Question: Select the incorrect statement from the options given below. Working in Customer Engagement involves primarily working with:

1. TCS Intellectual Property (IP)
2. Customer Intellectual Property (IP)
3. Partner/ Vendor Intellectual Property (IP)
4. Personal Intellectual Property (IP)

Correct Answer: (d) Personal Intellectual Property (IP)

Explanation:While working in professional customer engagement, employees usually are tasked with handling proprietary assets belonging to the service providers such as TCS, the client (customer), and third-parties that are involved. There is limited or no interaction with the personal IP and mixing it into corporate engagement is strictly prohibited.

While the modern corporate environment scales up and pushes its limits everyday, it becomes important to understand the framework of “Customer Engagement” for professional compliance and achieving excellence in operations. 

Here are a few sections that will help you understand this better.

What Does Customer Engagement Involve?

You might get this question while getting an understanding of the term – Customer Engagement. It forms a bridge between service providers and clients. Customer engagement not just covers communicating effectively with the client, but also focuses on efficient and responsible management of “Intellectual Property”.

While managing a project, professionals usually have to go through three distinct categories of intellectual property:

1. Customer Intellectual Property: All the client’s proprietary data, internal software, their business processes, and trade secrets are covered under this category. 
2. Service Provider IP: As the big service providing giants such as TCS, have been in the market for long, they develop their own methodologies over the years. These help them in delivering value to the client and solidify their position in the competitive market. These can be patented frameworks, code snippets, or business ideas.
3. Partner or Vendor IP: While providing a solution to the client, service providers might utilize a few third-party tools (such as AWS, Google Cloud, or SAP). In customer engagement, professionals have to make sure that use of these tools stays within the licensed boundaries prescribed by the vendor. 

Why Personal IP Is Out Of Bounds For Customer Engagement?

Coming to the original question, what does working in customer engagement involves primarily working with? It is clear from the explanation that personal IP is something out of the scope when it comes to discussing customer engagement. Let’s first understand what can be concluded as Personal Intellectual Property:

• Involves assets created by an individual outside the scope of their employment.
• Anything belonging to the parties involved that doesn’t hold a place in the corporate delivery model.

If personal IP is mixed into a client project, this will create an ‘IP contamination’ that might result in legal consequences for the involved stakeholders. 

Key Pillars Of Successful Customer Engagement

You might be wondering, what are the key components of a successful customer engagement? Well, here are a few points that’ll explain it briefly:

1. Making Delivery Seamless: modern customer engagements involve teams working within specific platforms (such as TCS iON). Understanding of the functioning of these platforms is very important for ensuring a smooth delivery of services.
2. Secure Environment: one of the primary concerns of a customer while sharing data to a service provider is, security of their proprietary data. Thus, it becomes crucial to adhere to global standards like GDPR or HIPAA to build a bond of trust between service providers and clients.
3. Value Creation: the domain of customer engagement does not only cover delivering the required services efficiently, but also involves how well you ‘partner-up’ with the client. This involves going beyond the conventional boundaries and providing methods to resolve any identified bottlenecks in client’s intellectual property.