Time Is The Resource

Gilman Louie of Aslop Louie Partners in a presentation on The Venture Capital Approach to Finding and Driving Innovation points out the the number one asset a VC manages is their time. It's a brilliant insight in that a key input to the process is dealflow, and quality of dealflow. How you distribute your attention thus underpins your success. As if to underpin the point Seth Levine of VC Adventure recently turned his Dash device to silent and found that he felt much, much better, and probably got more work done. In a way, we have allowed the "default settings" of our devices and services to define how the world will interact with us. People are going to demand more control over their interactions. You can't just drop mail on their carpet and expect them to act. There is also a lot of emerging talk on tracking "RSS streams" as they are "attention streams" and thus, one can tell what you are interested in, and maybe even what the "intention" of your browsing is about. Someone somewhere probably calls it "attention stream mapping". From a customer service perspective this might not be a bad idea. If you were a financial institution, and your customers allowed you to see their RSS feeds, a la Grazr, you might see that their "intention" is to discover what is going to happen with Mortgage rates. Being in a position to make an "interruption" that was of value to that customer would thus be high impact. Waking up in Ireland this morning we are now told to expect up to 7 separate interest rate hikes on our mortgages. There are going to be a lot of very nervous people out there this month, many of them will start actively looking to assess and compare the value of their financial products. From the VoiceSage perspective I guess we are interested in when people need or want to be reminded of things and actions they need to take. If people simply "forget to pay" their bills, managing that interruption effectively, and with true value add, could be a really important competence. If I was a mortgage provider I would start pro-actively contacting my "at risk" customers, and offer to advise them on how to re-organize and handle their payment schedules in order to manage my own bad debt exposures.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact