How SMAC has impacted Outsourcing

SMAC is an integrated concept that involves four innovative technologies – Social media, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud. These are considered as the primary disruptive technologies that are driving modern business innovations. A business can utilize the advanced ecology created by SMAC not only to improve its operations but also to deliver enhanced customer experience. By accruing the vital customer-generated data through Social Media and Mobile, businesses can leverage the power of analytics and cloud to minimize their overheads and maximize their growth and performance.

The concept first evolved in the year 2010 and is relatively new. However, many companies are willing to employ it as it allows them to create their own environment, realize their objective of engaging more customers and boost their brand image.

These four technologies operate concurrently to create a synergy, which can play a crucial role in helping organizations to build a competitive advantage, and as such none of them can be an afterthought.

Social Media

The core advantage of Social media is that it provides the businesses with an ability to share their promotional and engaging content with thousands of followers, instantly and concurrently. Effective techniques like Geo-targeting can be used by businesses to find and engage specific segment of consumers. The technique utilizes the parameters like demographics and location to target the right audience. Using the popular social channels, businesses can then invite the audience to try their offerings and utilize the opportunity to convert them to customers.

Social media can be collaterally used with other promotional mediums like websites and search engines. Using various techniques of social media marketing, the volume of website traffic can be increased considerably. The appropriate positioning of the products along with promotional offers can fuel the interest of the customers, which in turn can be converted to increase the leads.

Mobile

Advanced mobile devices like Smartphones have revolutionized the way people around the globe shop for their requirements. The ever-growing numbers of Smartphone users has led E-commerce to be specifically transitioned into mobile-commerce. The ability provided by mobile devices to shop for anything from anywhere has made businesses to lay special impetus on mobilizing their online presence and offerings in even starter ways.

Analytics

While social media and mobile devices have provided companies with an innovative method to do business, analytics helped in leveraging both of them to maximize their growth and profitability. Businesses can gain valuable insights on the latest trends and consumer preferences and identify newer opportunities. Based on intelligent analysis, businesses can customize their content and communications along with their deliverables to provide meaningful experiences to customer and engage them in a better way.

Cloud

Cloud computing offers an inventive dimension to the businesses looking for novel ways to improvise their performance.  With all the data generated and analyzed from social, mobile and analytics, it is critical for companies to keep them safe and utilize it when necessary. However, not every company can afford the infrastructure that goes into this massive data-churning exercise. By providing the processing resources on demand which can be used on shared-basis, cloud computing solves this major problem for small and medium-sized businesses. It also lets users to access vital resources from anywhere using Internet connection, which also maximizes the productivity.

Being disruptive in their essence, SMAC has already taken the realm of outsourcing by storm. Since its inception, outsourcing industry has tried to leverage the huge potential of the concept. By integrating these new technologies into their development processes, outsourcing companies have been able to deliver services with improved quality and higher responsiveness. The new-found alacrity has provided the clients with better agility to respond to rapid changes in both business and technological landscape. With innovative tools to garner business intelligence, companies are constantly focusing on improving their competitive advantage. Moreover, the concept has also helped in addressing the ever-impending issues of industry regulations and security.

With the advent of open internet, security has been a major concern for all the players involved. The concept of SMAC has increased the need for data protection like never before. Earlier, the outsourcing companies had to deal with the issue of protecting the data and devices from unauthorized access, and ensure that the entire IT infrastructure complies with the new regulations and standards. This has made outsourcers to become experts in privacy laws, and regulatory issues. With the need to incorporate the latest security tools and procedures in every aspect of their service that also meet the regulatory and industry standards, outsourcers are mitigating the vulnerabilities much before they come under the focus of their clients. With prevalence of SMAC, companies are now looking out for competent outsourcers to manage their data and IT infrastructure. This gives them the increased flexibility to navigate the global business landscape that is getting increasingly challenging by the day.

Key Takeaways

• SMAC is an integrated concept that is a consolidation of four innovative technologies – Social media, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud.
• The advanced ecology created by SMAC can be utilized by businesses to improve its operations and deliver enhanced customer experience.
• Since the inception of SMAC, the outsourcing industry has tried to leverage its huge potential.
• With the increased need for data protection and regulatory compliance due to SMAC, outsourcers have to become experts in regulatory and security issues that has boosted their image as service providers.