You've been noticed

Just A note

2009-08-20T14:17:00.000Z

Finding a lot of interesting links to research from people on Twitter these days. One of the more interesting questions being raised (in my mind anyway) is "what is the job of customer service", much as you might ask "what is the job your product performs for your customer". I think taking that perspective opens out a lot of innovative thinking.

Lost and Back and Lost Again....

2009-07-29T13:37:00.001Z

And Welcome back.

The New, New Thing & The Old, Old Problem.

Werner, Amazon CIO, said an interesting thing at the last Telco2 in London: "we only look for old problems, and innovate to solve them". Getting your latest newest thing to integrate with the slightly older newer thing, isn't going to deliver you any meaningful innovation. JP has an interesting point to make on one of his recent post on Confused of Calcutta: "The customer is the scarce resource". JP goes into an examination of peoples response to companies that create "artificial barriers" that create "artificial scarcity". Citing a study that indicates that those pirating games do so largely because the "free route" has less "friction to adoption" (i.e. less passwords, less pin numbers, less reconfirms, less etc. etc.), means that it is just easier to go free (if still, illegal). In a way these ties in with something Norman Lewis of Telco2 was saying; his kids made an estimate as to how much the artist themselves would make from any particular delivery channel, and chose the route that compensated them the most. I think both points are related: People Like Fair.

What stinks of "not fair"? Ummm, banning Google Voice from Apple for one. Me not being able to get my LastFm on my iphone (both of which I pay for by the way). If you ask a kid, they can mostly tell you what the definition of Not Fair is, and here's another thing: in psychological experiments children will reject an unfair deal even if it means getting nothing at the end of the day. The child would rather not have anything, than have an unfair deal. And this kind of Fair Deal imperative seems to be in all cultures, it is embedded in our human design.

So when I start thinking about Innovation, and Products, and Services, "what's fair" is not a bad place to start. What's fair will have an audience. What's fair gets a market. So perhaps the "Old Problem" is "How do we create and deliver a business model that is more fair than the solutions we see around us?".

And Speaking of Fair: VoiceSage

The people at Telco2 are lining up more sessions to progress the ideas of the two sided business model for Telcos. They are also releasing a report on Beyond Voice and Messaging which goes into some detail as to how CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes) can deliver significant business value. I am delighted to say that one of VoiceSage's customers is the focus of one of the 8 detailed case studies on the use of CEBP and the customer in question has gone from strength to strength as they continue to use the VoiceSage service and business approach to enable process after process.

There are many other companies now starting to say that Unified Communications is really just a bunch of CEBP's tied together. I've spoken directly to a senior analyst at a top firm about this, and we are of one opinion on that particular "marketing approach".

Real thought leaders are asked to speak at places like eComm uh hum .... and we use these forums not to speak about what we do, but what can be done. I am particularly thrilled that we will be on just before The Umair (Umair Haque) of the most consistently thought provoking, passionate, and genuinely "Disruptive" thinkers out there.

The Good, The Bad, and Just Being Able to Breath

I found this piece on an IBM Forum and thought it worth sharing. It basically says that many CFO's, in even the largest companies, need to have a look at what is tying up cash. Incorrect billing information, incorrect buying policy, or poor compliance with already agreed "blanket purchasing deals" result in millions going uncollected. In the IBM example it was $250m, for one company. GULP. Not giving credit where credit is not due; not allowing your late payments to age and turn into bad debt; not being rigorous about removing all points of payment friction, will cost you a fortune.

(Disclosure: I am an the Advisory Board to eComm).

Updates Will Continue .....

2009-06-04T15:00:00.001Z

A brief hiatus dear reader(s). Just putting together a new blog structure. Meanwhile, why not jump over to @paulsweeney to follow my inane updates.

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

Dialing To Get Things Done: Dial2Do.

2009-04-15T14:28:00.001Z

I have been following with interest Irish company Dial2Do and I thought I'd extend the invitation to Sean O'Sullivan to tell us what they do, and why it might be important.

1) For those that don't know what Dial2Do do (sic) can you give us a brief overview?

Dial2Do is a phone service that's designed to help you get things done, hands-free. It's a regular phone number that you call, and you speak to get stuff done. So you say "text" to send a text message, say "email" to send an email, and so on. It doesn't require you to download or install anything on your phone - it's just a local number that you dial with any regular phone (fixed or mobile). We have about 50 things you can do - from texts, emails (both listen and send), twitter, reminders, and so on. We've put quite a bit of work in to stitch the popular "web" services in to Dial2Do, so you can use Google Calendar, or Gmail, or RememberTheMilk, or a range of other popular web tools and services, all by dialling a number and speaking.

(2) You guys seem to connect to a lot of Social Media services such as Twitter. What kind of thinking lies behind this focus?

There are a few reasons for this. One is that we're trying to "add voice" to the services that people already use. So if they use Gmail, well let's try and let people listen to their Gmail, and send their Gmail emails by speaking. Same thing with twitter, and with other services like Evernote (for saving things you want to remember) or RememberTheMilk (to do lists) and so on. Really our goal is to "add voice" in as simple and intuitive a way as possible for services people already use and love.

Another reason is that we have a partner-driven approach to building our business. So our business goal is not really to get people coming to dial2do.com and using the service - it's to enable partners with millions of users to add voice to their service using the Dial2Do platform. The Social Media services are some of the key partners for us here, and they're very interested in new ways for their existing users to stay connected and engaged with their services. Dial2Do can help them do that.

And lastly - many of these social media services are viral. When an update goes to twitter via Dial2Do, you'll notice it says "...from Dial2Do" at the end of the update. This helps promote the service among other twitter users, who then try it out, and in turn expose it to their followers on twitter. Email, texting, twitter and many other social media services are great for building awareness for Dial2Do.

(3) Have you learned any lessons about developing for a "social phone" that are any different than other 2.0 services?

I'm afraid so :-) When you're developing a "purely web" service, everything is about the web site itself, and making that web experience the best it can be for users. And when you "open" your site, it's open, world-wide, the instant you push the button. It's inherently global.

With services that work from the phone, even ones like Dial2Do that don't require anything to be installed on the phone, things get more interesting. For example: we're open in 24 countries (meaning, we have local access numbers for calling Dial2Do in 24 countries) - it turns out that not all networks pass caller ID through to Dial2Do in the same way, so the system needs to be aware of the vagaries of how caller id might be managed in different places. Or take text messaging: it's a little tricky to reliably deliver a text message (and to ensure it has been delivered) in all the countries in which Dial2Do operates.

As a result, we've tried to put a lot of thought in to making the experience via the phone as consistent and usable as possible, in every country where we have a presence.

I think the other big think with respect to the "social phone" is how to successfully merge your phone contacts with your online contacts (from social networks, or Gmail, or Outlook). No one has really cracked this yet, and whoever does will be on to something big.

(4) In one of your recent blog entries you say that remindering is a popular application on Dial2Do. Are there particular use cases that are driving this (birthdays, just regular to-do's etc.).

That's right - reminders are really popular. I think there are two reasons.

One of the reasons is simplicity: it's one of the simplest services to use - just call the number, say "reminder" and then say your piece. People find it's very habit-forming - every time they think "oh - must remember such and such" they hit the Dial2Do number and do a quick reminder. It's easy and you're done in 20-30 seconds.

I think the second reason is that we've had a focus on the driver. One of our things has been to position the Dial2Do services as a great set of services to use while driving, if you have a Bluetooth headset or a hands-free carkit. And it turns out that people do quite a bit of, well, thinking, while they drive. On the way to work they think about their day ahead, and as they process what's in store, they start triggering little reminders - "must tell Ted about this" or "better not forget to mail that". I guess intuitively we all know that, but we see it in action with how some drivers use Dial2Do. During their morning commute, they create reminders, send texts, add things to their calendars and fire off emails - all en route to the office!

(5) Given the wealth of Interconnecting API's Dial2Do what kind of role do you see for API's in your companies future?

Well there's two parts to answering that. One is, we're obviously big consumers of APIs from other services. So for a start, we're trying to be good citizens in terms of using emerging standards like OAuth and the like, and offering people additional protection for their Dial2Do accounts (like the optional PIN protection we added last week).

Dial2Do of course, is really a value-add voice platform, to enable other players to "add voice" to their own services. And so, we're working on our own API which we'll make available in a future release. Today we work with one or two key partners to trial the API and ensure we strike the right balance between simplicity and functionality, as befits a service like Dial2Do.

(6) How are you going to deal with the body blow loss that Leinster will suffer at the hands of Muster?

I'm in good shape for that game, as both my parents hail from Cork city centre. So it's clear which team I'll be supporting on the day :-) I've lived in Dublin most of my life, but the Cork roots go deep. On a serious note, it should be a fantastic occasion, and in fairness to Leinster, the tag of underdog will suit them to the ground - I'd expect a ferocious battle with both teams at full tilt before a packed Croke Park. Can't wait!

Recession Pain Points

2009-04-07T19:38:00.001Z

The Harvard Business Review has friendly matrix that tells us that all retail buying is now up for re-evaluation as consumers change their mindsets. Marketing departments have to adjust to the new realities with some "old fashioned" thinking:

- Support your brand and brand values, it's "good investment" spend because in the long run, brand value is a huge profit generator for companies;

- Prune products and brands that were ailing in the first place or are unsuitable for current economic conditions. Also prune back to "core products" and abandon weak product line extensions;

- Maintain brand positioning; don't move down to value category just to fill short term revenue objectives, you will alienate your core customer base, and leave yourself poorly positioned for the upturn when it comes;

In deciding which marketing tactics to employ, it’s critical to track how customers are reassessing priorities, reallocating budgets, switching among brands and product categories, and redefining value. It’s therefore essential to continue investing in market research

The responses to recession also include the introduction of lower priced brands; cash incentives, credit plans, etc. etc. I found that other interesting points buried in here were:

REMOVE FRICTION FROM ADOPTION

BUILD TRUST IN YOUR BRAND

BRANDS ARE BUILT ON EXPERIENCES

You don't need to blanket reduce costs by 20%. You need to target cost reduction at the right products, in the right segments in response to shifting customer psychology and the realities of your product category.

Consumer confidence is currently shattered by fear. As a company some of the ways you can begin to think about the challenge this sets is to think about how your customer contact strategy needs to be amended and augmented to build trust in your brand. These shifts can be subtle (i.e. Agent Scripts) or fairly dramatic (focusing on emotional responses not agent minutes as a critical metric). I think that the companies that make the very special effort to treat customers well, and to deliver exceptional experiences, will be the ones that build deep seated trust. Cutting back on customer service will do the opposite.

Business Models, Cheating, and Retail.

2009-03-20T14:21:00.001Z

Taxonomy of Web Business Models: What I like about the wheel below is that someone thought it would be neat to lay it out in a non-tabular format. Having created a standard table, this new view gives us clearer view on what the popular models are. Imagine if you cross tabulated with actual "likelihood of success" measures available elsewhere.

Incentives To Cheat: scale, probability of detection, group membership, and importantly (for me) signaling to ones sense of self, and sense of group. If everyone in group keeps the rules, I won't break them: the further we move from the object itself (i.e. money) and more towards its abstract (derivatives), the more likely we are to cheat, or perhaps act irresponsibly. I like how these ideas could also be related to how we agree to actions, and future actions, in terms of paying bills, keeping appointments, and other social routines.

Retail Therapy: Reinvention. The SAS blog has an interesting piece on large scale retailing and how the downturn is affecting it. Yes there is a need to reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, with fewer available resources and with no capital expenditure, but there is also a need to realise that the actual consumer is changing from a badge wearing object seeker, to a "social customer" that will need to be engaged through social networks, and perhaps with definitions of product/ service that may be significantly different than those we employ today.

Concluding Thought: Wouldn't it be great to see how new web2.0 business models might be applied to "traditional retail" organisations, and informed by areas such as social psychology & behavioural economics?

The Foot is In The Other Shoe, Now....

2009-03-12T16:01:00.001Z

Banks Bid For Your Money !

Great little piece from Springwise on a company that allows you to post online how much money you want to save, and find out what the different rates of return would be like with different providers. But you don't have accept the offers, you can leave it there, and have the banks bid on your money. Ah, that sound nice. If only we all thought about money that "rationally".

Language Constructs Reality?

I've always been interested in the way that people say things. By phrasing it one way, everybody co-operates, and plays nice. Same thing phrased another way, hackles are raised, categorical responses loaded, and your diner party derailed. Ribbonfarm has a beautiful post on how:

Your metaphors, not your financial or mathematical acumen, determine the outcome of your dealings with money

For many in the corporate life 80% of the money we make flows through our accounts automatically, unremarkably, unnoticed. The last 20% we do notice, but we notice it in relation to a notional "high water mark" of about $5,000. In normal consumption, the most we spend would be around this amount (we consider it a lot of money!). Yet, say changing our credit card to another provider, "only" saves us $5/month, the price of Cappuccino, and hey that's hardly worth talking about. Interestingly what has happened is that you have categorised the saving and made an object comparison (coffee, cinema, diner out).

For marketers this is a very handy chart. People don't always make rational choices. The "reward" may be very large, but the probability of getting it very low, yet we still play the lotto. 10 Euro today is inexplicably more attractive than 15 Euro next week.

Entrepreneurs think of money as a goal (Money As Gaol Metaphor). How much money would you need to free from your job for one year in order to build your new freelance business?

Venkatesh has 13 Money Metaphors That are well worth checking out.

Insurance Company Advise You On Road Conditions

Helping you to stay off the road during icy conditions, a Dutch insurance company will text you a warning. Ok. But not really cutting edge is it, even from a customer experience standpoint. By extending the capability you could "confirm" that there are indeed difficult driving conditions in your location (citizen journalism), or share specifics (hyper-local), perhaps through Twitter, or re-publish this warning to others or online. A phone call that gave you the warning with the option of connecting to a pre-approved, and free taxi service would be an amazing service option. Just state your location, and we will pick you up. Now that's service.

What's with the Picture? That financial cataclysm that surrounds us now must feel a little surreal, like our world is out of control. Perhaps this is a learned response set.

Cut Cut Cut - Customer Service. Two Point Oh Dear. Lets all just be thoughtful here.

2009-03-09T11:15:00.001Z

Now is the Time to Cut Cut Cut?

Companies are facing pressure to reduce costs in the face of falling retail sales and demand in the overall general economy. Yet the pressure is still there to deliver exceptional customer service, the kind that drives differentiation and customer loyalty. So right off bat, let's kill some Cap Ex. And while we are at it let's cut 10% of customer service staff, and lets cut some of the resources over there, and there, and there. The problem with cutting resources is you are going to cut the overall (or more truthfully, underlying) capability of performance in customer service. That is because you have left the old process the way it is and took out the lubrication that allowed it to work before. You lowered the water, and the rocks have now stopped the flow. Well, maybe now is a good time to look at tall this "2.0 Customer Service Stuff , Right". Yes, for sure, but thoughtfully.

If you want to truly effect metrics of any kind you have to get into root cause and effect relationships, and for root you can substitute route. CEBP + Reports + Analysis gives you the ability to see why and where variation is occurring. But here's the rub: most of the time you are not collecting the data that you need to in order to control these variations, and then, you lack the tools and methodologies for rolling out a structured testing and deployment plan. If this sounds a bit like "Lean Production" and "Lean Enterprise", then you are right. If it sounds a bit like "Agile Software" and "Agile Programming", then you are right.

It is a good time to look at SaaS (software as a Service) to extend your capabilities without extending your costs, but you should look at the total costs of adopting any SaaS solution, including integration costs, training, specifics on support response times, and any nasty hidden extra's such as "storage space per seat/user", "number of users in a price band", and your access rights to your own data.

Community & Customer

In looking at some 2.0 CRM2.0, Social Media options, some companies might look to Community Self Help Hubs to take the load off the customer service representative but this is (IMHO) not going to work without a full analysis and understanding of true customer Interaction. This will require insights from a number of different domains including data analysis capabilities, sociology-social media insights; and psychology. How these different approaches are harnessed to generate true customer insight will truly separate the winners from the also ran's (more on this below).

One company I have been following with interest recently is Helpstream having been pointed towards them by a Paul Greenberg article. A blog post where the company made some very cogent points and powerful claims for the cost reduction and improvement in agent performance was significantly called into question by a commentator (in the comments section, and posted anonymously. Boo - Hiss). The company CEO replied in full, and convincingly in my book. (a) They published the original comment, which they didn't have to; (b) they gave a full and detailed explanation of the assumptions underpinning their assertions, and (c) they had their CEO do it, and sign his name. This is really walking the walk.

Did I Happen Upon A Twitter Business Model?

Before I talk about it, lets just take a moment to dwell in the Y2K awesomeness of spending nearly $40m without a business model (sic). Then, the cheek of it; to "crowdsource" ideas for a business model, yeah you guys out there, users, you awesome lead users, how about you guys tell us how you think we might make some money out of this? So let me start by taking Mr.Kelly's taxonomy of Free

(1) Immediacy: would you pay to get your updates in real (real) time? would you pay to get superstar - uberstar -realstar updates before anyone else?. After all, some people can re-blog, re-mix, re-message to get further attention.

(2) Personalised: would you pay to have your stream "tweeted" to your "live context", i.e. where you are, who is near you, what is near you, what semantically is shown to be "important". After all, past a certain number of follows the stream becomes pure serendipity, unless you are willing to group, and group, and regroup (which I think Facebook has shown people don't do, and which Linked in has shown they cant do). Perhaps you would pay to have your stream personalised, managed, maximised?

(3) Interpretation: this is the idea that you reduce the cost and friction involved in gaining access to the "raw material input", or in extracting the reports etc., and then charging for the knowledge you bring as an expert. Well in the case of Twitter it is effectively outsourced Interpretation to third parties such as Mr. Tweet, our virtual concierge for "who should I follow" interpretations, but perhaps Twitter can bring other insights as an "expert", or sell "tool-sets" to experts that enable them to be effective deliverers of that service (Twitter -As -Adobe).

(4) Authenticity: the knowledge that "you are who you say you are", or "this is the real-link/report", etc see here. How can we "authentically consume", or "consume the authentic" OR "participate in the authentic" and "further the authentic". Some deep dark part of my mind tells me that "authenticity" + "real-time" will unlock value.

(5) Accessibility: as Kelly says, "ownership sucks", (money, time, resources). Better to know that you can get it when you want, on-demand. So what can Twitter give Access to?: your network (a la linkedin - done); your attention? (the stream - done). Perhaps Twitter has access to higher level "nodal influencers" for any particular subject/ topic/ event.

(6) Embodiment: turning the resources and characteristics, maybe even the brand of twitter, into a physical object or experience. See Twitter Mosaic for examples of people turning a social object into a real one. Of course the "real value" here is "insidership", in that it is broadcasting your popularity of any social network. "Twit Talks-Where The Influencers Meet" an invite only event would make money, I am sure about it.

(7) Patronage: in Kelly's model this means that fans want to pay artists in the sense that "We Are All Medici". It taps a sense of tribe, of fairness, and fairness is a very powerful social motivator. Would we hat-tip money into a particularly good Twitterer? or is "re-tweeting", and "follower base attention" its own reward here? How about Kiva-giving to a particular project when it demonstrates results (i.e. we vaccinated these 20 children with your last donation?).

(9) Findability: with so much flow, how do you know what's important "in there"? Google-in-Twitter for rifle accuracy Semantic-Search for meaning-memes, abstractions, brand moods? or Stumble-upon traffic generation for serendipity?

I Think There Might Be One More Boxes To This Taxonomy

(10) The Guarantee Privilege: You certainly should not get in the way of network-building effects, or restrict assets that have the affect of restricting attractors. How about "Guaranteed": "Paul is Guaranteed-In" so what he says is "True". or "Paul is Trusted-In" so his tweets are prioritised in the stream. Of course, Privilege is a program to which you must be invited, and pay a small amount to use. Being privileged should in the best of worlds add value both way. In a way LinkedIn tried this in order to get us to want to look at others that have reviewed our profile, because that is a weak signal that they want to speak to us about opportunities. Sending direct mail to people you don't know on LinkedIn is a "privilege" or annoyance, depending on how it is used. But if someone "Guaranteed" makes you an offer, or gives you an invite, it would be red boxed and important.

This week I bought a MacBook Air through Twitter. Someone in Ireland had one, posted up the spec and price, and then the next person in their network, and in mine, re-tweeted it. I have been loitering around the decision to buy a laptop for a while. I reviewed his Tweet stream and he was active, connected, and "social" (note, not social media :) I saw one of his contacts comment on his offer saying "yip, saw two myself and bought them". Now I kind-a knew this person, knew her to be reputable, and a techie to boot. She would not buy crap. SO my next tweet was "I will buy that. Consider it Sold".

The glue and medium that this exchange (hopefully) occurred in, is TRUST. Social Capital.

I know that there are "big data table opportunities" relating to some of the opportunities listed above, but perhaps "Social Trust" is one of those base line assets that Twitter embodies in its network. Social Filtering and Recommendation is one way to make money from this.

Irish company LouderVoice do a nice line in using Facebook for the same kind of thing, using Facebook connect. They've just announced a plug in that will allow you to "recommend and review" items and have them posted to Facebook friends. Same reason I bought on Twitter. But LouderVoice would allow me to post my review (and maybe my satisfaction with the purchase") on the VoiceSage blog, and other places I choose.

Wrap Up

So how does all this tie together?

- SaaS can be used to extend your capability without Cap Ex, but you should be careful about estimating the Total Cost;

- To improve customer service you have to re-design it and examine root cause and effect relationships;

- Community of Customers is not a panacea for all service ills. Without a culture of customer service that understands that everything it does will be transparent in the network;

And What's With The Picture?: what you see isn't always what you get!

eComm09 et al.

2009-03-05T11:19:00.002Z

Graham Brierton, CTO VoiceSage, ecomm09 Source:

Well our presentation at eComm has been delivered and you can check it out here. We will post video if and when it becomes available. We think that there are some important points to be communicated relating to the true value of CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes), and the potential future value of CEBP in a Telco2 / Web2.0/ Enterprise2.0 world. eComm is seen as the leading event globally for disruptive telecommunications service providers so we are very proud to be there.

The presentations are put up on Slideshare for viewing and comment, but Twitter is the backchannel of choice for all these conferences and eComm is no different, though less busy than I for one expected (perhaps a reflection of social media participation versus consumption).

There have been a few notable announcements so far, including the open source, royalty free release of the Skype Wideband audio codec which may become a defacto standard in future communication modes (more here). It is part of the Skype-Everywhere strategy, and from an Innovation point of view, well worth keeping an eye on.

Other announcements (here) included the launch of www.grid.com by Jamie Siminoff enabling people to build fairly sophisticated telecommunications-web services. Jamie was the driver behind www.phonetag.com so he is worth watching.

The good people over at dial2do have an interview with me over on their blog is you want to drop over and say hello. Dial2Do were speakers at ecom 2008, and their thoughts on "social phone" and "social media" are worth following. Update: nearly forgot. HT www.sabrinadent.com for all her design effort on the presentation. She tells some of the Elephant Story here http://www.sabrinadent.com/2009/03/05/the-adventures-of-invisible-elephant/

Lets Talk About Data, Data Sources, How We Look at Data.

2009-02-13T15:36:00.001Z

"30% of kids finish high-school in the USA"

(Bill Gates, TED 2009)"

For a long time, this figure was hidden because the system was only measuring the "drop out rate" from the start of final year to end of final year, not from start of high school to finishing high school. Oh yeah, if you are poor, and a minority, it ain' looking too good for you. You have a higher chance of going to jail than finishing a four year college degree. Turns out the big difference is good teachers, getting them, rewarding them, celebrating them, keeping them. A good teacher will increase the performance of a class by 10% right away. It would remove the difference between the performance of USA vs Asia in Education. Seniority, having a masters degree; no effect on being a good teacher. It just seems that some people are great teachers and we have not the first clue why. The only thing we know is that past performance is a great predictor of future performance.

In the Q&A at Ted with Bill Gates he goes on speak about the problem of Malaria and African poverty illustrating that as you improve health rates, adults need less children to be born, because there is a higher chance of having children that survive into adulthood that can in turn look after you (the oldest pension scheme in the world). As family size decreases, the average wealth per family increases. And now the link. Another one of the Ted Talks investigates the predictive power of interventions with regards Aids in Africa: how about this: your likelihood of engaging in safe practices and heath enhancing activities is directly related to your already existing expectations of longevity. If you expect to die of malaria in the next 10 years, then you are more likely to engage in risky practices in the near term. In other presentations, free trade and exporting are also shown as being directly correlated with higher income levels, and longer life, but what if doubling free trade actually quadrupled the incidence of aids in a particular area? The more physical movement there is, the more contagions spread. The take away being that spending $50bn on education as an intervention for Aids, might be misplaced. Its not more awareness that a condom might save your life, but that you will live longer because the system is going to ensure that you don't die in childbirth, that you have nets to fight malaria, that you have access to micro-capital to build a small business.

What I like about these accounts is that they demonstrate that sometimes what you think you know is wrong. The data is "showing you to increase spending in education to impact aids, as education changes behaviour" (sic). We know that good teachers and good teaching drives student performance, yet we have no granularity, DATA or predictability that helps this to be managed. In other words, we have no causality. In (oh dear, yes 'my masters programme') we came across concepts such as "faulty causality", and "statistical artifacts". I wonder how many of these "facts" surround us every day in the assumptions that underpin how we manage our businesses and relationships? Facts such as "this is an unprofitable customer"?

IT Investment As Barrier To Entry

Facts such as "IT helps smaller players compete globally",(Andrew McAfee) and the rise of Free IT such as Google Mail, Docs, and eePC's, lower the barriers to entry associated with starting a business. We hear this a lot. We hear that Enterprise 2.0 will empower the end user, re-shape the corporation, perhaps even redefine what it is to be a corporation. But perhaps it also helps larger organisations overcome the drawbacks associated with scale (over formalisation, speed, flexibility) and actually makes larger companies more efficient and effective than smaller competitors. One of the reasons being pointed to is that technology (and its cost) is one thing, but getting more and better data, and making better decisions based on that data, is another. And the problem with that is that people make decisions, and very often, we make decisions based upon incorrect assumptions, faulty causality, and statistical artifacts with no true predictive power.

Information as As Asset and 'Competence'

Bruce MacVarish has a great take on what this means for enterprise systems. With relatively abundantly available "Technology" (i.e. Technology is not the scarcity asset), the ability to master concepts such as sensing, flow, collective intelligence, and collaboration become key. It is no surprise that these are "soft competencies", "tacit knowledge based", and "culturally embedded". All incredibly hard to develop and incredibly hard to emulate. What McAfee's points out is that the knowledge and data accumulated will have disproportionate effects on market concentration ratios (i.e. there can only be one market maker such as Google, this is the nature of platform economics). So you ring up two credit card companies and ask for another credit card: the first one knows who you are, who your friends are, what their credit ratings are, and asks a friend of yours how good a credit risk you are (via sms/ voice call), and at the end of a two minute call tells you that you can either pick up your card at the local shop (where a card is being encoded, and which is now expecting you). Oh, you didn't even call the second company silly..... the killer point is that they knew a friend of yours that would vouch for you, which had a higher predictive value than any geo-targeting scheme. And thus, the mass of relationship data has a steadily increasing marginally impact.

Processes Attract Conversations, and Vice Versa

Social Computing Magazine has a great example of this kind of thinking in progress and it deservedly received much commentary this week. I believe it contains some "evident truths" which we've held here at VoiceSage for some time: I have messed with the semantics a bit to put our slant on it:

- Processes That Attract Conversations

- Processes In Support of Conversations

"A good example of Conversation -> Process Integration was recent demonstrated, but to elaborate, by pulling Tweets into the SAP Business Suite and applying a sentiment engine to those tweets, a customer service rep can make those conversations actionable by identifying and emerging customer or brand issue. Someone may be complaining about your product or service. With Sentiment Analysis not only can an organization proactively address a looming customer crisis, but they can initiate corporate processes such as raising a Customer Service Ticket to initiate a problem resolution process"

"Going the other way, a super example of Process -> Conversation Integration is the deployment of Marketing Campaigns using Social Channels. Using Business Suite functionality, users can now design and deploy marketing campaigns which can execute over a variety of social environments, including Twitter"

Now I think that this is a pretty "shallow example" of the potentials in the MacVarish model, but it gives you a sense that the big vendors are definitely getting it. They are not "getting it big" yet, to do that, they will have to come along to hear VoiceSage at the eComm09 talk in March, in sunny San Fran. :)

The Problem With Communications Mashups - In the Media At Least

2009-01-30T12:17:00.001Z

IBM have a lovely new report on Telco2 (oops, Telco with a Focus on Web 2.0) and they immediately draw our attention to the imperative for innovation around the actual core business model of the Telco/ enterprise. Revenue growth also shares significant top of mind, while cost take out takes a back seat.

This is followed up in the media (CNN Money no less) by a joint IBM - Avaya story around the IBM Mashup Centre Capability.

As demonstrated by Avaya, a mashup prototype for field engineering managers enables them to check for new customer problems, assign field engineers, review status of ongoing problems, and, if necessary, contact the assigned engineer or customer using e-mail, short message service (SMS) or click-to-call, all from a single Web page. When contacting the customer by phone, the engineering manager can then click the "add" button to quickly bring other participants into a conference call.

Now I am not blowing our own horn by saying that you can do all this with VoiceSage right now, but what is definitely interesting is that they make such a big deal out of "getting at the enterprise data", previously, so cleverly locked away, (sorry locked down), buy (sorry 'by') the software vendors. They also, clearly "get" that enterprise data, and web-native data, will need to mind-meld. They also "get" that enterprise mashups are going to have "security" front and centre. It all sounds good. Oh, and if you think any of this is divorced from happenings in the world of the iPhone, Nuance and IBM have done a deal in relation to speech recognition and IVR etc. so watch speech recognition and speech navigation enter the on-demand, enterprise mashup toolkit.

Now here's the take away: To do this well IBM-Avaya-Other ecosystem has to completely seek to break out of the silo - websphere support strategy (IHMH). Go to ProgrammableWeb.com and look at what people are building: let me give you a clue, it involves Google maps and little else. Something is wrong in the world of Mashups and nobody has quite cracked it yet. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says "I really feel like a mashup today", a fry maybe, but not a mashup.

VoiceSage does this Customer Logistics 2.0 piece day in day out, and I can tell you that our customers are definitely concerned with issues such as "number of late deliveries", "number of no shows", but at the end of the day, you do very well indeed to point out 10 fold reduction in costs. Cost Take Out is way, way more important right now than using Enterprise 2.0 for potential revenue generation. I like the idea of integration of enterprise data with web data and I for one look forward to seeing examples of companies going from "no IBM enterprise software", and "No integration partner" in the mainstream media. The IBM approach presented in these instances above seems to me to be more "Enterprise Forklift Upgrade - Engagement Strategy" to be sold to CIO's, than true "E2.0 Thinking".

For a different perspective, and one I think has merit, see WIPRO white paper on it here.

Meanwhile, Somewhere Else in The Cloud

Dion Hinchcliffe (big time HT's this week) points us towards CloudMQ, an enterprise class messaging (queuing) service. Interestingly it sits entirely in Amazon cloud, but I am guessing that like Joyent, these guys are looking to be cloud-platform-agnostic (for complete data and application portability).

Jim Courtney over at SkypeJournal reports that Lotus Live and Skype partner up for collaboration in the cloud, part of the 'Skype everywhere' strategy. What was neat about this (for me) is that Skype point out that Skype is a great way of working with outsourcers and subcontractors globally. Indeed it is. This makes the integration very interesting. Companies have already adapted their behaviour now all IBM has to do is make Lotus relevant to that workflow. Jim goes on to quote Andy Abramson that this is "being embedded into an offering that is key to IBM's future success in delivering cloud-based outsourced business services". Lets look at that again: Skype being embedded into IBM is key to IBM's outsourcing success. On a conference call from eComm09 this week, Skype pointed out that over 10% of their users now use it for Conference calling. That's huge.

So Is Any of This IBM Stuff Actually E2.0-Cool?

C'mon, it's IBM and Avaya and their are very smart cookies working there (sic). Bruce McVarish points out to "IBM's Social Networks & Discovery (SaND) research and their focus on filter improvements to identify contextually relevant people, documents and expertise within the enterprise". Basically, the system enables you to see the relationships between people, tags, and documents (i.e. is socially aware). More here. So imagine you are on a Skype call to India with a software contractor, and you can hover over the name, and see others in your social network that have recommended that person, or hover over the link to the document they are sending you to see other documents or presentations that might be useful to you? Oh, yeah you can already do some of that through the LinkedIn integration but its all that stuff locked up behind the firewall that you are trying to get at (if you are a big organisation). So all this "context" stuff and "sensing" is going to be important? :)

And Back To The Business Model

So where did we start this, oh yeah, Business Model Innovation. To be truly innovative companies need to find new ways of generating value, not of shifting value along the value chain (in the case of developer channel decimation in the face of mashup potential, and for Telco's minutes calling revenues in the case of international calling). If you are an integrator, you will not be able to charge what you were charging before. The "value proposition" was in the fact that their was friction between systems, and you had to be trained, and experienced in dealing with them. I suspect Integrators will extract 1/10th of the value they previously did from enterprise integrations. So this is value destruction for Systems Integrators. Calling from Skype to Skype, SkypeOut, Skype Conference Calling is value destruction for Telco's, premier Conferencing providers, and potentially for Unified Communications Providers. There is no longer "special sauce" involved in making all these systems gel together.

Generating new value is where the real strategic challenge is, and this means tapping into global social change. Here's some companies that are in strategic decay because they are demonstrating a lack of purpose. Here's one example from that list - The Swiss company Roche makes a range of HIV-related drugs:

Roche charges $25,000 a year for Fuzeon. It does not offer a discount price for developing countries. Like most industrialized countries, South Korea maintains a form of price controls. The national health insurance program sets prices for medicines, and the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Family Affairs listed Fuzeon at $18,000 a year. South Korea’s per capita income is roughly half that of the United States. Instead of providing Fuzeon at South Korea’s listed level—and still turning a profit—Roche refuses to make the drug available in South Korea. South Korean activists report that the head of Roche Korea told them, “We are not in business to save lives, but to make money. Saving lives is not our business.”

Lovely. And guess what, we Trust companies, governments and institutions less than ever. A "catastrophic decline" in the USA, but higher levels of trust emerging in the developing economics (BRIC). In Europe Finance, Auto, Utilities are particularly badly hit. Perhaps, activities designed to build trust relationships will be the true corporate asset of the future, and perhaps, how we use technology and communications to build these trust relationships, would be an interesting starting place.

IGO People - IGO Here

2009-01-27T16:24:00.001Z

I've been in conversation with the IGOPeople people for a while now and their site launch has impressed me for a number of reasons. But first, the strategic positioning: IGOPeople is a space where conversations between individuals, groups, and organisations can be seen, and followed, and published. In my opinion, its part of this new social media / CRM2.0/ Social CRM thing. As I said, I've spoken with the IGO-Peeps and they have a pretty deep vision for the site. Here's what has impressed me to date:

- It looks pretty damn good and its damned easy to sign up and get started (low adoption friction);

- Conversations are flows;

- Conversations are facilitated from within IGO, or can flow from "outside-into-IGO". Loads of examples of from Twitter to IGO and IGO out to Twitter (DellCamp being one example);

- They have managed to entice some pretty major companies to try out this "new type of conversation" and they are obviously experimenting with different engagement models;

- They have "Individual's" conversation flows going, and that's pretty hard to do (HT to Campbell Scott for making that happen).

Best of Luck to Them. You have to ask yourself why a company wouldn't want to at least experiment with this.

eComm09 - Going, Going, Going...

2009-01-26T12:13:00.001Z

Prompted by Alan Quayle here I thought I'd put up a few reasons we are interested in going to eComm09 in March.

Ed Fontana of the Android Developer, Commuter Community Android App is speaking about "Intervals of Interest" and how it affects the design of mobile applications. I have a background (both practical and research based) in the Lean Production values of the Automotive industry, so I think this talk should be fascinating because it has as its centre the concept of reducing friction in social interactions.

Shai Berger from Fonolo will be looking back on a year of "deep dialing" . Fonolo is a great favourite with the guys from Telco2.0 because it also "reduced friction" in the interaction. The problem is kind-of simple (which all great problems are): you want to speak to a particular part of the customer service organisation, but you have to go through all the IVR menu's to get there. Fonolo enables you to direct dial the desired destination because they have mapped that company's system. At VoiceSage we've taken advantage of this kind of thinking as well because when we map out a process (or more to the point, when you map out your own process) you can assign a deep dial as one of the process steps. One instance where this is used is where a person has been called and asked if they wish to make a payment as part of a process. Previous steps may have specified how much that person wishes to pay, their account details, or the currency etc. When linking to an Autopay solution we "deep dial" that IVR and forward the relevant details so you don't have to ask for them again.

Irv Shapiro of IfByPhone will be speaking about Voice Services in the cloud. IfByPhone grabbed some attention last year by integrating their click2call capability with Google Analytics so that you could evaluate the ultimate effectiveness of your click strategy. Irv will be demonstrating some of his business cases and speaking about the technology architecture.

There are some "hardcore network" sessions and some pretty cutting edge ones on mobile wireless that I would love to sit in on, and mostly not understand. One good reason why we are sending our CTO Graham Brierton to the conference where he will be giving a very, very interesting talk on some of our next generation thinking.

The Picture?: If you are wondering what the picture is about, some of the things you will see at eComm09 are the early evidence of some big shifts that are lurking their under the Telco waters....

Welcome 2009

2009-01-05T15:56:00.001Z

Quick Note

Let me begin by saying a quick thanks to all of you that read this blog. 2008 was a great year for VoiceSage. We have many new clients on board and I hope to be able to bring you some stories and research based on their experiences to date. We will also be running a series of webinars and conference calls to discuss issues relating to how you can get even more from the VoiceSage service, so if any of you reading this are interested, why not drop us an email or phone call and we will see what we can do to fit you in.

Credit Crunch To Precipitate Change In Buying Behaviour?

Jeff Nolan over on Venture Chronicles makes a good point about 2009 and the effect of the credit crunch: people behave differently when spending their own saved cash than when spending on credit. This will result in people turning to Utility in their purchasing. Although my head tells me "true", another older, atavistic, marketing brain tells me, if so, why are people still buying Fendi handbags? I think that marketing and customer service people are going to have to embrace the concepts of connectiveness and social media even more when its not the price that matters, its your confidence that this is the right price. Thus, I think we will see more use of (mobile) coupons, we will see more use of iPhone/N95/Blackberry applications that scan a barcode and compare prices/ tell you what friends bought this/ etc. etc.

Credit Card Fraud: Get Pro-Active

Not that I think crime is a direct substitute product for work but there is no denying that as times get harder, crime rates will rise, and we will see increased fraud attempts. There are some super practical tips on protecting yourself from Credit Card Fraud from Light Blue Touchpaper. I found one or two of the comments especially interesting: (1) If you can personalise your card, or you get a card that is designed to demonstrate success, are you signaling that this is a good card to target? (2) If you are a particular type of person, or travelling in a dodgy area, why can't you elect to get a phone verification on every purchase?

The Future is Social (and Green, and Friendly, and all That)

Paul Greenberg has a great end of year review of CRM, where he points out InsideView and Landslide. What I love about InsideView is that its liked a "link-weighted" search strategy for people (uh, yeah, what LinkedIn should have). Paul also points out HelpStream which he reckons is the prime example of a CRM 2.0 play that truly gets it. It makes total sense as long as you understand that not all the information pertinent to every decision you make resides within your own organisation. It also makes sense that not all the knowledge/ skills you need to service your customers might reside within your organisation. And as it happens there is no need to throw my two pence/ cent/ cents worth into this, because a recent series of posts by Bruce McVarish does it all so well. Enjoy.

I picked up New Scientist this month and its theme of your social network influences you more than you know caught my eye (and reverberated with a RWW article on how smiling Facebook photo may indicated you may have more friends, and that happiness clusters). If it can be scientifically shown that 1st, 2nd and 3rd order contacts can actually influence our mood, and propensity for happiness, those that are able to attract the network to them and act as a co-coordinating node, will be those that succeed.

Note On Image: Symbolic Consumption will remain as strong an influence as ever in 2009 and beyond.

All Roads Lead To RSS, Enterprise Data Capture and Release Scheme...

2008-12-18T14:56:00.001Z

The ever excellent RRW reports a study that shows that the kids like gmail, and sms. Awesome. Also, that corporate types are obsessed with checking their email. What I found interesting though was that the kids used email to get updates from their social network and other types of alerts. I suspect that like me, they have many groups, clubs, networks that they are members of, and that email is a pretty good place to aggregate the flow of alerts. Which leads me to wonder if gmail will just email me a report at the end of every working day, telling me "what's going on, and what needs responding to".

In what must be one of the coolest company names I have come across in a while Cynapse brings these kinds of activity flows to the desktop. It alerts you as to the change in status of many of the objects and relationships in your corporate environment, which are relevant to you and your team. What I like about it is that it is an example of "loosely coupled, tightly integrated" where you could choose to use it for simple "group notification streams", or more tightly integrate it with an Enterprise wide collaboration capability. As one of the commentators says though, its hard to see where this adds value beyond being an interesting way to present RSS feed activity generated by people and systems.

Again, RWW bring news of Fidelity bank using them damn widget - gadgets to enable actual transactions. Check your current bank balance from the iGoogle front page. Mmmm. I think we can see where this is going folks ( see more from Martin Geddes on this topic of Banking2.0). RWW suggest that myWorklight might be behind this particular implementation.

That's where www.myworklight.com have made some interesting announcements. They have an integration with NetVibes that allows you to actually transact with others. Say you wanted to publish out a widget for "Special offers" in "Restaurants around here", and post it to your own Company Dashboard so you could order for the office every day. Well, you could do that, and pay for it, through the myworklight integration. Oh damn, you can do that with a credit card? mmmm, how about you integrated with your company purchase management platform, or your benefits in kind / expenses management system? or or or.... My head starts to come off me when I think of all the ways that this could be used. The caveat I would have at this stage is that anytime I hear "server install" I start to worry about scale. I know that this is about security, but whenever I hear the terms "download" I kind-of worry for the company.

Time and Tidings and Time to Stick a Fork In It...

2008-12-09T12:57:00.001Z

Great Timing For Voice Navigation

Great timing from the people at Mobivox. They get a lot of this Telco2 stuff and it shows in this white paper. It reminds me of a personal assistant service in the US a few years ago called WildFire which had a virtual personal assistant in the middle of a unified communications service. I think what we are seeing with Mobivox though is the emergency of a kind of two sided revenue model a little further down the chain. Telco's pay for getting to market without huge forklift upgrades, and end users get "mostly free services" with some paid for add-ons (maybe payments functionality). This also comes hot on the heels of Google voice based search offer on the iPhone, which everyone is going a little ga-ga for. Perhaps the most important element of that is that users are being trained by the biggest players on the block to use "Voice User Interfaces".

Time To Stick a Fork In It: Blackberry Storm

New Blackberry storm was handed across the table to me yesterday, and let me tell you, the experience sucked eggs. Almost no part of the experience was intuitive. From how the hell do I get the SIM card in there (oh take the battery out first), to how do I get the SIM back out (still trying to sort that one out). The touch screen interface is annoying with basic "handling" of transition from one functionality to the next super-clunk-e. How do I get rid of that keyboard when I am just finished with that bit of typing? why can't I seem to just press on a text entry box in the browser to put in the password? I could go on. On the positive side their desktop manager does allow you to add a new device to an old account so all your passwords and setting move across and that is useful indeed. God, I hate the touch-screen so much.

Build Trust - Trust Santa? - Banking Y

2008-12-03T12:11:00.001Z

Customer Experience - Building Trust Flow?

The Whetstone Group did a report "The Importance of Customer Experience in A Down Economy", (get report here) and the capstone comments is something that I can completely relate to, i.e.

“There is an alarming lack of alignment between customer emotional expectations and corporate action plans that can only result in frustration and growing distrust by customers.”

Yes, many customers are going to have a renewed and vigorous review of pricing, but there is another set that are going to need to feel a renewed sense of control in a very unsteady and fearful environment. There are many things to take from this report but some of my early take always are "what are you doing to be build trust with your customers?"; "what are you doing to actively listen for new issues, new fears appearing in the life of your customers?"; and "what are you doing to reduce the feelings of stress for your customers"? Emotionally rewarding outcomes are what will get you rewarded in the long term.

Santa - Line

Neat use of telecommunications: kids phone up Santa to tell him what they want, because often, they don't want to tell their parents what they really want. System emails parents (because you have to be a Vonage customer to use this), and parents retrieve the message. Besides, "what ever happened to privacy :)" a great example of totally taking home the booby prize. You could have opened the system to everybody and achieved one of your core marketing objectives: get a new user to trial Vonage and experience its benefits.

Banking on Y

Bruce Temkin on the other hand seems to have a fairly good grasp on what is required at the very minimum to compete in the provision of experience to Gen Y. He shows how a bank brought in IDEO to design a service that just spoke their language, and I have to admit, parts of this I found very cool. For instance showing me I have $200 in my account tells me nothing; telling me I have half my savings objective does; telling me I am at my lowest level of saving ever, does; telling me things in context, not just flat-footed numbers. I just soooo love the virtual wallet feature that redlines your Danger Days for you, yes, the days you are predicted to spend, or pay bills, and will have less money than you need to meet these demands. The bank will then allow you to transfer money from your Reserve Account to meet these, or move some of your bill payment dates :)

Oh, and how does the bank know how to do this? (Gee, they have huge complex automated giga-mega-load servers crunching away, right?), nope; they give you the saver a slider bar and let you divide your money pile up into Scheduled (for payments) Free (to spend), Reserve (for savings), and you can move that bar back and forth as YOU like. of Course if you go over, by miscalculating, and overspending, you may automatically be given an overdraft and incur some interest rates, but hey I'd rather the payment went out than damage my credit worthiness. Oh, and of course at the end of the month I can get a full report on where I spent my money.

All of these functionalities are easy, graphical, and no doubt "iPhone friendly". No min charges, no min amounts. Seems like Min fuss to me.

The Future of Messaging - The Social Dimension

2008-11-25T12:27:00.001Z

Where Do We Look? - As Usual, To The Young.

Innovation in messaging rarely comes from the places you expect. Telco’s thought SMS messaging so useless that they didn’t even bother to price interconnect costs when it was launched. This initial cross network capability (reach), and the relatively low price compared to voice calls, found a niche among young people facing a key constraint: they wanted to communicate with friends but could not afford to communicate as much as they would like. Once there was a price incentive in place and millions of people were using it new contexts were found that were uniquely appropriate for text. For instance the now common "running 10 minutes late" message.

In effect SMS created a new back-channel conversation.

What Is a Message?

Sounds like a strange question but Twitter? (www.twitter.com) or comments have re-spun this. When we "message as social network grooming" we often do not expect a reply, or not right away, but we do expect some form of reciprocity within a certain time frame. Having received a number of fairly passive SMS's from a friend we may feel a strong pressure to not only text back, but actually call them. We "owe" them a call. It is the power of the social bond that creates this pressure to respond.

In the past much of our messaging was one-to-one, we wrote and sent a letter; we picked up a phone and called somebody. Technology enabled us to use the phone to message many others such as group SMS capability (one-to-many). From a particular perspective Interactive Voice Messaging could be considered to be one-to-many in that the call center is calling many customers to give them a message and the option to reconnect. The intertube however excels in creating many-to-many capabilities. So from another perspective, Interactive Voice Messaging matches available customers willing to take the call, and available agents or employees available and suited to take that call. In this case the intertube hosted service acts as a kind of "platform of availability".

Messages are also not static spatial objects sitting in our inbox. They are part of a flow of communication, and it the flow that is becoming increasingly important. Twitter and Facebook present us with a flow of comments, pictures and the activities of our friends, and we then choose to connect to these comments and pictures or not. The initial posting of the comment or picture is what sociologists refer to as "weak signaling" in that they attract or encourage others to reciprocate with a comment, or to post their own picture. These signals occur in an environment of many-to-many messaging, and signaling. Messages themselves could also be considered as being signals that attracts further attention and interaction. The launch of Google Mail (gmail) with conversation threading is one example of an application service that acts in this way.

In conclusion, a message is no longer just the physical letter, the text or talking content. A message can no longer just be considered part of a 1-to-1 interaction that no one else sees, hears or shares. And with the Internet we are likely to see the rise of "communications" themselves as being things, as being social objects, that can be shared, discussed, or that create value in ways we do not currently appreciate.

Part 2

Messaging Will Be Consumed Socially

People with strong common interests or common goals will have reasons to commit to communicating more with each other. The relationship context will determine how much or how little information we want to know about these people, or from these people. That's why Facebook allows you to "get more or less about this person". This is necessary because as individuals we like to be able to control the flow of information and potential interruptions we are exposed to. From Internet alerts, pings telling us we have new email, to our phone ringing when just about anybody phones, as individuals we desire a way to control that inbound flow. The main problem is that these events come with little context, and little understanding of what I find important right now. Previously the costs associated with making a call acted as an inherent fee that the caller was willing to pay because they believed the call to be important. With actual call costs decreasing over the last five years, and with the rise of free services such as instant messaging, email and Skype calling, this cost barrier has been substantially lowered, and for many eliminated altogether. We need a new way to figure out which communications are important or not.

As with Internet searches a good predictor of what we like is what we have liked before, what our friends like, and what "people like us, like" (i.e. our profile). In Internet terms I read articles and stories that are recommended by friends (perhaps through Google Reader), or are suggested as stories I might like (as in Google news). This is a blend of algorithmic (automated) and social (physical) filtering. An example might be where we Google the term Restaurant and then check the top three results with some friends to see if anyone we know has actually been there.

We think that this kind of behaviour may play some part in how we manage our interactions with others in terms of "offering invitations to conversation". It will be a blend of automated suggestions and screening, coupled with social filtering and suggestion. When we leave an SMS, this might be seen as a weak invitation to conversation (give me a call back if this interests you). An email might contain a live link to the number of remaining seats at a concert, which might act as an incentive to call back and book a seat when bookings reached a certain point. These would be examples of passive and active invitations.

Some social filtering of the invitation to conversation cycle might be exampled by new services such as http://skydeck.com, and www.xobni.com. These new consumer services hook into your mobile phone (skydeck) to find out who you call, how long you called them, and presents you with the names you call most often at the top of the list. But it might also recommend who you haven't spoken to in a while. It examines the flow of your calling behaviour to find out who is really important to you. Xobni does the same for your email, but also presents you with information as to who is important to the people that you connect to. Add to this all the data being generated on social networks, and internal corporate networks, and you are looking at a fundamental shift in terms of how we engage with others to open up conversation.

We Give Permission and Pay Attention

So messages can be thought of as having social grooming characteristics; as re-enforcing social-bonds; and that often it is the flow of communication that is important, not the individual message per say. We see that messages can act as "social objects" that attract further further comment or action. For companies this means that messages have to be considered as part of an overall communications strategy that builds and supports the customer relationship. Ultimately it is the individual that gives the company permission to call them. Companies have to take care that each message conveys the appropriate content but also that it is in the appropriate flow, otherwise customers withdraw the attention they are willing to give to you, and withdraw from the relationship. Worse still, when these customers withdraw, others in their social network will see them withdraw and will then actively reconsider their own relationship with the company or their opinion of that company.

Companies and vendors of services will have to understand that our willingness to engage will contain both automated and social filtering of invitations to conversation, and that the companies "one-to-one relationship" with the customer is really going to be part of an overall network of "many-to-many relationships", and "many to many conversations". Found yourself sending email through Linkedin inMail, or Facebook email? You know, I think you are already doing this stuff.

What?

Will - Tell - Tail - Thaler

2008-11-21T20:41:00.001Z

The Long Tail a Shaggy Dog Tail?

Will Page at Telco2 rolled out some results on research conducted with a "major online music hub", on "long tail economics". The long and the short of it (ta-dum!), is that the Internet and "physical retail" have the same distribution, and the long tail may not be serviceable at all. This is no simple contrarian view, Will knows his stuff and this is going into the Harvard Business Review. It really is interesting to compare to other social media studies of content creation, co-creation, and consumption.

Demming Undoes Detroit

In a week that sees Detroit on bended knee (albeit, one that was flown in on a private jet), Toyota continues to be a model of lean production values. McKinsey carry a piece on getting Toyota lean production into an organisation, and from what I can see, its the same thing that Toyota were expounding 30 years ago. Its our survival we are talking about, lets get responsible to each other, lets make it better every day. Yes there are tools, and yes their are techniques, but as the article says "Its the soft stuff that's hard to do".

The Inter-Temporal Choice of Swans

And if you were wondering (as I was a few days ago) as to why people make strange decisions around what they can and cannot afford to buy (and repay), Mr. Thaler of the Ole Black Swan has a paper on Inter-Temporal choice, a fancy way for saying people make dumb decisions when the results are times into the future. From simple experiments on discounting future money to social engineering in Virginia where if high school kids dropped out of school they lost their driving licence, reveal that many are unable to delay gratification into the future.

Go have a gander at the paper, its interesting.

Data Strategy, 1938

2008-11-19T15:52:00.001Z

Notes from The Art of Conversation

by Milton Wright, 1936

The ability to talk well can be cultivated.

Interest you must have if your conversation is to be successful.

Interest can lie primarily in the subject or the person, the latter being by far the surer ingredient for success.

To chatter is easy. To talk resultfully with the hostile, suspicious, indifferent or even friendly is an art.

To really become a good conversationalist over the long term it is necessary to acquire the habit of conscientiously stocking your mind with facts and information and then forming opinions on the basis of that knowledge.

A monologue is not a conversation.

Silence plays an important part in effective conversation just as it does in music.

Masters of the art of conversation rarely give advice, and then, usually, only when requested. It is given tentatively and without seeming to impose their wishes.

The secret of giving advice successfully is to mix it up with something that implies a real consciousness of the adviser's own defects, and as much as possible of an acknowledgment of the other party's merits.

To plant a suggestion is a real test of conversational skill.

Behaviour and Action, Cause and Effect

2008-11-18T14:11:00.001Z

Oh Great Shiny Bubble

The New York Times gives a great visualisation of house value declines in the USA. Irish site FinFacts gives a long history of warning signs that went unheeded, and practices that drove this frenzied behaviour. But the question I really have is that even with all this information, and other information besides, would our behaviour and actions change? I mean lets face it lots of people knew we were in a housing bubble but most were still drawn to its shiny bubble surface. I think I need to dig a little into decision making within certain timeframe's and unreasonable weighing up of "perhaps lots of money next year", versus "reasonable money in ten years" (i.e. delayed gratification). Another way of looking at it could be the "problem of the commons" in that by acting in our own short term interest we brought about a collective collapse. Most commentators to date have focused on bad lending practices, but what about our own bad borrowing practices and our attitude to credit?

Data Is The Path To Insight?

I have been thinking that the key capability of a company may be the ability to generat Insight. But now, I am not so sure.(HT: Denis Pombriant)

“The necessary outcome of strategic planning is not analytical insight but resolve” (David Maister)

By this I am sure he means we know that the right things to do are, its just not always that interesting to keep doing them or to get them done. It does remind me of Werner Vogels at Telco2 saying that they knew (Amazon) that they had to focus on scope of catalogue, building visitor traffic, and lowering costs everywhere. Their "platform strategy" had to be a committed strategy, and joined up, and the management had to have the resolve to see it through, even though shareholders were unlikely to understand what they were doing, initially. Perhaps some of this resolve came from the CEO who has invested in some "dogs" in his day, but the learning led them to Platform strategy, and to Kindle, both billion dollar businesses. That and a "relentless focus on being customer centric".

So Why Is Customer Service Still In Trouble?

Well, perhaps its the small things that count. Mashable just posted up their take on a recent pew report that shows we are absolute crap at getting customer service, particularly around Tech support.

- 38% of users with failed technology contacted user support for help.
- 28% of technology users fixed the problem themselves.
- 15% fixed the problem with help from friends or family.
- 15% of tech users were unable to fix their devices.
- 2% found help online.

Consumers’ Attitudes About Various Forms of Tech Support:

- 72% felt confident that they were on the right track to solving the problem.
- 59% felt impatient to solve the problem because they had important uses for the broken technology.
- 48% felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem.
- 40% felt confused by the information that they were getting.

Wow, nearly 60% were so convinced the company wouldn't be able to give them good service, that they just didn't bother to call ! It felt like it was going to need a "big effort to fix", that it was making them feel "impatient", and then probably "discouraged" and angry? I think this may be a case of "interaction friction" before the customer even gets on the phone, or the web.

All This Miracles And We Are Still Miserable?

Eric over at Demand Satisfaction posted this video that just shows, perhaps, how unacceptably jaded we have become about the miracles of technology.

Tweet Tweet ! Your Company Has Flu...

2008-11-12T15:50:00.001Z

I think I said this a good time ago now, but we are only barely using the Internet to track information that is socially useful. The BBC reports that Google is now helping map the spread of flu by tracking keyword searches.

Chis Barraclaugh, STL Partners at Telco2 last week had a great slide showing how all of Google's recent moves were investments in customer data.

Over at SAS Blog there was a nice back and forth on the strategic use of customer contact. It is so easy to forget that in large companies each section, dept, division wants to send messages, calls, letters to the end customer. These requests have be filtered, rated, and evaluated by the company itself. Something in the back of my mind tells me that something this overall approach is ripe for some new thinking, like, here for instance. As if to reinforce this point, I saw the original SAS Blog entry because their SAS Magazine Editor is on Twitter, and she tweeted a link to the post.

Now what's with the pig? Well it goes to authenticity and two way value creation. I am a great believer that all customer interactions should be build to reduce the friction within the interaction, and should be seamlessly bound to the business process itself. We are on that journey here at VoiceSage.

Post Telco2

2008-11-06T16:41:00.002Z

Telco2: Janus or Dear Jesus?

I think Mr. Enck called it well when he pointed out how impressive and pertinent Mr. Vogels presentation was. The clarity of strategic vision, the simplicity of focus, was awesome. What I found intriguing was that each iteration of the platform thinking defined a new element of the fly-wheel, a new virtuous reinforcement mechanism. They brought the merchants (merchant platform), so that "the catalogue" was the biggest on the web, your "go to" destination; they built traffic (Traffic Platform) through a kind of open linking strategy, opening out book references, and giving incentives traffic of 4-7%revenue share. Most people would stop there, hey we have great customer traffic flow and the best stock available, cool. But no, they saw that they had to be the best price possible too, and this implied that they had to reduce the cost of infrastructure (answer: open out your Fulfillment platform so any merchant can send their product through the amazon warehousing network), and then the webstore platform, the enterprise service platform which is like a managed service for other web retailers (and a Labour platform, a Digital Media Platform, an Infrastructure Platform, and yes, a Telco Platform). As amazing as this journey, this evolution was, three things struck me with laser clarity:

- These guys have complete clarity on their strategic principles and will take big hits to protect them;

- They pay attention to "micro-incentives" and "micro-barriers" to desired behaviours;

- They innovate around things that remain important over the long run, not just "new things".

If I were in the Strategic section of a Telco, I'd be looking to workshop my Two Sided Telco play with these guys in the room. On a personal level I met some old friends, and I think met some new and interesting people that I hope to follow up with.

Hack The World: Health and Telecommunications

Again, the excellent RRW has a piece on how mobile communications is being used in Africa to encourage people to see the Doctor and speak about their health concerns relating to TB and Aids. "Please Call Me" text messages are issued from Doctors to the population to encourage them to engage early; "Text reminders" are used to remind people to take their medication or attend a clinic; the call backs are handled by a virtual call centre of "people like you" that will understand your condition, your life, your emotions; mobile blood testing units are brought to the people so that they don't have to suffer the stigma of having to stand in line. If Telecommunications companies are wondering how context, content, community and communications can be braided together in ways that actually improve the state of the world, well, this is one fine example.

Note To Self: Human Beings Are Not "Self Loading Cargo Units".

Open - Networking

2008-10-31T15:01:00.001Z

Hard Times For Big Vendors and Little Ones Alike?

In cold times it would seem mobile telecoms are still a Hot item (Tim Bray, Sun Microsystems, at FOWA London). People will give up that glass of wine, but not a $1.50 iPhone Application that gives them real value. And now that iPhone and Google have offline capability you can do a lot of great stuff. It is indeed a great time to build mobile applications, but I would also caution that 1998 was a great time to build a website, and building a website doesn't have a great reputation as a sure fire way to making you rich. Today the New York Times features Sun prominently as a company with big problems, so perhaps Tim's FOWA talk was from the heart. Some of these problems are good old fashioned competitive pressure in core product markets, and others are good old fashioned product development slippages. These are combined with the "slower than anticipated" update of its open source programs and initiatives (BTW: great piece from JP here on why Open Source may be stalling at the large enterprise level).

If you are thinking of building an application, Tim says "build it for yourself, its hard to understand the needs of others", there are others out there a lot like you and they will probably buy it. And watch out for the VC's, they don't understand 2.0, and they don't bring value (mmm, not sure of that one, know plenty of smart VC's). Gosh, this sounds like a sure way to end up on the bread line to me (but you will have your snazzy iPhone to keep you occupied). There is a reason people like "product managers" exist, just saying ye know. Its probably safer to think of Tim's comments as prods to get yourself multi-skilled, and to develop a "Career Portfolio".

The Elephant in the room is that most people are going to want to pay zero upfront to save money and are now being educated to "think like Google". I want it for free, or some version of it for free. I want it super simple. I want it to do one thing really really well. Agreed. One of my take aways from JP's posting is "the Enterprise has been trained to think like Microsoft", and this frames all enterprise adoption arguments in Microsoft's favour. What I particularly found interesting was the focus not on Excel, but on Excel Micros as a significant barrier to adoption of OpenOffice, and that the cascading effects this had on the need to redesign the Macro's, estimate the cost of the same, estimating the cost of failure. At the end of the day, the purchasing dept used the study to beat up Microsoft on price, and buy, uh hum, more Microsoft product.

What Do Tough Times Mean For The Enterprise?

Tim Bray was of the opinion that tough times might mean that companies look more to SaaS and to Open Source solutions. I do like the emphasis on "SaaS" and "cloud based" applications and services, of course I do, that's what we do around here. But the take away for me is the need to seriously look your "customers life right now" (i.e. the real life issues they are facing, the hard choices, the unpalatable trade offs). In my opinion, its easy to say "we are your partner" in good times and ask for some hefty integration and consulting fees to prove it. Lets see how good a problem solver you are now; lets see how flexible and adaptable you are now; lets see how your DNA shines through?. As a provider of SaaS you should now be looking deeply at some strategies for maintaining your value proposition. Tough times for the Enterprise customer means even SaaS entities need to bring a razor sharp focus on time to meaningful ROI.

I think its a great idea that Tim was encouraging developers to not only skill up, but look at legacy skills (Cobal etc), and cross-skilling. Companies can equally do the same thing.Taking charge of your own Identity by building your own personal network, blog, twitter, get into social networks, and social network at events are great personal brand builders. Get known, and get known for something. Now ask yourself, "what is Sun now known For"?

Some Cool New Media Business Models

Have you ever needed to read a children's book from cover to cover before you bought it because let face it, you will be reading it every night for a long long time. Lookybook lets you see the whole book before you buy it. And here's the one we have to buy (Its Not Fair), as we have a new arrival due in March 2009. Music sites like Ineem and LaLa have similar models for music in that they let you play the content, in its entirety, while you remain browsing on the site, no doubt hoping that the longer you hang around the more likely you are to buy a web song for 10c. I think a lot of companies are going to have to look at approaches that enable you to have a complete "experience" and that you may then proceed to commit to buying it, owning it, sharing it or some other upstream action that is predicated on shared value creation. It is a deep delayering of the digital value chain, with the understanding that some parts of the chain can better gather and aggregate data from multiple services and location, and that this will help them outpace offers that are more vertically integrated.

So here's the tie up: people buy experiences.

The enterprise customer is a person like you, and they want a great experience of your service, they want to be able to test and trial it and experience it and not pay for it until they know they like it, that it works. They want reliability, they want security, they want credentials, but these are "hygiene factors". The Enterprise's professionalised buying process will simply not allow them to buy in services that don't "stack up" in the traditional purchasing decision cycle. I personally believe that their will be an iTunes for Applications at the Enterprise level. Click Click Click. Done.

Let's Get (meta) Physical?

2008-10-29T09:58:00.002Z

Linkedin goes Social: now you can add applications and collaborate with your contact network. This is so boneheaded it beggars belief IMHO. I can see social objects as being useful to Linkedin in that they are social evidence of influence, popularity, or expertise. Thus, your sheer volume of network contacts speaks volumes about your rolodex if you are a sales director; your online presentations show you as an expert marketing person capable of speaking to C-Level executives at conferences; your embedded Google Spreadsheets show a deep understanding of risk and analytics. I have begun to think of Linkedin as a good forum for social validation of a contact (hey, what do you think of John, did he really do such a great job at company x?) and an extendable element into other environments (Everyone on SAP could now have a linkedin directory of both internal and external experts and contacts through a linkedin mashup).

We are the Adobe Reader here, the Recruiters are the Adobe Acrobat. Give the recruiters the heavy tools, just make it 3-click easy for us to use.

(and what's with the Meta-Physical? Linkedin encourages us to only linked with people we actually know, ie. real contacts).

Update: RWW seems to present the LinkedIn Applications in the mode of being Social Objects, which is fair enough, but I still think Linkedin needs to BE THE SOCIAL OBJECT, not be the place where you can bring your social objects.

Insight - Interact - Improve

2008-10-28T15:22:00.001Z

Super posting from SAS on Customer Contact Strategy, especially the problem of saturating the customer with customer contact (email, mail shots, phone calls, etc. etc.) You have to have a clear understanding when to contact, in what mode, and to make what offer. That may mean you need to segment your customers on the basis of how they want to be contacted. I think the SAS post misses some key points but they do get that all your communication to the customer needs to be planned and integrated into an overall strategy. Neat idea of "the recently rule", ie. you can't call your customer twice in 60 days with an offer. Also good example of not messaging cross-offers to customers that are "churn risk". This means you have to have a pretty solid view of what the "interaction rules are" for each segment. However, completely misses the idea to create real two way value through better interaction management.

Jeff Jarvis has a very nice piece on WWGD (What Would Google Do?) in terms of the downturn in the economy. Such as look at how relationships in themselves signal value, or ARE value; making physical products is probably a decaying strategy or just plain ole very hard to make money at (Dell?); big companies are really networks of small companies; in a network driven economy you should strive to be the platform; transparency will drive trust; the more control you hand over to users the more trust you build, and the stronger your relationships. Most of these points come from his effort to deconstruct what has made Google so successful. Could Dell execute on being your "design to build" for IT & Consumer Media products? It has most of the business and technical infrastructure to achieve this.

John Quelch over at HBS re-posts ideas on The Middle Aged Simplifier which basically says that this category (sic) of person is looking to de-layer their product ownership-positions (sic) in that they are going to happy to not own so much non-essential stuff, and will lease cars, holiday homes etc. in a variety of non-mass-consumer modes. I think the undertone of this piece is interesting none the less because it might signal an even older marketing lesson: if everyone else has your stuff (read 4x4 "landrover") then it has no social status, and no brand communications value. Perhaps "the experience economy" is going to truly expand.

Oh, and just in case anyone is dropping in here, and doesn't know, I am http://www.twitter.com/PaulSweeney

How We Pay

2008-10-22T14:00:00.001Z

Buyer Behaviour USA

USA Today report people are using their credit cards "dramatically less" either because they are maxed out, or are worried about the cost of their credit card debt. The customers of Wall Mart are also buying their baby milk formula early in the month, presumably when they are relatively cash rich compared to the mid month or end of month. People are also buying fewer brand names, and are decreasing the frequency of their shopping trips. Offering different payment options or times to pay might be a great way to overcoming being the "last bill of the month".

HT Pistachio and PKedrosky

Other take away's from this story:

- If your business is built on one known shopping pattern, think again. It might have changed. Specifically I am thinking about how customers weigh up categories (Food vs Travel; Car vs Bus, etc.)

- Broad based "scale competitors" like Tesco may have insights into the recession mega-trends. Maybe by following some of their announcements, add on's, technology adoptions, they might add as bell weathers for what other companies should do?

- Focus: there is lots of talk out there around the need to understand what you do as a business, and what core "benefits" you deliver. You probably don't need one more feature. But there is another element to Focus, and that is "strategic focus". If you are a higher end fashion store, selling "more economic lines" could blur your focus. Wall Mart is a cost leader, so these mega-trends expand its addressable base.

Break The Current Value or Activity Chain?

- If your customers are now increasingly cost conscious, how about making them a re-designed offer? Get 10% off if you buy completely online and NEVER call us :)

- Strip out the product offering until you are left with the core utility, and then give the customer option to re-bundle features "on demand"?

- Make some products "services" (i.e. buy the 24/7 totally connected office for $40/month, not a laptop, printer, and desktop?).

For sure I think that this is a market where the individual and the enterprise will go through their expenditures and those that are fixed, and with a big enough number next to them, will be asked to re-quote, re-justify, "get out or get real". How?

Creating Real New Value That Matters To People?

Umair gives an example of how Starbucks selling music and mouse mats is a classic example of selling product into adjacent segments (I'd argue that its a case of not knowing if its a product pusher/ service provider/ or meeting platform, but that's for another day). More importantly he points out that Starbucks has to become meaningful (again). The 'leap' Umair makes is that "being meaningful" has a social basis, in that it is a social meaning. We do not become socially meaningful by "pushing crap" on customers.

I think it is probably a dangerous game to "tell customers"(sic) what is "meaningful" to them ("here have a freetrade coffee"), or even ("here, meet Paul, your overpriced coffee paid for his school"). I think it is going to involve

(1) extreme customer empowerment to define how, when and where they wish to interact with you;

(2) total customisation of the offer/product/service in a genuine atmosphere of co-creation;

(3) network orchestration not network ownership (by this I mean "be the go-to-guy", not the guy who said "we don't have it today, but we will have it tomorrow. The go-to-guy delivers you the solution, no matter who has supplied it, even a competitor).

Crunch Crunch Pixel by Pixel

2008-10-20T14:52:00.001Z

Small Business

Via Greg at ScreenWerk an Amex survey in Oct 2008 shows that many small to medium sized businesses are now seeing a downturn in sales, and nearly 18% have real fears that they will go out of business. It also shows that nearly 40% of them will be late or unable to pay some bills. That's a lot of outstanding cash, and is sure to put even more pressure on cash flow. With this general lowering of the cash-level, we would normally expect the small business to go to their bank and ask for a little latitude, or overdraft. But I don't think we are going to see this happen in the next 12 months. Given that VoiceSage is in the business of helping you bring in your cash twice as fast you might expect me to plug that right now, but I am not going to (oops I just did). The real question here is putting predictability on your cash flow from all possible viewpoints. It is not enough to just sell, you have to "sell well", i.e. know how likely or not someone is to repay you. You then also have to collect well, and by that we mean be pro-active in your collections process.

Data and All It Can Do:

I love it when a service comes out and I go "now that makes sense, that's how people really think": Another HT to Greg Sterling : Homethinking matches a neighbourhood you know, with like neighbourhoods elsewhere. Doesn't this make a lot of sense? Isn't this what we want?; somewhere we understand and know as a baseline compared to a place we don't know that well. Truly excellent idea.

Customer Service: Call Transfer and Click to Call

Don't blind transfer calls. Just don't. Managing click-to-call with better call whispering is something that you might also look at. To see a quick example check out the VoiceSage contact page. Thomas Howe has a short piece on how he misunderstood the power of click-to-call. Some follow up points here on why it might be good for finding keywords as well such as screening inbound calls and gathering details prior to a call. Click-to-call needs a thorough overhaul and I for one am going to request a re-naming: how about "Click-To-Action"? All for that, vote eye (in your best pirates voice).

CrowdSourcing & Price Setting

Robin over at Bytesurgery is a neat example in progress of Crowdsourcing around the development of an entire application. Robin frequently shouts out via twitter and his blog to get feedback on everything from good names for products, to suggestions as to how his pricing model might be constructed. I happen to know that Robin spends a lot of time speaking with the real end users of his new product as well (Decisionsforheroes) but how he taps the community of web talent is pretty inspiring. And speaking of heroes, Sabrina Dent, well known and highly successful web designer, is also an expert in tapping the power of the social Internet. When she recently fell ill, she was able to "lay off"/ "outsource" a few projects to people she had trusted online relationships with.

(disclaimer: Sabrina did a rapid re-design of the VoiceSage website recently).

Eh, so what's so interesting about that Paul? Companies are not islands, they are networks, and the extent to which they are able to create collaborative, co-creating relationships, the more sustainable they will be. As analysts and planners we are often asked to challenge the assumptions but what better way to challenge them than to "publish them" and subject them to experiment? Crowdsourcing may not be good for all types of problems, in all types of situations, but it has certainly thrown open some interesting perspectives for Robin and his crew.

Ease of Use: The Data, The Presentation, The Influence.

2008-10-17T15:31:00.001Z

Presenting The Data

Sometimes you see a thing or remarkable simplicity and you have to share it. The New York Times has an application that enables you to input some basic data regarding house price and rent movements and then create a visual presentation of what this means in terms of value creation or destruction for you. The pretty picture above shows a market with 5% growth in house prices and a 3% growth in rental income. In this scenario it makes sense to invest in a house. But change that house price appreciation to anything less than 3.5% and have a look at what happens. With Credit Today showing a 30 year low in UK house sales, you have to think that renting is going to become relatively more attractive, doubly so when the Irish Times reports today that there is 10% more rental stock coming on the market because houses are so difficult to sell.

Yahoo have a nice site showing a Politics Dashboard with up to date information on how each candidate is doing. What I like about this, besides from the big bold percentage numbers, is that the dashboard also presents "prediction markets" assessments.

I think some smart little company is going to come out of the woodwork with a neat way of building and linking these kinds of dashboards.

Research Happenings

Randy Saunders over at The Perfect Customer Experience blog has a nice reference to a recent Forrester Report on the fact that customers still want to speak to a live agent, and that they have certain expectations as to how well this process will be handled.

McKinsey Quarterly have a piece on Multi-Channel Marketing with a spin on Social Media: worth a read, particularly on the "fallacy of the final click". All customers move through many stages in their buying decision making cycle and both online and offline media often intermingle in their effects. We don't buy "entirely online" or "entirely offline".

Finally ! Social Media is Going To Be Of Some Value To Credit and Collections Professionals

Yes, a catchy title, not ! But the same McKinsey Study mentioned above quotes a very interesting use of social network analysis (SNA).

McKinsey research on telephone users’ social networks suggests that even they can be measured to allocate marketing budgets more successfully. One telecom company, for example, has learned how to retain phone customers by assessing the strength of the relationships among them. The company used call patterns, changes in call volumes, types of payment (prepaid or contract), handset types, and other traits to identify customers likely to leave for another carrier. Meanwhile, it constructed a diagram of their social ties, derived from the people they called, the people those people called, and how often. In general, the more closely anyone was tied to someone who unsubscribed, the more likely that person was to unsubscribe in turn. In this way, the telecom company improved its churn prediction model by 50 percent. Moreover, by identifying the most influential potential churners and working to retain them with new services and price plans, the company not only retained a quarter of them but also reduced the churn rate within their social networks by almost 40 percent.

I think that if you were buying a house, or voting for a candidate you too are likely to be influenced by someone close to you, probably someone on your social network. By giving people easy to understand, easy to share data, you could probably "turn-on" your influential customers

Enterprise Micro-Media

2008-10-09T17:30:00.001Z

It's The Enterprise, Stupid

Great article on RRW on Twitter in The Enterprise, at BestBuy. What I take away from this:

Short messaging is powerful and many will send and consume "micro-social content" while on the move; everyone understands texts.
Social media will be made or consumed "around work", during breaks, before or after shifts; it may be made during "idle time".
They are using "short codes" so people can text in ideas, responses, etc. Good idea me-thinks. Of course deploying short codes is an issue, especially in the USA.
BestBuy initially went light on integration, but lingered on issues around authentication before considering deeper integration issues. If you are who you say you are, you tend to be a bit more careful though, so this one needs balance.
People don't want to manage "multiple identities in multiple streams", i.e. Twitter, Jaiku, Yammer, etc. etc. Perhaps indicating the future fluidity between personal identity and work life identity. After all, someone only has to Google you to find out about you. That's why they are building "containers" within which conversations occur. Some containers will be open, some will be restricted. This is where Jaiku really messed up with not moving forward fast enough.
Location awareness is something that they will be looking at, mostly because you want to see the people that are around you and near you for some types of questions. Watch this one go crazy as location awareness is embedded in the browser, and the browser goes to the phone (Firefox, and Chrome). Then watch it go mad when RFID hits it.
Trust is an issue when you begin to use social media, because you may not know who these people are, even within your own company. So you have to figure out how to provide social validation to get things started.
Initiation and Consumption: BestBuy bought in the solution that worked best in Outlook because that's where all their employees live. Think about that. Now think about the price of MSFT stock. Early adopters may be all "net centric" but the majority of people live in Outlook, IE, and their phone.

Example of Enterprise 2.0 Communications Mashup?

A lot of these issues ring true to me. At VoiceSage one of the things that we have (behind the scenes) is the ability to deploy inbound SMS-codes, and also outbound SMS a part of a flow. We had a client that was a large university that posted different Short Codes in Printed Media and in Outdoor advertising with the advice to text the word "study" to the short code number. VoiceSage would then ring them, ask them a few qualification questions, and then patch them through to the appropriate knowledgeable staff member. Neat use of a call flow I think. And one that the client came up with, not us.

Between the Two, Governed and Ungoverned Mashups?

I am sure that in-store staff could come up with some pretty neat promotions if they could create and deploy them within some kind of overall policy. But that's not exactly "in the spirit" of the BestBuy story above. I think the spirit of the BestBuy story is more in the lines of increasing the information flow, releasing some control of its granularity, and opening up the enterprise to the power of weak-linkages. In this respect VoiceSage is more the "governed mashup" to the "ungoverned mashup" of Twitter et al.

The Nature of Credit & Trust

2008-10-06T19:09:00.001Z

Credit is Social

Rob Paterson over on the FastForward Blog has a deep insight to share about the very nature of credit. In an industry that sees credit as an empirical, deeply-scorable entity, it is easy to forget that fundamentally, it is a social object. By this we mean that it derives its value from the social contract, driven by our fundamental belief that this person will pay it back, and not by any insight into our belief that they can or have the ability, to pay it back.

Mr. Hempton over at Bronte Capital (HT Mr. Kinsella) has a related point that its not a shortage of cash that is creating a credit crunch but a shortage of Trust. I did some research on Trust a number of years ago and from what I can remember it had an awful lot to do with irreversible investments and historical behaviors patterns. There was a whole lot more buried in the depths of the theory such as the existence of relationship specific assets, but I wonder if at route, an awful lot of this current mess doesn't lie somewhere between losing the social context, and losing the relationship-specific assets.

Trust-Thee The Cloud?

Some fairly big announcements this week around "cloud computing". The issue of how open or not the cloud was going to be was a talking point, and then Amazon goes and says he, we're like, Windows-Centric, and why not use BEA webserver, to like, totally port your application to the Amazon cloud? I think we are seeing a traditional bridging strategy here: don't abandon your old installed infrastructure, but if you need to build anything new into it, why not build it or buy it from the cloud? And now, with no improved windows-cloud, it will scale too :)

The Semi-Permeable Physical Digital Membrane

Cisco released a study that revealed "Reveals Consumers Trust Online Payment Providers More Than Traditional Banks". eh hum. Big throat clear. By facilitating connected commerce around the point of sale, financial institutions can become more influential, by connecting payments, merchants, and other "data" (one presumes). What it boiled down to is that if you get more "connected digital experiences" within the store (i.e. search - compare activity) then the opportunity arises to disintermediate the banks. After all, if I have a paypal account and so does the store, why not just pay through that? I actually do believe that digital technology and social media will play a much more prominent role in everybody's purchasing behavior, but I think we all may have to re-think what it is a financial institution does, and the role it plays in society, before it becomes truly possible for them to grasp this connected opportunity. Companies like Google "get this" and build "edge competencies" that lead them to become "market co-coordinators" or indeed, market platforms (For more on this topic I can recommend Sean over at The Park Paradigm and The 6th Paradigm ). John Hagel has more on edge economics here.

What would it take for banks and other financial institutions to develop Edge Competencies? I don't know, but I suspect it isn't in their DNA to do anyway.

Browser, Clients, Credit and 2.0

2008-09-22T14:06:00.001Z

Enterprise2.0 & Office2.0, Clients and Browsers

Phil Wainewright has a truly excellent piece on the use of mashup's on RightNow Technologies. Some of the points I am fascinated with is Phil's contention that in many situations "browser only/ no download" culture of Office2.0 may not actually deliver benefit, and that there remains a role for the lightweight client.

Credit and Collections in The News

The Wall Street Journal reports that credit and collections is now a front and center concern for all US banks. They are focusing on getting in front of customers as soon as their is any indication that they may be struggling; making more offers around helping construct partial payment and late payment plans; and they are using these interactions and incentives to help "renegotiated the debt relationship" they have with the client (i.e. reduce limits, introduce new terms etc.) Interestingly, they are also investing in self service solutions where customers that find themselves in a "bit of trouble", can develop and deploy their own late payment plan entirely on their own and without having to speak to the agent or collections agency.

Oh, and $969bn is the amount on rotating credit, ie outanding on credit cards. Gee, its sounds a lot when you say it like that.

Getting All 2.0 On Your Credit

Another service called BillShrink is also trying to help customers manage their credit card debt (VentureBeat). What I love about this is that the service makes obvious what other benefits might be (i.e. air miles, fees, etc.). It asks you a few simple questions around what your spending is like, and how much your credit limit is, and then gets to making some suggestions.

I sincerely believe that there are opportunities to more accurately asses the true nature of a persons payment risk through higher levels of data granularity; using data from different data pools, and ideas lifted from the world of social media.

To return to the question of "how you spend your money will impact your credit score": from what I remember if you buy groceries with your credit card, this is not good. The credit card company might make some high level assumptions about what this means. But wait.

Techcrunch reports on Expensify, a solution that is a credit card, that allows you to take a picture of your receipt, and file the whole thing. You can then print out your receipts by trip, in order, and attached with proof of payment (this is where I go, OMG, like a 13 year old). They take a 3% fee for doing this (woah.... what? but wait a minute, how much time would you spend doing your expenses, how late are you usually in handing them in, and what is your usual charge on that? yes, it does, it does add up). Of course the real beauty with Expensify is that they could be your "credit information broker", and unlike Billshrink they won't be asking you to guess, you just gave them permission to track your spend.

Human - Machine Interaction, When and Why.

2008-09-17T09:47:00.001Z

A new report from Nortel and BT, "Fragvergence: Changing Consumer Attitudes to Diverse Contact Channels", has found that there is actually a good consumer reaction to getting an automated message, in the right context.

They ran both a quantitative survey of 1,018 on U.S. and U.K. consumers and a qualitative set of in-depth interviews with consumers (how many of those, they don't say in the release, and I am waiting on the full report).

- 71 percent of U.S. and U.K. consumers would be happy to receive a call that used voice recognition to inform them that their plane, train or bus would be late.

- 80 percent reported that they would look favorably on automated calls that informed them of the time of delivery of goods to their homes.

Gee, shock horror. VoiceSage is doing this day in day out for leading brand name companies in the UK right now, today.

The report goes on to say that the end user would be happy for the company to use Voice Recognition if it reduced cost, and of course this cost was passed on to the consumer. Really? Customers are interested in better service at lower cost? I must read on.

They point out that American's are much more likely to like automated IVR, for reasons that remain unexplored in the PR Release, but may, just may have something to do with other research which shows that the American public would rather talk to a machine than someone from the Philippines.

But the report does strike some interesting notes: for instance, many product decisions are now "de-facto" service decisions. When I buy a laptop I am comparing various technical specifications against my belief in the brand, and my expectations as to the probable level of service I will receive if/when something goes wrong. This is an excellent point that is somewhat lost in the overall release.

They also draw our attention to the finding that:

Customers appear to have stark preferences on which channels they wish to use for different services. For financial services, for instance, 56 percent of U.S. respondents and half of U.K. respondents welcomed voice recognition for checking their account balance. Only 12 percent and 13 percent respectively liked the idea of setting up the direct debit using IVR

Now there is a very simple "work around" to that and it is "don't expect completely new to the service customers to sign up on an automated system, but instead, connect them through to an excellent call center agent?" I can also let you in on another little secret, VoiceSage is helping companies (Telco's, Utilities, Financials) to use outbound Interactive Voice Messaging to collect payments every single day, and our customer satisfaction and feedback rates are very positive.

In fairness Andrew Small, head of CRM capability, BT Global Services, says in the statement "Our research showed that consumer preferences are both particular to the sector and also the application being used.” With this I would agree absolutely, and that is why you should do business with someone who understands that process.

E.2 Barriers To Adoption

2008-09-15T19:57:00.002Z

Why Senior Management Invest In Enterprise 2.0

Here's a little conundrum: all project management and product development books will tell you top team sponsorship is essential for success. So why are all the Analysts saying that "enterprise 2.0 is under the radar", its "user generated", its wild-fire? Well, because that's what happened with Web2.0 Retail. Companies that spent a fortune gaining first position in their vertical were overcome by new 2.0 players, often within a 12-18 month time frame. (see UK real estate players for examples). But me-thinks Enterprise is a bit different.

Bill Ives on The FastForwardBlog says there are four business reasons for adopting enterprise 2.0 that got senior execs excited.

1. As company grew there was an increasing need to collaborate across time zones. This became apparent as they made more acquisitions and at first, had difficulty just going across one time zone. The enterprise 2.0 tools addressed this issue.

2. When they were a regional bank, the bank found that company events (picnics) and activities (softball league) helped build commitment. Now they saw the need to build a similar sense of community and commitment on a global basis with the new enterprise 2.0 tools.

3. Like many companies they have maturing workforce and were concerned with the lose of knowledge. Now with enterprise 2.0 tools they are capturing knowledge in the process of work through wikis, blogs, and similar means.

4. They saw the need to engage generation y workers. This caught imagination of senior executives when their research showed that generation y workers come with greater engagement but within a year they dropped to below average on engagement because there were no tools for engagement. The new employees were also driven down by the hierarchy. Enterprise 2.0 tools provide the means of engagement with tools they are used to using that allow for participation

So, Senior Management are concerned about Motivating and Retaining their young talent; they want to try to capture tacit knowledge, routines, and relationships; they want to build team spirit and feeling of "company belonging"; and they wanted to enable people to find others in their company, even across timezones. So far, so 1987.

More on The Adoption of Enterprise2.0 From Office 2.0

The Office2.0 Conference guys noticed 5 categories of barriers:

(1) Culture: resistance to change, resistance to new tools, familiarity with current environment, lack of rewards

(2) Awareness: lack of awareness of what the tools are. At client site, I was talking about twitter and a business problem we were working on, and using twitter to get some ideas. For the client, the firewall prevented them from using it. Most people know about LinkedIn and Facebook, but there is a lack of awareness beyond that.

(3) Technology: concerns about privacy, security, protection, particularly in financial services. Hospital argument — spend money in case someone might die. Same thing with security

(4) Security: privacy protection, etc.

(5) Generational differences: if the organization doesn’t have a lot of younger workers, there seems to be no acceptance. Many companies are not worried about the younger generation.

So again, Culture, Reward Structures for Desired Behaviors, Clear understanding of Security and Governance, i.e. who is in charge, and who is responsible for the implementation and its deliverables. Gosh, I sound so old school here.

Getting Over The Barriers

(1) Get upper management to use tools themselves

(2) Show use one small tool to solve one problem (reduce complexity and make benefit clear).

(3) Build on successes. Let others see that their peers are having success and they will want to follow suit.

(4) Build group and let others see that others are using IT—peers using it

(5) Use new system in parallel with traditional collaboration processes so they can see the benefits Ex: email vs banned email

(6) Build support processes at the same time as introducing the new tool (remember individuals can change tools, but the organization changes very slowly).

(7) Build/engage culture where it's ok to experiment/take risks

(8) "Social media policy' you represent the company so 'be an adult'

(9) Use summer interns to bring in new technologies. Are you a “stock” or a “Bond” (or maybe an “option”)- let someone else take the risk

(10) Kill the old systems so the new system is the only option

(11) Provide “guide on the side” training environment. Staff the role of community manager with the right person to engage others and teach others and manage content to get networking site going

(12) Start by addressing a business problem, not just bring in the tool. When the business problem has been successfully addressed, then collaboration can be seen as a nice 'byproduct' of the solution.

From where I stand, this makes a lot of sense. And from where I stand if you had a plan to implement a "2.0" strategy and had a 12 step plan to overcome barriers to adoption, and you had worked out a clear business case for using it, well, you probably wouldn't have to use the phrase "2.0" at all.:)

Update: Dion has a massive post on getting 2.0 into the enterpise. It takes a different tack to the "traditional approach", and its well worth the read. Dion's take (IMHO) is that you need to "break the china" and go big with the big commitment to 2.0.

Big Theme, Little Theme

2008-09-09T10:28:00.002Z

Big Theme: Serendipity, Patterns of Interaction, Culture.

When John Hagel speaks, I listen. Today he posted about "The Big Sort" and "The Difference", and the role of cultural diversity in creating "productive friction", which in turn enables long term innovation. While many theorist have pointed out that the urban flows (of traffic, of housing, and retail / commercial districts) set up a little "social tube" that we move around without really reflecting on it, I think not enough attention has been paid to "interaction styles" and culture. We can all pass each other in the street and say "good day, nice weather, I hope it holds", God knows, in Ireland the weather is always an occasion for conversation. But its a known pattern that isn't deviated from often. I am sure that just as many "known patterns of interaction" take part every day when a sales person is speaking with a customer, or a customer care agent is dealing with a call. The "formula" enables you to get through the interaction predictably and without offence. But it doesn't create the opportunity for insight. It doesn't help you understand "what else is going on around here" that could be influencing this interaction.

Little Theme :) Cumulative Benefits

Companies are now starting up to compete with SpinVox and the heavily funded Speech to Text product companies. Speech to Text means that you can dial a number, say what you want to do, or say a message, and have it delivered to a number of media or modes (i.e. email, SMS, etc.). VentureBeat reports on MessageSling which allows you to send a message to a group in any mode on any network. The article points out that you can do any network messaging on from SpinVox through uReach. I can also point out that www.dial2do.com has a speech to text engine. Yesterday ReadWriteWeb had a piece on using the iPhone as a satnav type offering. The opportunity to create applications and services that are a mix and match, a mashup, of various other platforms can often be a problem too, inthat the start up hasn't really thought about cumulative "lock in's" that discourage the user from leaving for another service.

Getting With The Big Themes: SaaS and Media Consumption

TechCrunch carried the piece that Joost would move to entirely browser based delivery. The even bigger news was that the social consumption aspect of the service would now be much more prominent. I always thought that joost should be the "virtual couch" where you and your friends could watch TV, Media, Games, and then just comment, show other related clips etc. You could say to your friends "hey, wanna watch CSI tonight at 10.00?". Others say that Joost just didn't have the compelling content it needed to draw users in. I learned a lot from my trial of the spotify.com alpha service. It has great player, loads of content, clean interface. What I missed about my lastfm was serendipity. And that is what John Hagel was talking about.

Appointments 2.0: A specific instance of "micro-process" drags.

2008-09-08T15:07:00.002Z

Kristen Nicole at Mashable brings us news that HeyCosmo brings the world a service that uses the phone to help schedule your life. You could use the Concierge service to phone the HeyCosmo number and ask it to phone all the restaurants in a particular area and see if they have a table for 7pm. One presumes that who ever picks up the phone and confirms that they have a table will then be connected back to you.. It sounds nice but you will never ever use this service unless it is connected to an accurate and useful store of directory assets, or social network ratings, etc. I must admit Ijust don't see these guys being architected to do this. HeyCosmo reportedly has plans to expand into a kind of referral based service based on Geo-location/ local data. With 11 staff and Silicon Valley based, it can't be a cheap start up either.

Update: RWW thinks HeyCosmo needs more emphasis on the receiver's experience. Bang On Assessment in my view.

Presdo (as in "press-do") are another 2.0 start up that enable you to invite people to events "on the fly". Drag a link to your toolbar and start booking events with friends and colleagues. This service is email driven and very "gooleicious". Which leads me to Google Calendar. Use Gmail and Calendar, hey even stick an SMS reminder into the routine, and your good to go. And with Google Gears for Calendar about to debut you have even more reason to use it.

TimeBridge on the other hand have a brief "negotiation" capability in that the initiator can choose 5 potential meeting times, and the recipients choose "best, available, not good" for each of the times, and then an email negotiation is entered into. It also synchs with all the available calendaring softwares. The key pieces here are "installed software base", and "negotiation". If the negotiating service was also "aware" of some of your meeting habits, relationship strengths, and work priorities, then it might actually become effective. These are key "micro-process" drags based on problems of co-ordination and communication.

Phil Wolff of SkypeJournal totally nailed it this week with this posting.

While the diagram above is an obvious reference to Alex Saunders "Presence 2.0" it illustrates how much deeper the conversation has to go to actually solve something as "simple" as an appointment routine. If you think of an appointment setting in your outlook as an "object", you may wish to see notes on the conference call, attached to-do's, products referenced in the call, etc. As your organisation scales in number, and the number of interactions / appointments between you and the customer scale, the issue becomes non-trivial.

Imagine: you have an appointment with an installer from BT, who said they would be at your house by 10.30. Why not go to the calendar page he emailed you as part of the confirmation cycle, hover over it, and it shows you on a map, where he is right now, and how long it will take to "next appointment"? Think of it as a FexEx for Everybody in your always live calendar. There is a opportunity to solve a real problem here, but we're all a bit away from having the social and technical infrastructure in place to crack it on a large scale. (IMHO)

Batch and Weave

2008-09-03T14:04:00.001Z

Micro-Processes , Structural Processes, and Shorter Product Development Times

The theme is well understood at this point: those that can sense and respond to market needs and demands, and can iterate their products, designs, features etc. faster than the competition, eventually "out evolve" them. I saw this years ago in Japanese manufacturing strategy called lean production.

A key part of this "lean" was the ability to turn production processes away from "long lines" to "flexible cells". Then, within each cell there was (usually) a key machine that had a "set up & turnaround time". This was a key constraint. But here is something you probably didn't know: operators of these machines kept very detailed log books of how the machine operated in reality, and issues that effected its performance. We are talking a "log book on a string" here. These books would provide details of real "constraints" in the production process so designers could see that their design changes would have key impacts on the production line. Underpinning the systems thinking here, was a clear culture that understood the upstream and downstream impacts of their performance and failures. Micro-processes (Machine Set Up Constraint) fit seamlessly into Macro-Processes (Product Development Process).

For all the talk about Lean Production & Agile Enterprise we still don't seem to be doing a great job of this in the last 20 years. What strikes me here, again, is that there are many Micro-Processes that an individual can capture, and these will matter in themselves to the individual capturing them, and in aggregate to those involved in strategy, finance and marketing. This is one theme of the Enterprise 2.0 debate that isn't really being brought forward enough.

CEBP (communications enabled business processes) are one way of unlocking some of those key constraints, but perhaps there are very many other opportunities to capture and share micro-processes. I am sure that a lot more could and will be done with CEBP and internal organisational efficiencies.

Costs and How To Curtail Them

Denis Howlett has a posting on how to look at costs a bit more closely: a lot of smaller companies don't have a formal review process for this, but just by asking existing service providers to re-tender you can regularly attain decent cost savings. Denis does recommend that companies also look to see how they can refocus from offline to online marketing. At VoiceSage we attend quite a few conferences but we also do quite a bit of our work through "teleweb". Of course a core part of what we do around here is help companies bring in their outstanding debtor days/ sales days outstanding by using Interactive Voice Messaging (IVM). One of our Clients is a Catalogue company called Otto, and it brought in its money twice as fast using VoiceSage. But there are add on points to this: we know that companies can reduce their outstanding debt by Communications Enabling the Credit and Collections cycle. But have you traced all the upstream and downstream benefits of being more in control of this process?

Telco2 Themes: The Continued Importance of CEBP

The guys at Telco2 continue to show the way in terms of what is possible for all parties in the new CEBP marketplace. looks like another good line up for the November Brainstorm. Let me throw a theme into the hat: "What enables you to create a platform of availability"?

Follow Up On Last Post: micro-processes

2008-09-01T11:25:00.001Z

Are Conversations The Missing Piece Around Micro-Processes?

The ever excellent PersonalInfocloud comes forward with some interesting comments around Enterprise 2.0 and why it might be a bit different from Web 2.0. The bits that particularly caught my attention were that many of the micro-processes (my term) were not captured in an organisation, and information around even well defined processes were also not caught and captured and thus saved to "organisation memory".

Enterprise has gone through its phases of knowledge management tools, from forms for capturing information, forums for sharing, and up to enterprise content management systems (ECM) that encompass document management, content management, knowledge management, and information harvesting. But, the gaps still exist.

These existing gaps are around conversations not being captured (the walls of the halls have no memory (well today they do not)) and increasingly the ubiquitous communication channel in organizations, e-mail, is being worked around. Quick decisions are not being documented as it is not enough for a document or worth completing a form. As the iterative processes of development, design, and solution engineering are happening at quicker and smaller increments the intelligence behind the decisions is not being captured or shared. This is largely because of the tools.

How Would You Get Those Micro-Processes Out of Company?

TechCrunch reports on Worklight, a server based application that sits behind the firewall of the corporate and then enables corporate information to be "widge-fied" a la iGoogle. So, you see you're stock levels, your delivery times, etc. etc. I think this is a great idea and just know that this is the way all corporate interactions will move, both for internal employees, and for company customer interactions. The only "vision thing" I would ponder is shouldn't the server be hosted somewhere?

That Sounds Cool: Could We Do This On Some Web2.0 Stuff?

For those of you thinking that "our product would really sell well into large corporate users", beware. Its a serious commitment as a sales and marketing strategy, and needs good capitalisation. Ed Sims has more here. In a related point Tom Evslin asks can you have a strategy for a start up if there is no revenue plan? Yes, you can, if you have a lot of personal money, a low personal burn rate, and the frame of mind to do it :) For those who are used to selling into large enterprises, expect "higher than web2.0 rates of friction".

Process: More than "the computer says no"

2008-08-29T15:20:00.001Z

I have been interested in transaction cost economics for a number of years, particularly from the organisational & supply chain point of view. At what point do the internal efficiencies of process and formalisation become more effectively performed outside the organisation? How much formalisation should we have versus "organicity" and "self direction"?. From what I learned, quite a lot of "reality" gets "codified" through "formal procedures". We've all seen it happen in our companies, or in former places of employment: the report says "good to go", but you know there are risks not mentioned in that report. That's where the informal processes and network does its work, and those conversations are probably happening in emails, IM's, and social networks. So, formalisation is and always was mediated and augmented by conversation.

Being thorough in following process and procedure can drive effective performance, even in medical environments like Intensive Care. It can help in the diagnosis, in the doing, and in the reporting.

I was intrigued when the FastForwardBlog had a posting on Taylor and Micro-Processes. To quote:

examples (of micro-processes) might include:

Customizing an existing sales presentation for a meeting with a new prospect

Designing the agenda and preparing materials for an internal brainstorming meeting

Putting together the briefing materials for a quarterly business review meeting

Analyzing and making sense out of a competitor’s recent pricing announcement

These micro-processes are characterized by:

A small number of steps

Ad hoc design created by the knowledge workers responsible for the process

Loose definitions of the beginning and end of the process

Loose notions of control, sign-offs, and approvals

Technology-enabled, if at all, by email and office suite tools.

None of these processes were ever explicitly designed; they’ve evolved over time. The cumulative pain and productivity drag imposed by these processes is accepted as a fact of organizational life. While various technologies are offered up as ways out of the swamp, we need an overall improvement strategy to provide the necessary direction

There is much to ponder here. Given that there has been little progress made in bringing "Taylorism" to knowledge work, how we can use process-based orientation to expose these hidden drags could lead to an explosion in productivity. God knows, our economy could do with it. VoiceSage takes a process perspective to drive out drags in communication and collaboration, particularly in communications to the customer base, but there is no reason why a similar focus could not be used on internal processes. Indeed Thomas Howe has numerous examples of how document sign off and management creates unnecessary and expensive drags that when traced and measured cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Odds and Ends of Week

2008-08-15T19:24:00.001Z

Evert Bopp is following up on his idea for a co-working space in Ireland. Eirpreneur uses Twitter to have a virtual watercooler for teleworkers. Bernie Goldback does the Sunday Papers via Qik, the instant video solution from your smart phone. Oh Yeah, and Ireland gives James Enck some serious link love around his return to the world of Blogging, and being "cutdown in subprime". So what's it all about?

Well in a way there are some fairly big themes going on here and they have to do with broadband, broadband availability, and the impact of this on work patterns and social communications. From ip-networks to social networks, if you will. I have to admit that I am more than a little interested in how people can maintain social networks, and business networks through a combination of online conversation, webinars, and physical presence. Ken Thompson calls it 3 types of network dialogs "Getting Things Done, Grooming, and Emoting", and a viable network has to have all three to be sustainable.

I've been around a few years now, and I think that I've found that particular people can be great networkers, but it is so very very hard to extend that capability to groups, and to organizations as a whole. Yet, everywhere we look the researchers are telling us that "open innovation", "networked organisations", "virtual organisations", are the future of our global economy. Cisco have put very big bets on just this kind of social change and collaboration (thus their purchase of webex).

I'd love to hear of great examples of these virtual networks. How far do people have to be apart for it to fall over? Is it iterative or or are they like the may fly that dies once its purpose is completed?

For my book, I am watching the guys around Twitterphone with great glee, (www.maxroam.com, www.dial2do.com, www.zong.com). What I love about it is that for a relatively small amount of money, three players were able to get together and make a big bang in the world of early adopers. Perhaps it isn't the belly of the whale, but its on its tale, and its making it way.... "press 2 to talk to the whale".

CEBP + ME

2008-08-13T20:12:00.001Z

Thomas Howe has an interesting take on why Ribbit acquisition by BT is all about the next generation of services for the enterprise. One of the key things will be "communications enabling business processes", or CEBP. Who companies look to to deliver this capability is one of the reasons he reckons BT is so interested in the acquisition. The "typical enterprise developer" will not tackle telephony solutions in his humble opinion.

Jay Philips over at Adhearsion has a great posing on why the Asterisk open source PABX is not developed upon to a higher degree. "Beyond that point (..of getting a basic function to work)Asterisk becomes prohibitively unintuitive and that impression sticks and becomes a reputation" He also says the developer retention rate is less than 1%. This is very, very interesting, and maybe also why Ribbit, in turn, is interesting. If applications can be niche, and faceted to their actual use-case situation, without programming, then they become "long tail". Maybe what the open source movement need here is a "container" that enables people to play, without programming.

If Ribbit was as easy to use, as say, iTunes, would it be adoptable? If there were zero programming? If literally, you did not see one line of code, not even a "copy this, and paste it where you see <body" :) Perhaps this is the bet BT are making.

Well don't let me scare you, but if you had popped inside VoiceSage you would see that our applications are entirely deployed without you having to write a line of code. Could it be made as "easy as iTunes"? mmmm.....Lets see.

Just a few very cool little gadgets

2008-07-21T11:54:00.001Z

Techcrunch has a few iphone apps listed that make me actually want an iphone because it might be useful. Capture my expense slips through the camera and post them to my Salesforce.com account? Yip. See how my Supply Chain analytics are performing in real time: Yip.

Misalignment of what you think is important and what your customer thinks is important.

2008-07-21T10:34:00.001Z

Dimension Data has an interesting report on 45% of respondents to their survey would prefer to use DTMP (punch a number for each option), than to use Voice Recognition. This kind of thing happens when you fall in love with your technology, and a distance grows between you and the people that actually use your solution.

Now, that's quite a headline issue right there, but the central one of interest to me is that the "customer use case" in this research has some pretty interesting "implicit assumptions". For instance, "when I call, or get called", "reason for calling", "where I am". This is all good Telco2 stuff. Yet more than half of people and vendors believe that the Voice Recognition IVR implementation is primarily driven by cost savings:

Now, there is nothing wrong with trying to save money, but where is the two way benefit in the relationship? yes, if you pass on this benefits of low cost interaction in the form a low cost business model, the low cost has clear shared value for the customer.

Only 18% of customers thought that their interaction with a Voice Recognition Platform completely addressed the reason they called up in the first place. I think this is just a totally mindblowing figure.

VoiceSage is an outbound Interactive Voice Messaging service so when, where and for what reason you contact the customer must be very carefully examined. You must focus on why are you interrupting this person, what is the two way value to be communicated and demonstrated to the customer, and how closely can I reasonably meaningfully personalize this experience? By more closely examining the reason for the call, and the two way value generation potential, you will take this 18% problem resolution figure, and blow it through the roof.

News Updates etc.

2008-07-11T15:19:00.001Z

Retail Week carries a very nice piece on how Otto used VoiceSage to reduce the overall level of late payments in its catalogue businesses. I can tell you here (because this is private isn't it?) that they reaped many more rewards than you might expect. Why? Well, when you reduce the amount of time that people are in arrears they tend less towards bad debt. In effect, you shift your curve in and down. Its not unheard of for companies to bring in their money twice as fast. The implications of this are actually quite interesting, but I won't rob our sales guys of all their stories.

Force.com (appexchange related) have an interesting development where if an object or entry is changed, you can get notification. I guess this would be interesting in financial services, where the sales person might wish to know that one of their customers has been downgraded from a credit standpoint. If he knew this, he might choose to contact them to re-negotiate or help to manage the account before it ran into trouble.

Web2Ireland and Fergus Burns point out how light weight API's and mashup can be used to re-design how government projects are run. With Sky News carrying the story about how the mayor of London wants to make crime data available as an API, you will be able to not only map these to house prices, but potentially make crime reporting a citizen activity, where people actually get to recommend solutions. I really like this because IT and Software needs to address real big societal issues, if it is to make big impacts. See umair for more on this.

Mathew Lees of the Patty Seybald Group, has a nice piece on Enterprise 2.0 Lessons. Although I agree that taking a more social approach to computing will reap massive rewards, I think that "unplanned innovation" is akin to "build it and they will come", i.e. it doesn't work, and hasn't ever worked. But that's another conversation.

Andrew McAfee has an interesting question list relating to the kinds of questions people ask before engaging in an Enterprise2.0 Initiative. Josh Bernoff of Forrester has a very nice run down on why Enterprise Clients could be the real "sweet spot" for 2.0 approaches. There was a lovely comment after the article "connecting people with people is helpful, connecting people and business is valuable!"

TechCrunch urged us all to "stop before you voicemail", which is a neat take on what is happening in the hyper connected world. Because basically, no one has time to check their voicemail anymore because "they live in other environments", i.e. their Google Reader, or MS Outlook. I know of one Irish financial institution that has banned employees from turning on Voicemail. Employees were just turning it on, getting down to their paperwork, but were not being responsive to customers and other employees. Their customer satisfaction and customer service ratings were taking a hammering as well because if you left a message and an employee didn't answer it until the next day.... well, there goes your SLA.

Update on Symbian Release

2008-07-04T14:42:00.001Z

As usual, the most in debt analysis of what might be going on from an IPR and technical point of view with regards Nokia's release of Symbian into the Eclipse environment. Mr. Geddes.

Nokia OpenSource Symbian ? eh, What?

2008-06-25T20:33:00.002Z

This is a bit of a technical post, and lets face it, the musings of an outsider. I don't have any special knowledge, just some speculation to offer about why Nokia open-sourced Symbian and what it means for mobile services.

- Someone did the maths and figured out that they might get "linuxed". If they did not open source the developers would have to go elsewhere, eventually (Android, Red Hat, other). By opening up, they stand the chance of being "the developers friend" and retaining "third screen space" on the mobile device. How deeply they open up will be the telling point.

- Nokia need, and want, business users. This doesn't mean becoming "the next blackberry", it means being the "Anyberry", i.e. on any phone, anywhere, completely interoperable with your enterprise software. It also means inventing a whole new bunch of services, and delivering them through the network (nee cloud), to the end user enterprise.

- Hey, if you want to be "Anyberry", that would mean doing something with MSFT, right? I expect that integration with exchange will continue to erode RIM's dominance in business email messaging. MSFT & Nokia are compelling combination in this space. Of course, MSFT & Nortel are also getting very cosy around the Unified Communications space. Oh, and isn't Nortel on some kind of IBM middleware?

- Being interoperable, means middleware, and middleware means Eclipse. Funny how Eclipse was the only environment it was released into isn't it? Not really, IBM just released their big vision of the cloud, the grid, the big thingy in the sky. So IBM would really like to be your "Amazon for Hosted Business Services". Oh, and if you want to provide services to big companies, you better have a background in doing so. mmm... who would Nokia use to offer such services into the enterprise, who might Nokia trust to build their own Hosted Business Services?..... oh, and Dana Gardner points out that "Eclipse.org needs a cloud story". Lots to ponder there.

- To do this properly, Nokia also needs to be "Nokia-Network-Inside" (see location based services plays, location based advertising, etc.). To be sure they have some network presence through joint ventures, but nothing as central as Cisco. So, what I would do is look to a hugely influential company, with a massive installed based of communication products, with a network presence and an enterprise footprint. What's going on in Nortel these days? Oh, hold on, aren't Nortel & MSFT doing some nice work together on UC for the Business, and didn't we just say that Nortel is built on some neat IBM middleware?

So the question might be, what part of the overall delivering services through the cloud story does the symbian purchase and outsource release? As many have pointed out, the new apple iPhone 2.0 does a neat side step around the carrier for managing notifications. That's all I'll say. I have to go away and take my medicine now. Upate: As per usual Martin Geddes nails it.http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/07/how_open_is_open_or_whats_up_w.html#more

Making Change Matter

2008-06-24T13:39:00.001Z

In the spirit of new technologies doing things that matter and impact society, the Fast Forward Blog has a project to use public TV to help people make connections around the issue of Mortgage and Debt problems.

For me, there are a couple of brilliant points in the middle of this project: The Public TV acts as "the trusted place" where the conversations can be initiated; to paraphrase earlier posts by Seamus McCauley and Umair Haque it is a trusted place, where people like us can share some opinion and knowledge to make a change. The other thing I find interesting is that they are using Ning to support the service from a social networking point of view.

A central problem in "surfacing this community of interest" is that to date they may not want to "hold their hand up", and go search for a community. But because there is a "mass media" outlet that can centrally direct them to a trusted place, there is the potential for critical mass. These people can "get organised"

My Data or your Data?

2008-06-24T09:06:00.001Z

Hatip: Geek and Poke:

It does raise an interesting point though. If you are mashing up data, from different sources, and end users can add data sources of their own, who is going to be responsible for overall data integrity?

Enterprise Two-Dot-Oh-Dear....

2008-06-23T20:33:00.001Z

ReadWriteWeb have a very nice piece on why Enterprise 2.0 has to be different. They list 8 Attributes of E20: I have just posted my inflections on each of these points after each:

(1) Monthly Subscription fees, not upfront perpetual license fees. This means the vendor has to be good to keep earning the $$$. The vendor also gets a predictable revenue line, so they can invest in R&D with confidence.

(A) This is a bit off the mark in my opinion. The value of monthly charging, historically, is that the smaller amount every month, doesn't hurt as much. Smaller numbers also don't draw attention to themselves during review processes. Yet, larger corporate clients look for value, and don't mind paying upfront fees/ forward paying usage, if they get better value. Consider this to be a reflection of your Enterprise customers confidence in the service.

(2) Adoption by users, not forced by corporate policies. Users "vote with their mouse", so it has to be good to get traction and bloat gets quickly punished.

(A) I am afraid this is just a clear result of having a clear value focus. Is it useful to the user or not? Remember, there are still corporate issues that have to be addressed no matter how "cool and funky" your user thinks Skype-Conference calls are, if your company operates in a regulated environment, then they may not be a viable option. Dion Hinchcliffe referred to a recent webinar he was on and the main issues raised by CIO's are still, Governance, and Security. Ignore corporate policy at your peril.

(3) Usable without a manual within 30 minutes, still valuable for a sophisticated power use 2 years later. That is the mark of greatness. It is a real art. The great ones make it look simple - it is not simple!

(A) Completely agree with this. And would like to add that the more people use your system or service every day, the more usability issues come to the fore. When trialling a system, you may be quite happy to go through 3-clicks to make a contact request. Using it every day, you want one click. So an emerging E20 rule might be "Usability is more important on day 30, than it is on minute 30".

(4) Hosted SaaS, so that vendors can invest R&D in new features and not in the intricacies of different platforms forced on them by an internal IT department.

(A) Completely agree with this. The caveat of course being that you may have to have broad customisation capabilities versus "the one interface for all". Users want to move things about to suit their work habits, let them. But remember, some of the most useful applications retain their background structure, so that your adaptations don't end up just creating a mess. This also effects how you roll out features (i.e. if they are important to some customers but not others). As far as I know, some of the more successful SaaS apps are standard to all users.

(5) Enabling secure, fine-grained communication across the firewall. This is the big issue for enterprises. Not many vendors do this right yet. Today we see too much binary "you are either inside or outside". The winners will enable security in a much more fine-grained way.

(A) This one is becoming more and more important. You can see that the "100% browser based solution" approach is attractive from a number of perspectives, but the limitations are clear when you have large volumes of data involved. It is also, I believe a reason why the Adobe Air development is so attractive. Perhaps companies will all have their own "iTunes for Applications" strategies.

(6) Loosely coupled, not attempting lock-in, enticing but not forcing use of related modules/products. This is a real biggie. Bringing any new system into a company involves a horrendous amount of co-ordination and interfacing. The one's that say "you can have just this little bit and it takes in data this way and spits out data this way" will win.

(A) Yip. Reduce friction to adoption at all points. One thing VoiceSage has done to address this is to enable you to use as much or as little data integration as you feel comfortable with. This reduces friction in the adoption process. Yet clearly, there are many benefits that can only be driven out with higher levels of data integration from an input point of view, but also from a report generation point of view.

(7) Freemium model, so some early experimentation can be done free of cost. This also reduces the vendor's sales cost, so they can invest more in R&D and/or lower the price enough to drive adoption.

(A) Agree, BUT. People/ Companies that want a free service are not always the people that will move to pay for a premium service. I think its somewhere like 2% move on? What FREE might give you (where there is near zero marginal cost) is more information on what people want from your service, and more usage behavior. The real thing that should be made as free as possible as an experiment that enables experience of benefit/value. Just using the service is nothing, experiencing measurable benefit, that you can put a money value on, is everything. Enabling customer experimentation is rarely truly free to deliver.

(8) Fun, relaxed, not taking itself too seriously. Taking off the suit helps adoption.

(A) Well you know, some customers like to know that you take their business and concerns seriously. If your customer/ client needs to see a suit to feel that, then you have to call it. At VoiceSage we like to think that we help take away the veil of complexity, we like to reveal the simplicity. How you interact with the client needs to reflect that "organisational value", not a notion of "cool", or general cultural trends towards informality.

29% of Agent Time Spent Talking to Customers

2008-06-13T18:38:00.001Z

From Silicon republic: Independently run, Siemens Enterprise Communications sponsored:

- Employees are finding it too difficult to manage all the different software they have to use, and are spending too much time logging this information at the end of the call.

- As a result, only 29% of an agents time is actually spent conversing with the customer. of that 16% is spend conversing about the query, the remaining 13% is spent building up a rapport.

- The remaining 71% is spent entering notes, entering data, and seeking advice, and looking up screens.

Clearly this needs a radical simplification. 15 different solutions to solve one customer query? Wrong question I'd say. It doesn't matter how many apps are involved, what matters is your User Interface (single log on, customer and agent, dynamic context dashboard). OMG Paul, have you any idea how hard that is?

Some Observations on Customers and Technology Use

2008-06-11T10:38:00.001Z

With the talk of GoogleLabs (gmail) last week, it was obvious that Google was launching products based on actual observed consumer behavior. Compared to Microsoft, they also seemed to have a much much smaller development team. These are the result of being a completely hosted service. There are no legacy software to manage, no partnership / software alliances that have to be supported. The web is the platform and the it is a liveweb.

It's possible to look at this another way: Google's very broad base of users give it the capability of sensing and seeing user behavior in near-realtime. Google can also track the rate of "launch success" against other factors it now has at its disposal: "do early adopter lessons cross over to the main stream for this type of application"?

While everyone has being looking at GooData as being "the best advertising information in the history of the world", perhaps the behavioral and profiling information coupled with expertise in discerning "intent", have made Google the most formidable "product development company" in history. After all we all buy products and services "to achieve an intent", be that latent or overtly expressed.

Now before everyone goes crazy on me, (all two of you) and says the obvious ("Google is a one trick pony, with a a dodgy hind leg, i.e. applications), let me posit that Google is learning how to use this information to build products, because to date, Google has not been a "product development company", but an "advertising platform". It will launch and fail, launch and fail again, but it will learn better than anyone else, how to fail successfully and how to incorporate the information into the next iteration. It won't approach this like an old school Proctor and Gamble, and I ultimately, I think they will make these kinds of "use-case-scenario-analysis" available as an API. Why not?

It's Out There, They Are Evolving, They Are In Your Browser :)

2008-06-05T18:53:00.002Z

(1) Thomas Otter at Vendorprisey has a great idea: link Lastfm.com to the conference call waiting space: dialing into a conference, why not hear something you actually like ? :)

(2) Want to use your mobile phone to keep track of what you've just read, or where you are in that book? Bkkeepr allows you input some simple commands against an ISBN number. It uses a twitter channel feature. (HT: Damien Mulley)

(3) Hey, a number of people in your business are using Twitter to comment or micro-publish, why not get them into a company directory and let people in the company connect to each other and share, or even let customers connect directly to the employees? (HT: FastForward Blog).

These examples have a number of points related to them IMHO :)

- They understand fragmentation, and the power of widgetization (i.e. a widget on your blog, on your website, on your phone). Like a beer add might say "widgets reach those parts that other beers just can't reach.

- Many products are actually platforms: Twitter is a pipe powering Bkkeeper, GetSatisfaction.com, and it will empower many others. Right now, good reliable API's are key to any product. (My predication is that GetSatisfaction will become a platform for managing customer conversations).

- The granularity of interaction between your company and your customers will increase; and this interaction is not private and is not owned by your company (Jeff Jarvis has a twitter today asking people do they know of companies that have come out and been honest about a screw up, and come out stronger, i.e. been authentic. This is a natural outcome of being scrutinized, as they say in politics, "sunlight cleanses".) And oh, god, as if to prove the point yet again, that you don't own the conversation with the customer, check out Paul Greenberg's response to Sony misrepresenting their product offer.

- Companies that become "magnets for conversation" will become very, very successful. Conversation are magnets for collaboration. Collaboration creates Actions & Information. In turn, these create Insights. Insights are very very rare, and good insight has the potential to create massive value creation. (note: not value shift along the value chain, but real value creation).

The Telco2 Guys today have an interesting point around products being extended, enhanced and differentiated by service. Yes, people talking to people, people interacting (well) with others. And they give a nice hat-tip to VoiceSage, so thank you very much.

Conversation, Collaboration, Community... mmm.... the force is strong with this one....

Outstanding Debtor Days

2008-06-03T08:33:00.002Z

Not that it should be any news to anyone, but Intrum Justita find that the average outstanding debtor days just went up from 14.3 days over the due date, to 16.4. 54 Days is the average payment duration in Ireland. Not bad, I think, if you actually do get paid. The problem is, that the longer it's out there, the less likely you are to get paid, and the more likely your debt is competing with someone else's debt.

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

Mortgage For Quote: National Irish Bank, Impermeable, Bank of Ireland a Case Study In Customer Care Excellence.

2008-05-29T14:43:00.001Z

There is absolutely nothing like personal experience to bring home just how important customer care is to actual business profit. Before I start / rant, let me tell you that good mortgage enquiry leads can be worth up to €50. I have had mortgages with two banks previously. NIB and BOI. I phoned my former account manager at Bank Of Ireland (Anne McNamara) and said I am interested in getting a quote. "No problem" she replies, "but I work in Business Banking now, so let me see if I can find the right person for you to speak with". I gave her an incorrect name for the person I had been dealing with last time in Mortgages, but again no bother: she found the person we were dealing with, and called us back in 5 minutes with two other contact names that would take our call in the next 30 minutes. Thanks Anne, that's great, and you know, I like speaking with you, and I feel better about working with your Bank.

Cue Bad Guy Music: NIB have a general low call number on their site (yes, not free, lowcall). I phone, it puts me through a useless IVR, and never offers to connect me to a named service (duh, Mortgage Enquiries?). I get fed up, and hang up. FAIL. Feel guilty, maybe I was wrong. Search the intertube for any reference to a local NIB Branch number in Limerick, you know, so I could call the branch and book a meeting to talk about a MORTGAGE ! (Holy cow). Can't - find - a - way - through - must- try - harder... ah to hell with it.

Then an email comes back (I'd fired one off earlier to our account contact in the local branch) and its "I'll call you tomorrow". Great, I'll talk to you after a meet the nice people from BOI, have drunk their tea, and generally got friendly with. Hey, maybe they will come up with some great insights, and be able to get the ball rolling so I can close down my bid really fast. Wouldn't that be great.

The Take Away:

- Make it easy for your customers to reach the people they do business with, within your company;

- Use Click-To-Call intelligently, a "mortgage search query" should pop up a local number to call;

- Understand Context: I have signaled to both institutions in various ways that I was actively looking to make a house purchase, why is this not ticked?

Dirty Small Bad Things:)

2008-05-27T13:26:00.001Z

I follow quite a few of the "new media guys" and they often come up with great insights that I can keep in my deep back pocket when looking at the enterprise2.0. Darren Herman is one of these guys, but I was a little surprised to see that one of his "habits" is to leave the phone on silent and only check it a few times a day. The interruptions are just too disruptive. If people really want to find him, and get in contact, they have to be "creative". I think Darren may be a maven in this respect (i.e. early social media adopter), but it does point to a central question: "if it's important, the request will find me".

It's a variation of Tim Ferriss's "let small bad things happen", because you don't need to manage every little thing. What is really happening here though is that Darren is screening his calls, and (from the outside) this has some embedded rules:

- if your caller ID announces you, I can choose to take call or not

- I have voice mail, so you can choose to leave a message or not

- I can choose to call in, and action as I wish.

- If important, there are other "hard to find" / "insider routes" to finding me.

eh hum. Small point. It's the little things that really drive customers mad. If you don't find a way, and have a system for ensuring that the small things don't get picked up on quickly, you are going to lose some of our customer good will.

Speaking of small things, Rob Patterson over on the FastForward blog points our attention to the corporate use of Twitter over at Zappos. They have a directory of all the employee Twitter-streams, that way employees can connect with each other, and connect with customers. It's leading edge for certain. But then GetSatisfaction use Summize to bring the twitter and social media back to the place where people are seeking to make contact with others around this complaint or praise. Zappos wants you to call them, you will develop some relationship with them, and ultimately buy more (their growth is stellar). At VoiceSage we think that how you handle the "exceptions" is a real opportunity to create customer satisfaction value.

And then I put out a Twitter saying what a great idea this corporate twitter directory was. And the CEO of Zappos "added a follow" , i.e. "we're listening".

Recently Insolvent Companies

2008-05-22T12:44:00.001Z

This just in from the Irish Institute of Credit Management (IICM) Newsletter:

(Quoting) IDS Collections survey from Credit Today, where they surveyed credit management in the final 6 months of 100 recently insolvent companies –

97 had not taken any action against debtors –
92 had received no payment since oldest invoice –
50 continued to supply customers with debts of over 90 days
40 of the 50 doubled the customers indebtedness

I particularly like the reason the recently insolvent companies gave for allowing this stage of affairs to continue:

"we wanted to maintain good relations with customers"

Datability: Is it time for you to build on your own data?

2008-05-22T12:34:00.001Z

"If the economy continues on a path that looks like a recession, consumers are going to tighten their belts even further. More and more of a consumer’s household income is now going to simply servicing current debt. The credit crisis will guarantee that this will go on for awhile longer given the bad debts on many lenders books".

Source: www.mybudget360.com

So, with all this spiraling debt, how come our inflation figures aren't even higher? According to this interesting site, the US Government is looking at inflation as something more long term, something that doesn't want to too heavily weigh Food, Energy and Health Care costs. Not only that, but there is an interesting discussion on how the Government calculations of "rent equivalent" valuation of housing stock, significantly underestimated how much the average person way paying out at the end of each month., i.e. they are underestimating the actual disposable income.

So what's my point?

(1) Information should be based upon data that you understand, that you have an informed understanding of, such as the nature of the "inflation figure" you are using;

(2) Using "big block" figures removes nuance, and nuance is the day to day stuff that gets you operational efficiency (of course nuanced data requires flexible reporting capability);

(3) By digging into your data and acquiring better data, or even better still by encouraging customers to exposure their data to you, or co-create data, you can come to a real estimation of risk (in this example mortgage payment risk).

(4) Nuance gives you the opportunity to re-segment and gain insight.

(5) New insight create the opportunity for new Interaction patterns.

At VoiceSage we have reason to work with quite a few companies on issues such as late payments on personal loans, on mortgages etc, and mostly these customers have very professional systems and organisations for addressing these issues. I just wonder how much nuance is being lost by taking "data" at face value, and how much more "nuance" might be able to add value.

del.icio.us Tags: VoiceSage,Mortgage Payments,Late Mortgage Payments,Debt,Systems,Solutions,Processes

Theme-Synchronicity

2008-05-21T13:26:00.002Z

Yesterday, I just went off on one about customer interaction patterns, and how online and offline behavior's weren't so traceable, and weren't so simple. Today, Patty Seybold has a timely reminder that there are three different customer lifecycle scenario's: I really like them because each one gives you some good framing to work within, and then match to your online / offline activities:

Customer Lifecycle Customer Scenarios. These are closely connected to customers’ discovery, acquisition, and use of your products to fulfill a need they have. How do customers ideally want to interact with your brand and your ecosystem through their product lifecycle?
Event-Triggered Customer Scenarios. These relate to life events or business events that customers need to deal with. For consumers, these might include buying a new home, retiring, welcoming a new baby into the family, sending a child off to college. For business people, these scenarios may include things like launching a new product, opening a new branch, or downsizing the business.
Outcome-Based Customer Scenarios. Some scenarios are focused on a specific outcome, such as losing 20 pounds, getting a promotion, or increasing your revenues by 20 percent while retaining or improving your current profit margins.

Just to take the second point there, "event triggered scenarios". If a chronic late payer has received messages from your organisation attempting to engage them in conversation around that commitment, wouldn't it be interesting to know that their house was up for sale? That their car was at auction etc. That scenario could be delivered to you via some interesting mashup's. Indeed, if 20 other properties within "x" distance, or within that post code had gone up for sale in the last quater, this may influence how you wish to treat the customer debt (i.e. it really is in danger of going delinquent).

The Buying Process Isn't Straight Forward

2008-05-20T19:01:00.001Z

Bruce Temkin of Forrester points out that customers want face to face interaction. 45% prefer to speak to an agent over the phone, than other ways such as FAQ, self service, etc. In our book, the question thus becomes how can you enable the "best way" for your customers to contact you? Publishing a click-to-call button is surely a good "invitation to conversation", but so is just giving the customer a call when you know they are likely to want help. How many calls do you usually get because part A does not in fact slide easily into part B? There are different points in the customer interaction process where they will want to speak with someone, make it easy, and make it a great experience.

A related question is how to link all lead generation activity from "leaflet drops" to "adsense" back to actual purchase activity, and measures of customer loyalty is a current holy grail of many companies. Right now what we have is the fallacy of the "last click" (i.e. the last place we clicked in from is the reason we are at amazon, dell.com, etc.). It's not. A friend might have recommended that we check out a review site, a comment there might have brought us to a blogger, who recommended that we check out his story on zdnet.com, after which we clicked through to that computer etc. YET, (play drum roll here) Pew Internet Study found that over 20% of Americans have never even used email.

Something is broken here.

Lets Look A Bit More At This Pew Report

For those who have bought music in the prior year:

83% say they find out about music from the radio, the television, or in a movie.

64% say they find out about music from friends, family members, or co-workers.

56% say they find out about music through various online tools, such as going to a band’s or artist’s website or streaming samples of songs to their computers.

Among those who have purchased a cell phone in the prior year:

59% asked an expert or salesperson for advice.

46% go to one or more cell phone stores.

39% use the Internet.

The “bottom line” conclusion is the following: “Even though many buyers use the Internet in product research, relatively few say online information had a major impact on the product choice they eventually made. Only 7% of music buyers, 10% of cell phone buyers, and 11% of those who bought or rented a home in the prior year say that online information had a major impact on their decision.”

So, yes the Internet is a really important research and comparison tool, FOR SOME DEMOGRAPHICS, but not for all. Many will look to the lead user/gatekeeper in their social circle, and there are indeed many interpolating influences at work here. The question I would pose for you and your company, is do you have a real roadmap and activity sheet to build out a clearer understanding of how your customers make decisions?

I'm guessing not, so something is broken here.

I can't leave this subject without also highly, highly recommending that you read this post from Greg Sterling, at Screenwerk. I too have been following NearByNow for quite a while, and the "killer app" behind their service (which I would have strong recommendations to change) is that the current "dark data" of unsearchable inventory in a retail shopping center is exposed, and becomes searchable. This is a mapping and melding of the physical and the digital in a way that enriches both. These kinds of services have the potential to radically change the nature and flow of the buying process.

Now Why Don't Credit Cards Do This?

The ever excellent Nudge blog points out that your credit card limit should not be a "de facto" blunt instrument. Why can't we set our limits for specific purchases, god knows, I need something to double check with me if I really want to buy those books :) Set your own credit limit for each category of purchase. Now that's some neat thinking. Why not have a little routine that you have to go through in order to validate what might be a impulse buy (i.e. if I buy anything over $100 please read out my credit card balance before authorizing my purchase!). What I love about this idea, is that people could customise and mashup what, right now, seems a pretty lame process.

So, Services Can Be Mashed Up For Personalisation? Duh.

If you are wondering about "Google Think", look at all the cool things you can do with gMail. Why am I such a big fan? Because Google Mail "atomizes" and "API's" everything, and that opens up the opportunity for innovation. Its "customer driven mashup" by any other name. Take the NearByNow example above, why could you not ask for "show me every store that sells Levi jeans for men" and have it on a "live map" (i.e. as the special offer jeans sell out, the count goes down in real time etc. etc.).

To follow the theme Dion Hinchcliffe is developing some excellent diagrams to help people understand what this landscape looks like at this point in time.

PersonalInfoCloud blog also has some interesting thoughts on how to visualise this landscape. A link to that diagram is here.

My take away, is that the people familiar with technology, our 2.0 crowd, will see, use and abandon services with great regularity. Some will stick. Those that show real capability of getting scale will be bought by those that can distribute, i.e. the big installed players.

In a final note, I was sad to hear that KnowNow are to cease trading. It was a great idea. I think it just needed a "bigger home".

Forrester Mash Up To Be Worth $700m

2008-05-06T18:58:00.003Z

VoiceSage provides Interactive Voice Notification in the Process Layer of the Diagram above. Its not easy, but we hope it's simple. More detail on the excellent, as usual, ReadWriteWeb.

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

All Companies Are "Collaboration Nets"?

2008-05-06T14:53:00.003Z

Some notes coming in from Sapphire 2008, SAP Conference: (HT: Paul Greenberg) Cisco: The future of business is collaboration....(John Chambers, CEO) SAP: The future of business is business nets...(CEO of SAP) RSS: Attention and Use, and what your colleagues are using, should influence what is presented to you on your own desktop.(HT: Jeff Nolan) Thought: To see this on a macro macro level, John Hagel, Edge Perspectives, Creation Nets. Oh, so what's this got to do with "customer interaction". Friend, its all about how you create and manage interactions.

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

Late Payments In Europe.

2008-05-06T12:25:00.002Z

Lots of things to talk about out there. Inside ARM cover a piece on Debt Payment Practices in Europe. Once again it goes to show that "one size fits all" probably doesn't work in Europe. It also brings home the need for good credit checking.

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

Twitter

2008-05-05T08:38:00.003Z

Twitter.com, the meme of the social computing world, is seen by others as an actual test of many of the theories at work in the whole social computing, social networking world. It generates around 20 times more traffic from API's than from the site itself. Paul Greenberg gives us a little tour of how those in the CRM and Publishing world are currently using Twitter, and you have to think that for Twitter this is half the battle. Expect to see the Twitter embedded in mainstream apps in the near future.

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

Telco2: In Brief Review

2008-04-22T17:22:00.005Z

Telco2 4th Executive brainstorm was last week, and it was in London, and it was some fun. It was also a little worrying. Thomas Howe did a great job of summing up over on Alec Saunders SquawkBox Perhaps it is a problem of "big numbers". There is still money in connectivity and IT outsourcing. The Telco's can't seem to get their heads around how to get started, and even it's worth doing. How to and why they should expose API's is an unknown. And these are some very big numbers, it is perhaps difficult to get excited. Now a bit of a drum roll please.... VoiceSage announced that a major study had come in from a large client showing an 800% overall improvement in the processes enabled by VoiceSage. Uh hum. Yes. VoiceSage brought their cash in 100% faster and the cascading effects of this were significant. So when I was saying we can make dramatic offers, I wasn't joking. Now here is the kicker: "Every $1 spent with VoiceSage makes or saves you $12": again, validated. So what's with the big diagram folks? (HT Dion Hinchcliffe) The Web and the Company will mash together. The ease with which this is possible has the potential to release a lot of new data, and create a benefits that are orders of magnitude above what current IT deployments are able to achieve. Oh and as I was at Telco2, Dion and his crew were building, in realtime, applications within the new Google hosted development environment. So, under the floor boards, the ants were already swarming. So, I can build an application in the cloud, host it in the cloud, scale it in the clowd, and promote it through Google, and manage the logistics of delivery through Amazon. That's cute. And what do Telco's do? We do what we always do, we provide you with connectivity........

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

Telco2, London

2008-04-14T20:48:00.001Z

Well, we are off to Telco2 in London on Wednesday and Thursday and presenting on the area of Communications Enabled Business Processes, i.e. how Interactive Voice Messaging can be used by regular business to drive results. It is pretty well attended by the Telco and Telco vendors, but one of the absolute reasons everybody should check it out, is their vision of the Two Sided Platform. The blogging will be in pause for probably a week, but as per the world of modern media I hope to post some twitters on interesting opinions as they emerge over the course of the two days. If you want to follow me, I am on www.twitter.com/PaulSweeney

Follow up those forms with a phone call!

2008-04-14T11:03:00.001Z

DestinationCRM.com reports that a simple phone number on the webform can increase customer contact where good "follow on" leads to sales. So, either put your number on them there forms, or follow on with a phone call over times certain forms get filled out. You could lift your sales by circa 10% (apparently). The key thing is you have to make this contact happen within the first 30 minutes. response rates are much better in that time frame because people are still thinking about that issue and willing to engage. From elsewhere on the web last week someone asked "what's the number one predicator of bad customer service?" Ans: "They don't put their phone number on the website".

InsideARM point us towards an Aberdeen Research report that says the best performing collections agencies focus on shift scheduling processes to that you can adjust staffing levels to meet actual demand. It makes sense, but the question is of course how do you manage demand as well? Outbound Interactive Voice Messaging can be used to completely eliminate many different types of inbound call, and can also be used to dramatically (yes, we have numbers to validate this!) improve your agent productivity vis-a-vis a regular auto-dialer. The rest of the points were as follows:

Focus on Training is also important: Agent training and coaching provides agents with the necessary skills and support system to properly utilize new product releases, tools and practices. More than half of best-in-class firms use e-learning to improve agent performance; another 39 percent employ periodic agent testing; 36 percent use issue resolution workshops; and 36 percent employ self-paced training.

Knowledge Management: Analytics is a key component of any workforce optimization suite because it provides the cornerstone to understanding the current and historical state of contact center activities.

Updated Technology: To optimize workforce utilization, a contact center needs integrated technology with multiple components. Forty-one percent of best-in-class companies have implemented workforce optimization suites.

Performance Management: Best-in-class companies that use workforce optimization solutions see increases in key performance management. Performance management solutions help companies improve sales or improve collections on outstanding invoices, according to the report.

Who Answer's The Phone? Who Answers The Missed Calls?

2008-04-11T11:28:00.002Z

Lots of interesting themes linking up this week. So this is a post in two parts: Seth Godwin asked why most organisations are so "careless" about who answers the phone?

"Shouldn't every single inbound call be answered in one ring? Shouldn't there be as much spent on self-service customer support as is spent on the design of the selling part of your website? Shouldn't you be tracking in the finest detail what people have to say when they call in? Shouldn't you be rewarding call center operators by how long they keep people on the phone, not how many calls they can handle a minute? Shouldn't there be an easy, fast and happy way for an operator to instantly upgrade a call to management (not a supervisor, I hate supervisors) who can actually learn something from the caller, not just make them go away?"

Calls coming into any business can be analysed for underlying causalities. Seth wanted to say "hey, your product changed and I don't think that's been in a good way". Basically he wants to help you develop a product that appeals or re-appeals to the people that made your brand successful in the first place. Offering him another bar (of the same) chocolate is obviously lame. Routing him through to "Frank, our chocolate mixing guy", might seem weird at first, but hell, why not? Frank gets to talk to a customer and connect with a customer, with someone that actually cares about his part of the product development. At least, everybody will have an intelligent conversation. Of course its hard to have this conversation in the first place if you don't answer the phone. Ever heard the phone ring out in your office? Bet you have. Bet you have no way of knowing if it was important or not either. So the first take away: perhaps even more time should be spent in matching inbound callers, and their inbound calling contexts, to actual agent skills. I know this topic isn't new, but so few companies seem to be doing this well IMHO. And now to our second, related point: Jim Gilbert is a marketing guy at eDiets and has a lot to say about marketing and customer service in the catalogue industry. To speak to the issue at hand, when the phone rings in this environment he believes that their are four types of prospect inbound call outcomes: 1. calls answered where an order occurs; 2. calls answered where an order doesn’t occur — contact data captured by the customer service rep (CSR); 3. calls answered where an order doesn’t occur — contact data not captured by the CSR; and 4. calls not answered where no order occurs (calls abandoned). Jim, then goes on to give some ideas on how you might respond to scenario 4 in particular. In this scenario Jim reckons that you can do a "reverse look up of the ANI (automatic number identification) and perform a match up of that number with an address. The success rate of such match up's is about 30-40%. Similarly, you could also just send a "missed call interact" from VoiceSage and give the customer one of the 3 known reasons why they were calling (i.e. were you calling to order a catalogue, if so press 1, and then get them to confirm their address. If the address is incorrect hook them back to customer service and get the correct address). Simple. And hey, if you do this kind of thing really well, you will probably be very easy to contact if anything does ever go wrong with the service or the products you buy from this company, thus increasing my likelihood of buying. So take away 2, is the same as take away 1: even missed, dropped calls can be re-engaged with through good forward planning.

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

All Behaviour Is Incentive Lead.

2008-04-09T12:43:00.004Z

Customer behaviour is an interesting thing. That's why I read Gerard O'Neill's blog Turbulence Ahead, Seamus McCauley's Virtual Economics, and Tyler Cohen's Marginal Revolution. What do these have in common? They all take a micro-economic view of human behaviour in that people are basically, incentive led. The problem, is that we don't build the right incentives. I was much taken to day by a lead provided by Gerard to Nudges where they show examples of where small "nudges" to your behaviour can have dramatic effects. One trick is to put the "nudge" near a decision point: for instance, putting a sign "why not use the stairs" near the elevator increased use of the stairs by 200%. Marketers have known this for a long time but it still makes me wonder why we don't always put the right information or action choices near key decision points. If someone is late paying their bill, they know they are approaching a late fee, they are often making a decision to "not pay", to "forget to pay", to "re-prioritise" payment options. You can send a call / SMS / Nudge to them and just remind them that this is a decision point, and that it has consequences. I am also thinking about how all these "nudges" and "micro-incentives" could work in terms of social media. Given the liquidity of digital environments, it has to be a huge new area.

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

A Gathering of Topics

2008-04-08T17:43:00.004Z

I really like the idea of voice powered services particularly the idea of dialling your to do number, and getting things done. Irish company Dial2Do are doing just that enabling you to dial in and start sms-ing, emailing, and god knows what more. Check out Jott (for Blackberry :) and Pinger for examples of other companies that help you get things done with voice. From what I can gather with Dial2Do the guys in there are looking for all sorts of modes and streams to make and post to, but if rumour is true then the guys in spinvox not only have a cool Blackberry application that lets you "see inside your voicemail" by sending you an email summary, but they may be opening their whole TTS (text to speech) engine to all other applications as an API. Hey, the more people use it, the more powerful it becomes, great strategic move from SpinVox (if its true). UPDATE: of course I intended to mention SimulScribe, a leader in visual voicemail, and they have a full API for their solution. Ah, so why is this stuff interesting to anyone from an enterprise point of view? Well, how about putting systems in place so that customers can use these kinds of tools to "get things done" with you? Why do I need to speak with an actual agent, if I can just phone your company IVR and leave a Jott/2do/Vox? Ever leave a message with a bank's voicemail and feel no one listened to it, that maybe nothing is being progressed? Ah, yes. That's why we phone in again, right? Strikes me that enterprise companies can learn a lot from what is going on in the consumer field right now. And how people make decisions, compare options, make recommendations etc all changes with the net. Forrester's Charline Li pointed out to her "twitter followers", that they had released some details about how they were looking to measure "customer engagement" "Engagement is the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence an individual has with a brand over time. The four components of engagement are: Involvement— Includes web analytics like site traffic, page views, time spent, etc. This essentially is the component that measures if a person is present. Interaction— This component addresses the more robust actions people take, such as buying a product, requesting a catalog, signing up for an email, posting a comment on a blog, uploading a photo or video, etc. These metrics come from e-commerce or social media platforms. Intimacy— The sentiment or affinity that a person exhibits in the things they say or the actions they take, such as the meaning behind a blog post or comment, a product review, etc. Services such as brand monitoring help track these types of conversations. Influence— Addresses the likelihood that a person will recommend your product or service to someone else. It can manifest itself through brand loyalty or through recommendations to friends, family, or acquaintances. These metrics mostly come from surveys (both qualitative and quantitative). Our argument is that companies need to start tying these metrics together to make sense of how engaged their customers actually are—and then make product and marketing decisions based on that knowledge". I guess my "bridging point" here is that planned/ active interaction, and passive/ receptive interaction really need to be finely aligned, so that you communicate with your customers when they need it, and that you really listen, and make it easy for them to speak with you, when THEY need to. Services such as VoiceSage can really help you reach out, put in the "to-do", and manage the response/ action cycle. I don't think I'd be making any ground breaking comments to say that most organisations (at best) approach each of the 4 Forrester tenants of Engagement as point solutions, but for complete pictures, all 4 will have to be undertaken in an interwoven strategy.

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

No Service Is Best Service?

2008-04-07T13:15:00.002Z

Guy Kawasaki has a good interview up Bill Price, Amazon's former VP of Customer Service. I think I can boil this down a bit further: - Make your product unbelievably easy to use. If you make your customer look up FAQ's, or ring you up for "dumb questions", your product is inadequately designed; - How can you predict a company that's going to have bad service? Ans: They don't print their phone number anywhere you can find it! - Be proactive: give the customer the best price/value point you can "pro-actively" (ie. best value delivery schedule, best value product bundle, etc.) - Eliminate contact friction where it exists and is necessary, but with a view that you should be able to gather the information and fix the reason they are calling at root cause. Here are some follow on questions in relation to that point: 1. Eliminate dumb or avoidable contacts to free up capacity and slash costs. 2. Build self-service that works to free up even more capacity and cut costs even more. 3. Find ways to be proactive rather than reactive because it is often cheaper than waiting. 4. Engage the real "owners" of customer problems to work with the customer service team to fix the problems 5. Make it really easy to contact your business. 6. Use the contacts you get to listen closely to the customer, and act upon WOCAS (What Our Customers Are Saying) 7. Fix reporting metrics, processes, and the staffing side to deliver great experiences for customer contacts. And here is an interesting take on measuring customer satisfaction "The rate of customer-initiated contacts that require personal support is the best measure of satisfaction. This is expressed as "CPX," or "contacts per X," where "C" equals calls + email messages + chat sessions, and "X" equals transactions or installations or invoices sent. Measured and shared weekly, companies achieving Best Service see 20-40% per year reductions in CPX and as a result much happier customers and lower costs too. Our second killer metric is the rate of repeat contacts, or "snowballs." Just like the snowball rolling down the hill, getting bigger and menacing skiers, repeat contacts are clear "customer dissatifiers" that need to be stopped--or melted--before they ruin the company's reputation. CheckFree is a great example here: over the past five years their transactions have quintupled while customer support headcount is down 20%, at the same time that customer satisfaction rose by 20%". I haven't read Mr. Price's book yet, so I look forward to it.

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

Passive and Active Participation For Customer Experience

2008-04-04T11:42:00.003Z

Some good points today from Beagle Research today on the difference between Active and Passive customer experiences, and how to think about customer experience itself. Nic over at The Equtiy Kicker is zeroing in on why social networks will be important, even if they aren't making that much money now. Its been fun following Nic and his journey down the rabbit hole of social networking. Nic also has a post today on why SaaS (software as service) offerings like VoiceSage, may see an uptake during a recession. What have these posts got in common? Its the bridge between them. Social Networks can be passive or active, and the experience of being on a social network can be passive or active. Their benefits from and for both of these. Sometimes you just want to know when someone else "is going to attend that concert", because it tells you something about what they are interested in (which may be a false picture none the less); other times you value knowing this information because you too would like to go if this person is going, and you want to take action. Thus, Active. We have been using some of these principles internally for a while in explaining to people that SMS is Passive, and Voice is Active. When combined, you can achieve a cycle of interaction that has active and passive elements. You can also throw synchronous and asychronous communications and need for active and passive into the mix. Either way, their are many new ways into which companies can communicate online and offline, and the key will be having a joined up strategy for them all, but keeping "customer experience" dead centre.

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

The Customer is NOT Always Right? Duh.

2008-03-31T12:10:00.003Z

The customer is not always right?: or siding with your employees more might actually result in better customer service. Interestingly, this post drew over 250 comments after it was mentioned in the NYT. Alexander Kjerulf, of PositiveSharing Again, the question to ask might be "what's reasonable here"? and "how can this be made exceptional?" The example given in the piece is that one customer of southwest airlines complained about everything. When bumped up to the CEO, he said "Goodbye, we shall miss you". Perhaps, "I've called my friend over at Virgin Airlines, and they would be delighted to take your business, and as a parting gesture, we have transferred all your travel miles to Virgin so you can get off to a flying start". Might seem counter-intuitive, but I bet that word would have went around.

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

So What's The Big Idea? Be Meaningful.

2008-03-31T09:59:00.006Z

I had caught this post by Francois at Emergence Marketing, basically saying that how a customer interacts with your brand or service is your "UI" (user interface). Its an idea picked up by Piaras Kelly this morning as well, as he explicates his experience at Dublin airport. He also connects to a great slideshow on the new approaches to marketing that is worth checking out here. If your product is really great, it will be remarkable. People will want to talk to others about it. Fortunately, the internet is a great way to share these experiences. Some friend on his myspace/ facebook presence line says "hey, about to go out and buy new sneakers", another friend emails/sms's/calls and recommends a new asics/ nike/ adidas. Some of the examples given in the slides I think are a bit "old school" in that they are really examples of conspicuous or public consumption (i.e. products that you consume in public and have a brand messaging element). See someone using a cool new iPhone, they are a "tech person", an "apple lover", a "tech hipster". The TRULY great examples of products that are their own marketing, are the products that significantly make your life better. Umair makes this point over and over again. Do something that is culturally and socially important, that removes an unbalance, a barrier, an injustice, and you will be rewarded. Weirdly, when I go to think what's an example here Paul, the idea that looms largest for me is the use of Technology and Communications in the Obama campaign. The ability to connect, communicate, and mobilise using community, technology, and meaning, could actually re-engineer how our leaders get elected, and from there, perhaps how our public service relates to its public. That could be a pretty big structural change in the years ahead. If anyone has any other big ideas, please, let me know, I'd be happy to post them here, and give you the citation! update 1: just remembered www.headshift.com, these guys are bring enterprise 2.0 to the NHS (UK Health Service). Here is a great slideshire from them on bringing 2.0 tools to one of the biggest public service blocks.

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Update 2: Via Venterprisey (enterprise 2.0 blog) the use of mashup's to bring citizen based reporting on exit poles, intimidation attempts, murders surrounding the Zimbabwe elections. This inability to control the media message, may actually free a nation.

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

Personality Not Included.

2008-03-30T11:30:00.004Z

The Book Personality Not Included: I think there there is a strong trend towards Customer Interaction as Brand Experience. You might have noticed over the history of postings on this blog, that we think of customer interaction, and the management of customer interaction, will become more transparent, will be capturable, and publishable. Rohit Bhargava has been looking at these issues from the perspective of the advertising agency, and he extended the invitation to his readers to post in questions in relation to this topic, which in in turn would respond to in person. A great way of building engagement, and of course, gaining initial attention for te books release. Here are a few questions that he kindly undertook to answer for me an an email exchange. (1) Companies are short term in their outlook (lets face it) How Can companies overcome the initial "slump" in performance and motivation when they open up to transparency? Well, I'm not sure that there always needs to be a slump associated with opening up. For example, there was an online retailer I remember reading about that decided to add customer reviews to their site. Almost immediately after they added this feature, they saw a sales spike and that spike was sustained over a long period of time. Here's a link I managed to find about that story: http://www.internetretailer.com/internet/marketing-conference/65531-customer-reviews-spike-conversion-rates-at-overstock-bass-pro.html The point is, personality and transparency can be the best ways to add to the bottom line ... and the best part is that often they don't require the huge types of capital expenditures that can kill short term profits and be very unappealing to the many companies that operate focused from quarter to quarter. (2) Opening up will make you very dominant in the "commentsphere" and you will take a resultant leap in Google ranking. But now all the new prospects are seeing a lot of noise about "poor performance". Could this be actually damaging given the competition is presenting a "nothing wrong here" image? I think the idea that you can still present a "nothing wrong here" image is probably fading fast with the easy with which consumers can share negative opinions whether you provide a forum for them to do it or not ... which gets to the heart of your question. When it is so easy for people to talk about negative experiences with your brand, you have two options. You can either decide to open up, have a forum to address complaints and do it on your terms, or just let conversations happen online without being part of them. My argument is that it is far better to be part of the conversation and have your own platform than to be a spectator only reacting when a situation gets close to a crisis mode. (3) It seems to me that how employees respond to the commentsphere and the new community based support approaches are going to lean heavily on the individuals capacity to engage and solve, coupled with old fashioned great technology for content management etc. Have you seen anyone address this particularly well? You are very right to point out the importance of the team in building a personality for your brand. This is absolutely true. A few brands that do this particularly well are Google and Sun from the tech industry. Both have a relatively strong point of view on what their employees stand for and how they are able to speak on behalf of the company. The other example I would point to is Zappos, the online shoe retailer famous for their customer service. Thanks for taking the time to answer those questions: My final points here arethat where, when and how companies engage with their customers is completely changing. The conversation is not only occuring with your customer service representative, but also with on your customers blog, their myspace, their twitter stream. Granted, not everyone is "net native", but when they go to find out more about your companies, the places where these conversations are occuring, will have authority, and search ranking preference.

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

Nice Use of Recruitment Site Data

2008-03-26T14:12:00.002Z

HT: Paul Kedrosky

Investing In Customers, Listening, and Loyalty.

2008-03-26T11:47:00.003Z

Umair (no need for a second name, you know, a bit like Madonna), brings our attention back to the topic of brands, and brand building. The key question, IMHO, is "how can we meaningfully invest in our customers"? This is a very deep question. This question, in turn, is framed by the Purpose question, what are we about as a company? Umair gives the example of Google, and talks about how it is driven to "make the world a better place". I think that this goes fundamentally to the issue of developing products and services that address real substantive societal issues, not corporate ones. A key take away from the posting for me was that Nike was moving from advertising spend, to investing in customers services like work out advice, sports events, local sports competitions, communities etc. In another post, Bruce Tempkin of Customer Experience Matters points out some metrics relating to customer loyalty and great customer experience. It's worth a look over just to re-iterate that Great experience has a much higher impact on loyalty that Good experience. Perhaps Great Experience will morph into Authentic experience, i.e. a sense that you are interacting with real people, that can be like your best neighbour, you know, the one that offers to cut your lawn when you are on holiday, so your house doesn't look neglected. At VoiceSage we had our own mantra's that were based on "being fair" and "being different". We wanted to only charge for real, measurable benefits, that you could get quickly, and with no upfront investment. We didn't want integration costs, we didn't want hidden charges. We wanted simplicity, ease of use, flexibility. I think we've demonstrated this capability to our client base now. But I wonder what lessons we could draw from Umair's comments about Apple and Google? Its worth thinking about.

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

The Plastic Revolution

2008-03-25T12:58:00.001Z

Paul Kedrosky points us towards an article on the global growth of credit cards. Last week, another newspaper pointed out that UK indebtedness is actually higher than US indebtedness on the level of the individual.

Sometimes you have to take functionality away to get breakthrough ideas....

2008-03-20T14:44:00.003Z

Take away Garfield from the frames and you get the story of a really disturbed young man. This is going to be a huge hit on the web, but (and without forcing the point), it shows that by focusing on simplicity, and taking functionality, roles, etc. you can make a service that is so easy to use that it is hyper-simple. Also one of the www.springwise.com trends.

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

bear sterns .

2008-03-14T18:06:00.000Z

Bear sterns go into receivership ? Need to be bailed out ? Asset backed securities a huge risk factor in overall env. What to do ? No joking , get in control of your credit process, and steamline cash and payments so you don't get credit crunched. Be in no doubt, this is serious stuff.

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

James Whatley On Customer Expectations of GREAT Customer Service.

2008-03-14T08:59:00.005Z

Oh dear. Mr. James Whatley, esteemed mobile technology blogger, goes drops his Vodafone Nokia N95, which he loves, dearly, and calls Vodafone to get his fix (literally, the man loves his N95). So rather than replay the incident, why don't you just drop over here and have a read. Back? I didn't think so, but I will go on with a little Friday Quiz anyway: - James was transferred to another agent because it was felt that his claim was insurance related: was this good practice? (Yes, I know they are another company, but think about it, was it good practice?) - James was so infuriated with the Insurance Agent giggling (I jest not) at him when introducting herself and the company, that he hung up, and rang back (Given that the company deals with Insurance claims, I think it's pretty obvious that a lot of people are going to be wound up a bit emotionally when they ring); so, how can an agent "Get Away" with this? (cheat sheet: culture) - James Rang back to get a different agent. Had to give all his information again. Are their ways around this (cheat sheet: his phone number)Oh and to save time, in other calls, nobody knew what phone he had, his status as a customer, or pretty much anything else about him. - James said he dropped the phone, and this might have something to do with why its not working now. The Agent asked "Did it stop right after you dropped it"? To which he replied, No, but I think it probably has something to do with it. Stunningly, she says that "If the accident can't be directly linked to the phone not working, there and then, it becomes a warrantee issue". This is it. UNFAIR. You've just told me the expensive insurance I've taken out is useless, and that I have to go back to Telecom service provider, where the "device" warrantee is applicable. WOW. Probably will never take out a financial product with a Telecom provider again, hey James? - While "transferring him back to the Vodafone customer service", they dropped him. - So James re-phones the Telecoms company (call 4 or 5 now). They say, great fine. Bring it in to the store. JAMES IS TELEPHONE AND INTERNET GUY he never goes to the store (oops, didn't keep tabs of his channel interaction patterns?) Actually, he hates going to the store, it fills him with feelings of dread. - James is utterly utterly angry. You've made him feel fraudulent, betrayed, and now very very angry. UNREASONABLY SO. (after all, Vodafone are not the insurer, they didn't expect James to go throwing his phone around, they've been good to him before). BUT: he Admits that he got great great service from Vodafone before, he LOVES his N95, probably spends a packet on his packets. SO: one truly awful experience, fuelled by a mixture of bad practice and lack of customer experience focus, leads to one heavy user leaving, and one major online publication carrying the story, and probably hundreds of bloggers commenting. I am not saying "things like this don't happen all the time in companies". What I am saying is that how you deal with them is now part of your customer service because it will be broadcast. Peak Experience: James remembers the trough of his disappointment and the peak of his anger. It is his overwhelming memory of his entire relationship, over a few years, with Vodafone. Now compare that with yesterday's post about Russell's experience with returning an iPhone. The Difference is CULTURE in the Service Providers: The Difference is THE EXPECTATION of GREAT, not Good Service: The Difference is APPLE Want You To JOIN, Vodafone Wanted You To BUY: -

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

Russell Drops iPhone, Then Adopts iPhone !

2008-03-13T17:03:00.004Z

Russell Beattie has a problem with iPhone, because he dropped it. Goes to the store, the lovely lady says "no problem, I'll replace that". Russell dumb struck. Great Support for what, maximum cost of $200. Russell's impact on the mobile developer community, $2m, I'd say. I must say I am seriously looking at an iPhone, but 3G is kind of essential to me.

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

Proactive and Personal

2008-03-12T12:17:00.003Z

DestinationCRM's Editor has a good post this morning. The upshot is the assertion that even as people and companies move online, the interaction with the call centre will become even more important in developing your real brand identity. Quoting Genesys (a call centre solution provider), they propose 4 key components of delivering great customer experience in the contact centre: Convenience, Competency, Personalization, and Proactivity. He explain that there are nine ways to fulfil these requirements: * conduct real-time satisfaction surveys; * implement a customer front door; * increase first-contact resolution; * provide a consistent multichannel experience; * maximize resource availability; * communicate proactively; * manage callbacks effectively; * provide personalized services; and * apply innovative communication. The article goes on to say that "While many of these strategies may seem like common sense for the contact centre, two in particular -- communicating proactively and providing personalized services are often overlooked because of poor implementation". Proactivity in the context of the article refers to "popping information" so that the customer doesn't have to volunteer it, or repeat it. But there is no reason at all why it would not also apply to "outbound Interactive Voice Messaging". The additional wisdom I would look for in this kind of an article is to give practitioners some kind of a "map of concerns" beginning with short sharp interventions, while at the same time, developing a view on how to progress to more strategic approaches such as "building a data strategy", "actionable information", and "customer interaction context". The number one concern of CEO's to IT directors is "fast implementation" of the projects. Hosted players enable you to get quick, sharp projects going, prove the value and then fine tune or integrate.

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

Stop Mortgage Payment Defaults

2008-03-06T19:33:00.002Z

From NYTimes Default rates are going up. Interestingly, the rate is higher for those moving from a fixed rate to a variable rate, one would suppose that people are moving from that early "promotional rate", to the "adjusted rate". This is what we call a context trigger. I know your postal code, I know you are on this threshold, you should get a call, and offers should be made to adjust payment schedules to stop defaulting before it begins.

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

If Interactions Were Free...

2008-03-05T15:34:00.003Z

If interactions with, and between customers were free (and frictionless) what effect would this have on the value of brands? Looks like we may find out soon. Umair (now over on the HBS blog), is taking the fact that brands are "heuristics", i.e. short cuts, to evaluation. Brands, and prices, indicate value, belonging and a range of other elements. People can very quickly see, and share, if brands (information) lives up to its promise. This happily coincides with Conversations over on VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) with Doc Searls around the role of pricing in communicating within markets. In commercial B2B markets, price is also an "indicator of value". But is it a good one? Customers that buy your product promise, will test it, video it, and publish it to their friends. If your not thinking about how you can build "conversations, and experiences" into your "product or service", you have little chance of giving a customer a brand experience. A price is just a message around the value encapsulated. Not understanding how the customer got here, by what route, and with what context, is a sure way to lose them on price. By understanding what the customer truly values you have to understand the process by which they come to make a decision, and thus what they are seeking to value. You may actually end up being able to charge more for your service. Final Point: an old McKinsey paper said that if your marketing guy calls your product a commodity, fire them. No product is a commodity to ALL its customers. Even for rolled steel, some customers will value consistency in product or delivery, others in pricing, others in speed of cycle time. The challenge is to capture more and more data so you can generate the opportunity for insights around what customers actually value in their interaction with your company. So, if Interaction was free, what would people actually value, what is actually scarce? ah-hum. Yes. Attention.

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

VoiceSage In The News

2008-02-29T19:40:00.003Z

TechCrunch UK Irish Times Silicon Replublic TechCrunch.com

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

Micro-Channel: CommuterFeeds

2008-02-28T11:47:00.002Z

Know someone that takes the same route to work as you do? Try CommuterFeed powered by Twitter. (hat-tip RWW) This might be a "mirco-channel" with only 10 people in it, and only updated twice a day. But it is a channel, and people are going to create more and more of these things. They will be called "comment channels", "IM Sessions", etc. etc. They will not be launched by your IT department, they will be Enterprise Edge Services (Seriously thinking of patenting that phrase:)

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

Technology Populism or Enterprise Edge?

2008-02-28T10:14:00.002Z

Edge Enterprise: ReadWriteWeb has a piece today on the rise of "consumer-employee" adopted software as services and the strategic integrity of in-house IT technology stack. So you want to find out if anyone knows someone working in Adobe, you check your LinkedIn or Facebook not your internal directory; you want to call long distance to the states and china you use skype, not your inhouse telephony system. Need to find out something in relation to your product, chances are you will consult a wiki not the official FAQ pages. The RWW article says that maybe people would not feel the need to use these technologies if they had better training and understood the features of enterprise softwares a bit better. Instead of a hosted wiki use sharepoint, from Microsoft. MMmmm. Perhaps its time to teach people "responsible adoption", or "how to understand potential implications" such as Data Privacy, Application Security, so they can make better decisions at their own level of the business. If circa 14% of your employees are early adopters perhaps you should be thinking more about how to harness the power of these collective experimenters. VoiceSage has literally Dozens of examples where someone adopted the service to do something relatively simple like stock availability updates and then found a few other things in their immediate environment that could also benefit from pro-active communications. Doing moves you towards knowing. The faster you Get Doing the faster you learn what works and doesn't work. What we have found is that people that understand how to pilot early, and often, inevitably get the better results. The people that can spin a problem on its side, and look at it a different way (i.e. innovators), and then craft a meaningful test of benefits, are a key part of any innovation competence. And that's the problem with lengthy cycles of adoption, learning, deployment and learning. It just takes too long to see what works. One final spin of the wheel on this topic: Its called "environmental fit". Where your external environment exhibits constant change and unpredictability the "edges" of your company need to exhibit some "porousness" and "flexibility". This was traditionally termed "organicity". And that's why inability to adopt, experiment and learn leads to lack of fitness at the edges of your company. I.e. the customer interface.

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

Google Talkback: Click-Cool :)

2008-02-26T11:24:00.003Z

When Google bring out a new product, sometimes it sucks. This does not suck. Google Talkback enables you to put your TalkBack button on your blog or website. Since I have Google Talk already, and Google Talk on my Blackberry, it now means that as I change my mobile status, this will be reflected on my blogsite. Suddenly, I have very real mobile-internet presence. Now, before everyone goes APE (API) on me, I know that Twitter and Jaiku badges update my presence from my mobile all the time. Where Google Talk is different is that Talk is Integrated with Mail, and Mail is being sold instead of MS Exchange Server. So, how long before I can have a very low cost domain hosting, email hosting, and click to call service that can give me great stats on where my customers are coming from and who they are talking to? When Grand Central eventually enters the mix, well what can I say: Fred Wilson is already buying stock.

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

The Future Of Credit Scoring ?

2008-02-25T18:58:00.003Z

Well, I have to hand it to Jim Bruene over at NetBanker, todays roundup of disruptive credit scoring services is a show stopper. You should stop over and have a look.

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

Ah, Forget to Pay Your Credit Card Bill?

2008-02-20T11:16:00.005Z

Paul Kedrosky (PK) posted a link to this study on credit card late payment penalties. The bottom line is that people who forget to pay their credit card bills on time, and become subject to the pain of late payment fees, initially change their behaviour, but over time forget the effects of that late payment fee at a rage of 10% per month!. If you have to pay a late payment fee this month you are not very likely to forget to pay your bill next month. BUT: in 10 months time you will be back to exactly the same behaviour pattern as you were exhibiting a before any fee was applied to you. Late Fees Do Not Change Inherent Customer Behaviour, but they do adjust it in the short term. It might be a very useful experiment to pattern a series of Reminders to such late paying customers, in two or three month cycles to remind them that they paid a fee before, and to avoid doing so again they might want to take actions x, y, and z. With an interim messaging strategy it might be possible to stretch out the reinforcement effects of the original late fee, without damaging the customer relationship by applying another late payment fee, thus encouraging potential switching behaviour.

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

Just Three Points on A Friday

2008-02-08T13:46:00.000Z

Confused of Calcutta has such a nice saying that I thought I'd bring it to you: " First Law of Benchmarks: If gains are so low that you need benchmarks to prove the existence of the gains, they’re probably not worth having in the first place". GetSatisfaction guys bring out a Full API (soon!). Marshall from ReadWriteWeb covers them here. I think these guys are going to radically change how customers manage their reputation: think "epinions for companies". These guys will end up with widgets on your home page publishing out to your audience the good, the bad, and the ugly. Mick Butcher over on Techcrunchuk has a nice piece that points out that not only are advertising only models in serious danger, but that what is needed is better ad targeting, and measures other than click through rates. Mobile phones and social newtworks might be better ways of collecting data at higher levels of granularity. The take away? Be better at collecting data and know how you can use that data to deliver better interactions with your customer base. How you interact with your customers, and well you manage those interactions, will be published. It will be published on Twitter, Jaiku, blog feeds, it will turn up on Techcunch. So get in front of the problem.

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

Letting People Innovate with Telecommunications

2008-02-04T14:24:00.000Z

Helsingin Sanomat via Gizmodo Finnish public toilet opens when you send it a Text Message. Why? Because then we know your phone number if you vandalise this toilet. Brilliant. Oh but what if I am on pre-paid etc. etc. Yes, but there might be some psychology at work here as well. Would you "mindfully" weigh up the options of the likelihood of being caught vandalising with your pre-paid phone number, or would you just move on? I think you'd just move on.

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

Leaving Voice Messages

2008-02-04T13:23:00.000Z

Conversationware makes a great point today about leaving voicemail. Matt makes the point that if you think about it before hand, write a few notes down, you can leave a message that has some real impact. He follows up by saying "I hate it when people leave a message that just says, Call me". Exactly, it says "hey guess what, my time is more valuable than yours, so why don't you waste more of your time ringing me back, trying to find me, and then finding out what I wanted to talk to you about in the first place. So, I have to agree with you there Matt. Here are a few rules I picked up a while ago about leaving good voicemail: - Start by saying who you are (no, I don't recognise your voice!) - Tell me what the message is in relation to (need to organise a meeting time) - Tell me what I am expected to do (decide, ring someone, suggest) One of the things VoiceSage does really well is to automatically detect whether you are about to leave a message with a live person or a machine. If you are getting through to a machine, we recommend that you leave a different message, structured as per points above. You don't have to leave a "teaser", leave a valuable message. If you are wondering how you might measure the effectiveness of your message, leave a different contact number or email address for the return enquiry. That way, you can track would called you back. Simple.

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

Billing, Billed, Bill: You Have To Get It Right.

2008-02-01T16:16:00.001Z

Only yesterday I was speaking with an Analyst saying you know, Telco billing isn't easy to do. We were talking about how used strategically, the ability to create unique tariff structures, particularised the needs of each company, and person, creates powerful competitive advantages. We were building the metaphor out into Software-as-Service examples, seeing how some providers were emerging to provide this layer to other software-as-services on the Salesforce.com platform. Well, Pat Phelan at MaxRoam bounced me over an email to give me an update on their progress and what was the first thing on the agenda, yip, Live Billing. Being able to see what you are spending, in real time, is a real comfort. In other posts I've talked about the importance of "getting the bill right", and more importantly "the check out". Studies by McKinsey show that its the variability in the telecoms bill that causes customers to look around for other providers, and my guess is that people who made a lot of calls on their Christmas holidays are looking around. Maybe they should check out MAXroam at their nearest Maplin?

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

Perfect SEO Brand Advertising

2008-01-28T13:51:00.001Z

Via John Batelle

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

Pay Attention To The Peak Experience and Sign Off.

2008-01-28T10:28:00.000Z

Bruce Tempkin over at Customer Experience Matters makes a few interesting points about creating memorable customer service. There are two aspects he points to:(1) "peak experiences" and (2) sign off. I think some banks pay attention to this in that they are delighted to call you and tell you "that loan has been approved" etc. It's an opportunity to push the happy moment up a notch and make it memorable. The sign off to a job is akin to getting off the stage, having hit the last high note, but it is just so messed up in a lot of companies that I just can't understand what they are thinking. Perhaps people just don't understand that there will be an inevitable emotional experience involved in the interaction with your service. If you are handing over cash for any service, it is normal to feel a little hesitant to hand over cash, our instinct is to hold onto our resources. This is one of the psychological reasons that people pay on their credit card; it reduces feelings of guilt because their is no immediate experience of loss. I've mentioned this before, but my brother in law provided a service where he went over to the UK to pick up cars he had bought for clients, and then he would arrange all the paper work, number plates, and park it in your drive. Neat service. But what his clients commented on was that he would wash the car thoroughly inside and out in their driveway, and he left all their documents in a neat leather folder. I am sure that many organisations have empirical metrics that need to be managed day in day out in order to hit Customer Service targets, i.e. we will phone you within 12 hours of your application to let you know where it is in the process, but how many companies track the "emotional response" of customers, or take these measure around times/interactions where their is the opportunity to enable a peak experience? There are many instances where thinking about "leaning over to the customer" and asking a question, or making an offer would be welcome. Just received your credit card in the mail? Chances are you are happy to have it, so why not follow up with a call and ask is there anything more you need to know about the service, or posting them a parcel with a genuinely pleasing gift that is related to their specified interests? Here are some interesting articles on "happiness" and what delivers happiness....ah...mmmm.... "experiences deliver happiness"....

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

Sandy Is Getting Some Lovin.

2008-01-25T15:51:00.000Z

Sandy is getting some lovin from Profy. :) It's great to see a simple productivity tool ring so many bells for people. I've been hearing nothin but good things about her.

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

Enabling Online Interactions: Yabb?

2008-01-25T14:33:00.001Z

Techcrunch uk's Mick Butcher report on Yabb, a service that integrates with your Skype to make the call. You go to the Yabb site, find a topic of conversation that you are interested in, and then send them a voice message that you are interested in a conversion. It seems that you have to register for the beta and get an invite to see it in full swing but from Mike's description the fundamental flaw in this is that you don't send voice messages to people you don't know! Yes, its that simple. You don't even text them. People consider it an unforgivable violation of their mobile phone, a very personal object. If Yabb had considered using voice to "stay in touch with the conversation", of "extending the conversation", then they might have been on to something. Never the less, I wish them well, its never easy to start something new.

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

Another Headline Grabbing Number That Makes No Sense

2008-01-25T13:24:00.000Z

Damovo and Ericsson are saying that "missed calls" and "phonetag" are costing business $700m a year. Not a bad figure for the global costs....oh.... wait, that's the estimated cost for the Irish marketplace? The average worker spent 73 minutes per week leaving voicemail? I know I talk to people on the phone, and waste that amount of time within the call itself. It's certainly not a case of stop leaving voicemail, get an IM, you will find yourself more efficient, because you will get interrupted. At its base level, what this should have been about, is that there are modes of synchronous and asynchronous interactions and requests for interactions that could be managed more effectively. The opportunity for time saving is of an order of magnitude higher than this piece of PR might suggest.

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

Radiohead: The Business Model

2008-01-24T18:58:00.000Z

Free is not a business model. Some things occurred to me about the recent Radiohead experiment (nee "revolution").On TheDrama20Show there is a lengthy piece on "consumers are cheapskates" provoking comment on the model; one of the comments is very very telling, and very very important: "Cutting out the middlemen lowered the price that a Radiohead customer was willing to pay for Radiohead’s music. The loss of the middlemen did not entice non-customers into becoming customers. This makes sense since the loss of the middlemen did not make Radiohead’s music more valuable, it simply made it less expensive" The comment is unattributed but wow, nail-on-head. But it did not end there: oh no, Drama20 returns: "Do you really believe that the elimination of the middlemen factored into the customer’s evaluation of the value of the music? I personally doubt that the average customer calculated the costs eliminated by the removal of the middlemen and adjusted the price accordingly" I've also heard someone say this about their kids, i.e. that they knew what the royalty split was and just decided on a price point that gave more money to the artist (i.e. artist may have received $3 under old programme, so paying $4.50 seemed a good up to them). And kids talk, especially about music, and especially about their favourite band, so if this "fair price" got out there in circulation, I have no doubt that the "crowd" might set a price (not that it is one crowd). The argument goes that the "studio system" is required because it fosters bands brings bands to the attention of the audience, that only 5% of bands actually make money for the record company, i.e. most bands don't find an audience (product-market-fit failure), i.e. the company is a two sided platform that doesn't work very well. (hatip Umair ). Name-your-price/ priceline model is a great way of segregating customers; it's a great way of gaining attention by being viral. On my own Lastfm.com front page Radiohead own the chart; they are probably played 5 times as much as anyone else. Will that translate into more ticket sales to gigs? Absolutely. Will it sell more T-Shirts? Absolutely. i.e. the "profit pools" lie in ancillary services, attention is the razor, belonging is the blades. Given the moves by companies such as Newsgater to offer their products, once premium priced downloads, for free, is premised on the rationale that having experienced the products in a personal capacity, end users will understand how paid-for enterprise versions could be value adding to their companies ( i.e. Free in consumer to cross subsidise marketing to the enterprise). It's an interesting hypothesis, but essentially it is betting that "the ultimate customer", in this case the enterprise, is also willing to pay for your product, and that another competitor isn't cross subsidising entry into your market "for free" in order to gain access to their own "profit pools" (imagine IBM giving away free Publisher Manager in order to sell you business process improvement consulting?). So, not only is "Free" never "Free": sometimes Free might just be putting a time-delay between you and the realisation that some other bigger animals are slowly sauntering towards your profit pool. Of course, I could be way, way wrong....

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