomark-Governan in 2001 to implement the practice of presenting IT Value to its prospective customers, Siemens Communications, Inc. has chosen to renew its contract with Glomark-Governan to leverage its solution to help demonstrate the value of Siemens’ unified communications products and services to customers.

“Siemens’ desire to re-license Genius® software demonstrates their continued confidence in our products and EVC™ Methodology,” said Todd Whittier, U.S. Regional Director of Glomark-Governan. “Their commitment to the collaborative development of a Business Case with their clients has been leveraged as a competitive differentiator. They rise above the typical “just another vendor” role, and are viewed as true business partners by their clients,” said Whittier.

Siemens has adopted the practice of Glomark-Governan’s EVC Methodology and the usage of the Glomark-Governan Genius tools to highlight the tangible and intangible benefits and value of unified communications to prospective and current customers. With these tools, Siemens’ sales force can build a business case for customers, which quantifies the total cost of ownership and the return on investment of Siemens’ unified communications solutions.

“Using the Business Case Builder (BCB), which is how we have branded the Glomark-Governan ROI tool, has given our sales force a distinct methodology and a unique customer deliverable to help articulate the value of Siemens’ unified communications solutions,” said Alina Urdaneta, Vice President of Marketing, North America, for Siemens Communications, Inc. “This has helped us show customers that Siemens can deliver significant efficiencies and cost savings through the deployment of software-based VoIP, for example. With the BCB, Siemens’ sellers can quantify improved productivity realized through solutions like presence and collaboration applications, high definition video, one-number service and mobility tools. More importantly, the BCB is a vehicle for Siemens’ sellers to better understand their customers’ business objectives, and build intimacy and loyalty among their customer base.”

About Glomark-Governan
Glomark-Governan helps enterprises around the world by providing them with the methodology, training, consulting, benchmarking research, and software tools necessary to assess, communicate and measure the economic value of investments in technology and services initiatives. Glomark-Governan has enhanced and refined its Economic Value Creation (EVC™) Methodology for more than a decade, bringing to market a proven, complete solution that allows companies to justify their solutions’ value, define operational and performance metrics, assess economic risk, and quickly create project-specific business cases.


source:- pr-canada.net/

15 priceless tips about on-page optimization for perfect SEO services

Any kind of search engine score of your site which helps you to increase your page rank or the search engine ranking of your keywords will entirely depend on the on-page optimization of your site. Mainly it is viewed that the on-page factors of your index page determines the rankings of your keywords.

We can say that an off-page factor includes the maximum part of SEO Optimization work but the results of off-page optimization reflect through on-page. Thus this is quite assumable that a rock solid off-page optimization with a poor on-page optimization will not very fruitful for any website.

People have an idea that on-page optimization is very easy and it can be done within an hour. But let us remind you friend, search engine algorithms are really very cruel and it is improving day by day. Thus it is very crucial for your website to do the best on-page optimization for receiving ultimate ranking.

For organic and natural search engine ranking on-page methodologies are extremely important and these techniques are used to define your website business or we can say to describe the motive of your website business in front of all search engines.

15 unforgettable priceless tips regarding on-page optimization

1. URL Naming: If possible try to place your prime targeted keyword as your domain name. This will help you to advertise your business at the first impression.

2. Title Tag: Decorate your title tag with your utmost preferable keywords of your business in a smart and eye checking manner.

3. Meta Descriptions: Sketch your proper business announcement with simple words for catching concentration of the visitors who are searching similar kind of product or service which your website is going to deliver them. Possibly you can punch your keyword into that description but in a tricky way.

4. Crawler Notification: All kind of search engine crawler notifications like SE robots instructions, website owner and publisher declaration, website language, copywriter name etc. should go from the Meta portion of all your web page.

5. Image Optimization: Crawlers are unable to read images and the flash part of your web page but these images or flash is required to influence the visitors. Thus Optimize this images with suitable contents using Alt tags which reflects your proper business.

6. Text Links: Use text links of all of your important pages of your site and if possible then try to avoid flash links, Java script links, image links etc.

7. Keyword Density Checking: Modern SEO services told us that you should inculcate your keywords at your content and maintain the density with an ethical mode.

8. Broken Link checking: Broken links are really very harmful for any site, thus don’t forget to check it first, if it exists then remove that from your site in a quick approach.

9. Static URL’s: Remember that all of your important pages should have short and static URLs and dynamic pages may follow those static pages. If unwanted lengthy URLs exist at your site then replace them with short.

10. Footer: Don’t forget to place links for all important pages at the footer part of your index page. This allows your visitors to jump at important pages with just a single click.

11. Robot.txt: Ensure that robot.txt is necessary at your website with apposite crawler notifications.

12. XML Site Map: Nowadays an xml feed acts as a site map which includes all pages of your site and is really indispensable from crawler point of view and should be confined as a link at the index page or at the common footer portion.

13. Canonical Issue: Nowadays optimization for Google is vastly required because maximum customers come at your site through it. Thus canonical issue should be solved first if exist.

14. Common Header and Footer: a common header text and footer text within H2 tag should be placed at each of your web pages.

15. Avoid Black Hat techniques: Achieving organic ranking and holding it for long time depends absolutely on white hat techniques and we should simply avoid all black hat strategies.


source:- promotionworld.com/

JoomlaCRM Offers Best New Low Cost High Performance CRM 2.0 Solution

Small to mid-size business can easily migrate to CNP's "cradle to grave" application that supports all facets of their online presence and operations. JoomlaCRM handles online business actions from marketing to customer support on the public side, to sales cycle tracking and data mining on the internal side. CNP's application also serves as one of the first hybrid solutions to successfully integrate client needs for social networking and information portals with today's requirements for customer relationship and ecommerce management. Joomla CRM delivers an outstanding feature set complete with mobile accessibility.

The price vs power equation in the online business management arena has been seriously influenced this year by a small web business integrations firm in Boston. CNP Integrations is well known for its talent in Joomla Web Portal development and has been building interactive internet infrastructure for many high profile firms. The company became one of the first US distributors of the popular Info@Hand CRM system in '07 and has led the industry in deployment and customized support of this renowned solution. For '08, the firm has leveraged its own integrations talent by extending the Info@Hand product with Joomla web portal functionality to provide customers a seamless web-to-back-office experience at an incomparable price point.

CNP branding has deferred to the wildly popular open source Joomla community by branding it's solution "Joomla CRM." The moniker speaks to the firm's commitment to the largest and fastest growing segment of the Web 2.0 movement; and an opportunity to serve the customers that need proven, reliable, easy to use business integration. The company has essentially married the two most powerful software solutions of the day into one ready to roll, easy use, quick to deploy package. Small to mid-size business can easily migrate to CNP's "cradle to grave" application that supports all facets of their online presence and operations. JoomlaCRM handles online business actions from marketing to customer support on the public side, to sales cycle tracking and data mining on the internal side. CNP's application also serves as one of the first hybrid solutions to successfully integrate client needs for social networking and information portals with today's requirements for customer relationship and ecommerce management. Joomla CRM delivers an outstanding feature set complete with mobile accessibility. According to CNP's founder, Chris Nielsen, "JoomlaCRM is designed to be, or grow into, everything you need on-line for your small business to grow and compete in a global economy. This platform can be adapted to just about any industry or scale of small to mid-size business. We've been delivering these solutions separately for a long time, but customizing an integrated solution allowed us to harness the real power of these applications, and make it easier for us to support our customers with faster roll outs and greater return on investment." The package provides businesses in all sectors with extended business management capabilities for order, project and resource tracking, Customer Service, Human Resources, learning and event management and much more, with all the power of today's social networking and information portals. JoomlaCRM differs from conventional CRM products in that it offers key features that enable small and medium businesses to capitalize on their ability to be nimble -- and out-maneuver larger companies.

"We (CNP) heard the market's frustration with the long project lifecyles and ease of integration omost CRM solutions. As the demand for social community marketing and service grows, we see the common feature sets that everyone requires. We knew we could make that process easier and less expensive. Our solution offers a more stable, well tested environment, simple programatic expansion, and refined our ability to train customers so they get the most from their technology investment. Essentially, Joomla CRM lets us deliver our customers more power, more quickly, and save them money."

CNP Integrations is a unique business consulting firm determined to empower your small to mid-sized business in areas of current and future Social Networking CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and CRBM (Customer Relationship and Business Management) practices. CNP provides software solutions that integrate online business information for both internal and external stakeholders, improving the client's overall customer experience, brand image and project management efficiencies. CNP Integrations is a division of Creative Networks Protocol Inc. and is a global partnership with US corporate offices in Massachusetts, and worldwide online.


source:- news.yahoo.com/

Managing success in offshore software development

High-end functions like software development are rapidly gaining acceptance as off shore candidates. And as the pattern of off shoring migrates from low-end to high-end work, the challenges faced by the management have moved from dealing with political backlash to more operational issues like retaining managerial control and gaining operational efficiency. As application development becomes increasingly dispersed, those running these projects face a new twist to the age-old challenge of managing distributed software projects. Traditional team management techniques, like scorecards and site meetings, are ineffective and impossible to scale in a world where teams span vast physical, temporal, cultural, and organisational barriers. Managers are finding it increasingly hard to get the facts needed to build a reliable picture of projects and to make informed decisions. Building software in a flat world, characterises this loss of control as a major obstacle to working in a globally distributed environment. I suggest that this problem is experienced by 35 per cent of organisations engaged in off shoring today.

The Duke Booz Allen study agrees with this assessment, suggesting that loss of managerial control has trumped cultural and political issues as the primary challenge for offshore projects today. Absence of factual insight can lead to missed deadlines, budget creep, and a fundamental erosion of trust and goodwill in relationships. The result? Companies waste billions of dollars each year in project overruns, cancellations and missed business goals. This white paper outlines a way for organisations to build a modern framework for managing distributed teams that overcomes the structural challenges of working across far-flung locations, and ensures projects come in as expected—on time, on budget and on target with business goals. This framework reuses your existing development infrastructure to restore visibility and empowered decision making within your globally distributed software development projects.

A tale of two models

Recent hype has blurred the distinctions in offshore development models, making anything offshore nearly synonymous with outsourcing. While offshore outsourcing has garnered most of the attention, customers are also beginning to engage in a model Gartner Group calls ’offshore insourcing’, where companies own and operate the staff, infrastructure and processes by way of organic growth or through acquisitions in offshore locations. While both approaches have different costs and benefits, both are united by the same challenge in maintaining visibility, trust and control when traditional management techniques are applied. The challenges inherent in managing a global team have driven some customers to altogether rethink the notion of outsourcing to offshore third-party suppliers. The number of customers planning to use offshore suppliers is at its lowest in two years: 64 per cent compared to 85 per cent in 2004, according to the Diamond Cluster International 2006 global IT outsourcing study. Customers are breaking outsource contracts in record numbers because of discontent with suppliers’ performance and a feeling that outsourcing deals fail to live up to the anticipated benefits. In fact, 47 per cent were terminated prematurely during the last year, as compared to 21 per cent two years ago. But the reality is that adopting an offshore in sourcing model doesn’t necessarily resolve these challenges. The physical distribution of teams—in source or outsource—negatively impacts visibility and control, making it considerably harder to lead, manage and make informed decisions. "You can’t manage what you can’t measure" is the famous mantra of author of the book Metrics – Reclaiming Visibility and Control. This message is profound in its simplicity, and it has inspired many to adopt a metrics-based approach to management. However, many organisations were ultimately disappointed with their early metrics initiatives. It’s not uncommon to hear managers lament about metrics programs gone awry. Metrics are said to be artificial, inaccurate, costly to collect, and even unethical. And despite the tremendous importance of metrics, many organisations have resigned themselves to failure because of a negative experience with first-generation initiatives. Some of the key limitations of first-generation metrics programs include:

Manual – All data is hand-keyed by people, which is time-consuming and distracting.
Static – Provides a snapshot in time, but doesn’t reflect the dynamism of a project. Subjective – Data input is based on individual interpretations, assumptions and biases.
Coarse – Provides high-level information, but limited detail or context at the process level.
In comparable – Data collection approaches vary from project to project, which limits comparability.

Inaccurate, inconsistent or unempirical metrics can lead to poor project performance and damaged relationships. The key to making offshore projects work is process transparency; transparency brings more predictable outcomes and higher levels of trust. Without process transparency, those running distributed teams are effectively blind, Companies whose instincts have gone stale are like patients with local anesthesia let free to wander the world. They are rational, coherent and aware of their predicament, yet numb. They can no longer sense the world around them.

Company automatically and unobtrusively collects activity-based data from developer tools and delivers on-demand analytics to individuals and teams. These analytics deliver insight into the time spent on specific activities, and provides a basis for understanding team effort and overall project velocity.

Offshore challenges

The following challenges excerpted from Diamond Cluster’s 2006 global IT outsourcing study reflect five of the top challenges managers need to overcome to successfully manage offshore projects. For each of these challenges, there is a relatively simple metrics-based solution:

Limited visibility into day-to-day delivery status

Accurate project data enables you to see where development team members are spending their time, whether there’s a skills shortage, or whether best practices and processes are being followed. Outsourcers who share this sort of data with their clients witness higher levels of trust and lower attrition rates.

Slippage in project deadlines

Accurate and up-to-date visibility into the effort and investments being made provides powerful insight into the focus of individuals and teams and a basis for ensuring alignment with overall project goals

Inadequate work estimation capabilities

Too often, estimation is based on artificial units of measure such as elapsed time. But the reality is that elapsed time is a very inaccurate proxy for estimating the time it will take to build software. Elapsed time estimates typically over or under account for multi-tasking and environmental distractions. Organisations need an empirical basis for estimating the effort required to complete a work effort based on the actual ’active’ time it take to complete a work effort.

Ensuring use of best practices

Best practices ensure you can consistently replicate successful work patterns. But the reality is that measuring best-practice adherence is very difficult in a distributed environment. Activity-based metrics can help you achieve visibility into process alignment and work patterns.

This provides a basis for managing the blend, pace and sequence of work. Inadequate skill proficiency and experience, understanding the breadth, depth and location of specialised skills is easier said than done in large organisations. Use activity-based metrics to document individuals’ experience with tools, technologies and activities in the development life cycle.

Inadequate skill proficiency and experience

Understanding the breadth, depth and location of specialised skills is easier said than done in large organisations. Use activity-based metrics to document individuals’ experience with tools, technologies and activities in the development life cycle.

source:- merinews.com/

Beyond BPO and into knowledge process outsourcing

Organisations have been outsourcing and offshoring business processes for many years now, to take advantage of the lower cost of labour in developing countries such as India or China. Many of these Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) contracts have focused on large scale transaction processing, frequently in 'non-core' processes such as accounting or human resources, or in areas of perceived lower value or complexity.

Recently this trend has begun to change.

Low-value, 'lift and drop' contracts have run into some severe and well-publicised problems. In the UK, most of us have either had, or heard about, a bad experience with an offshore customer service agent usually suffering from inadequate language skills or a lack of knowledge. On the other side of the fence, the offshore call centre agents themselves often face daunting overnight shifts (to field daytime calls from the other side of the world) and a job offering limited professional challenges to skilled graduates. Under these circumstances it's not surprising that offshore staff attrition rates per year can routinely be over 50% and that serious questions around customer satisfaction and operational stability have become common.

As these problems have hindered the development of offshore call centres and even prompted some organisations like LloydsTSB to use their onshore call centres as a selling point, other factors have led BPO providers to offer more complex, knowledge-based services that sit far closer to the core business. These higher-value processes, while still offering reduced cost, also take advantage of the wider availability of qualified talent in developing countries, exploit the benefits of operating in different time zones and allow added flexibility for ad-hoc or short-term projects.

Moving up the value chain
The issue of global talent is key - onshore availability of skilled graduates, say in the UK, is small compared with a country such as India with an estimated 2.5 million new graduates and 500,000 postgraduates entering the job market every year. The price of this offshore talent is far lower than the UK too. In fact, the wage differential between near and offshore skilled professionals with significant experience is greater than that of the graduates with lower levels of skill and experience traditionally hired into the transaction processing operations like call centres. Bearing this in mind, the higher knowledge-based BPO presents a better business case than low-value deals, albeit on a smaller scale. Crucially, higher-value BPO arrangements give offshore workers a far greater degree of job satisfaction and potential for career progression - helping to address the high attrition rates and customer service issues associated with transactional and support processes. Tasks are typically analytical and require staff to be highly qualified, professional and mature.

With many organisations now operating on a global scale, using third-party talent sourced from worldwide locations also means that business can respond and serve customers regardless of the time zone they operate in. The flexibility of using a third-party BPO provider also allows organisations to easily and quickly scale operations up or down in line with seasonal or otherwise predictable peaks.

Challenging underlying business assumptions

The cost savings offered by high-value BPO deals are important, but arguably of greater significance are the strategic opportunities that were not available with the traditional onshore models. Most human capital-intensive business processes within corporations were designed and based on certain underlying assumptions: about the supply, the demand and the price for talent in the geography where the process was originally based. When this underlying constraint is relaxed through global sourcing, the results can be dramatically different.

The idea is that by applying new knowledge, skill-sets or business savvy that were not previously affordable or available, organisations can enable new services or capabilities that, in the past, could not have been considered feasible. For example, one customer of Cognizant in the healthcare insurance industry has been taking advantage of skilled Indian labour to improve the effectiveness and extent of its investigation of fraudulent claims. Previously, with onshore employees the company wouldn't investigate any cases below $1,000, as the costs involved would outweigh that of the potential fraud itself. Taking advantage of the lower cost of labour has allowed the threshold to be brought down to $500, allowing more leads to be chased and reducing margin leakage.

This 'knowledge process outsourcing' approach should also have benefits for providers - involvement in these areas of a client's business brings greater understanding of business issues and the opportunity to serve clients better. For those outsourcing vendors who also offer IT services, there are opportunities to bundle together different services and offer complete packages to their clients, taking increasing accountability for delivering business outcomes.

Cost remains a strong motivator in outsourcing decisions, but the ability to source global talent to deliver business processes brings new challenges and opportunities. Organisations have to change their decision process to make the most of this worldwide knowledge base. They need to ask themselves, not how much more cheaply and efficiently a particular process can be done, but why they are doing it in the first place and whether they could achieve a different customer 'experience' if they had access to skills, expertise and talent at price points which were not previously possible.

source:- financeweek.co.uk/

How Offshore Outsourcing Affects Customer Satisfaction

The outsourcing of customer service to offshore providers has gotten a lot of bad press in the U.S., with reports citing language problems and the exporting of jobs. But, despite the potential for such reports to alienate consumers, this offshoring continues to grow, driven mainly by the lower labor costs overseas.

Are companies that send customer service abroad making a mistake? It's hard to answer that question without knowing offshoring's actual impact on customer satisfaction.

Our research indicates the effect in most cases is significantly negative -- but similar to the effect of outsourcing customer service domestically. That suggests companies shouldn't necessarily forgo the savings they can reap from offshoring. But if they're going to do it, they'd better do it right.

Negative Numbers

We analyzed the offshoring and outsourcing activities of 150 North American companies and business units from 1998 to 2006. As a group, those that outsourced customer service saw a drop in their score on the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, or ACSI, a measure created by the National Quality Research Center at the University of Michigan. The declines were roughly the same whether companies outsourced customer service domestically or overseas.

ACSI scores tend to move in the same direction as companies' share prices. Based on the historical data showing that connection, the average ACSI decline we found at companies outsourcing customer service is associated with a drop of roughly 1% to 5% in a company's market capitalization, depending on what industry the company is in.

That's a steep price to pay. But there are ways to make outsourced customer service more palatable to customers or to mitigate its negative effects, and in some respects that may be easier to do with offshoring. And there are offshoring alternatives that can save a company money without damaging its relationship with its customers.

An important step companies can take to improve the quality of outsourced customer service is to ensure that the provider has all the information necessary to help the customer and full authority to do so. Sometimes, because a company wants to protect information about its customers, the customer-service provider isn't given complete customer histories and profiles. Or the provider's authority to resolve complaints is limited; for instance, the provider may not be permitted to grant credits to customers. Companies need to weigh their concerns about information security and financial control against the damage that such arrangements can do to customer satisfaction.

Tapping Technology

Companies can also make customer service more effective by taking advantage of the technological innovations that some providers offer, and here there may sometimes be an advantage in offshoring. That's because some foreign outsourcing providers have offerings their domestic counterparts can't match in terms of technologies that help guide customer service by recognizing patterns in consumer behavior.

One way to mitigate the damage from outsourcing customer service is to invest the money the company saves to improve the quality of the company's products or services, or to cut prices, rather than simply pocket the savings as extra profit. Our findings suggest that this isn't happening in most cases. Among the companies we studied that had outsourced customer service, there was no increase in the perceived-value component of their overall customer-satisfaction score: Their customers didn't feel that they were getting any more for their money than they did before the company started outsourcing.

Here again there may be an advantage in offshoring. If a company can save more by sending customer service overseas, it will have more opportunity to devote at least some of that money to upgrading its business.

In addition to considering whether or not to offshore customer service, companies should consider whether back-office functions such as information technology may be suitable for offshoring. Our study found that back-office offshoring had no effect on overall customer satisfaction. So the savings a company garners this way aren't offset by dissatisfaction among customers.

source:- online.wsj.com/

Search Engine optimization to get top rankings in search engines

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source:- pr-usa.net/