The Challenge

The transparent Company – Introduction

Published by Esteban Glas on March 21st, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Business, Web, Web Marketing

Inspired by Mark, who was later provoked by me, I felt the need to write a little bit about the “transparent company” concept and what it might involve.

The name speaks for itself in a great extent; it involves a company which is transparent to it’s customers, at least in its interaction with them. How can this be possible? Is it desirable? what are the advantages and disadvantages of such approach? This are some of the questions I made myself and which I will try to address on this post.

The Concept

To first introduce the reader into this concept I shall quote Mark, who could understand my interpretation of his original post much better than I did myself:

A company’s core functions still operate upon a myriad of different systems, and getting on “the glass” is just one more layer of technology and process. I think Esteban is proposing a complete immersion, a fusion in which those back end systems are phased out and the entire business, from suppliers all the way to the customer is executed on the web. Not just published to the web, but on the web. The apps are all web based.

I’ll further expand the idea a little bit. The main aim is getting applications on the web and accessible not only to the inside people, but to customers, suppliers and partners. The first half of the statement is already partially true, at least for big multinational companies. On a daily basis more and more applications have web interfaces; this can span from human resources to pricing, including back end support and project managing. In most cases this applications are behind a firewall or only accessible through IDs and Passwords.

Naturally then the second part of the statement would only require a corporate decision, a bold one, but almost natural in todays “the customer is the king and he has a voice” culture. It would boost confidence in the company, and generate a sense of involvement from part of those accessing to such services.

Let’s exemplify for a second. We’ll use the cliché of customer support and how it works nowadays. Usually a customer calls in a help desk, he inputs some data through the telephone’s keyboard, and then is asked to speak orally what he has just inputed. Then, its time for the usual “what is your problem?”, “I’m sorry I can’t help you, I’ll pass you along to some other guy who has a different speech on his screen” and so on until some enlightenment (or not) hits the people on the other side of the line and they finally and up actually helping you. Let’s say the problem pops up again. You call in once more, and you face a difficult decition, you either A. go all over the drill and end up explaining that you went all over it before and that it didn’t friggin‘ help, or B. loose your temper from starters and ask to talk to a manager, after which you end up in A anyways.

As you probably know, whenever a call to a help desk happens everything is loaded into a database, with a case number, some details, the people who read their pre-programmed speeches from their screens and how everything worked out. Now, let’s involve the public web into this. After asking if you’d rather have your case public (with customer data hidden) or not. Either case an incidence number will be sent to you, with a URL, in which you would have access to all those notes, the exact same notes people on the inside have access to (this is core to the concept). Thus next time you call in with the same (or other) problem you can point the guys in the right direction or ask directly for that guy who’s inspiration helped you the last time.

Let’s take the example one step further. Let’s say such all public systems are integrated. So, if you bought through web, or through a vendor (remember they have access to the same tools), you have a profile. You can point out your profile, and people on the help desks would know what your historical purchases have been, solving much of the fuzz of detailing all you customer IDs, serial numbers, invoices, warranties and so on. As you would have access to the exact same data those guys have you could even point out if there were any issues on such profile. Every ticket you open on any issue you have would be associated to your profile and the product on that profile.

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