Great Service is Semi-Permiable

Agit Jaoker at Open Gardens is always interesting to read when it comes to the future of mobile communications. He has a great article on a conversation he had with a Vodafone executive. While their service were great, and he had no problem with them, Agit realised that the service was so great in fact that Vodafone had no real reasons to contact him. Yes, when travelling he received an announcement welcoming him to the new geography, but that's about it. This is one of the real challenges facing every virtual service:

If they (and by that – I mean any Operator) can work this out i.e. the ability to work with the best customers, interact with bloggers, be human, be open to feedback etc etc .. they have a good chance of succeeding in the next wave of Mobile data apps

I've always thought about this from a networked organisation perspective. It was called "having a semi-permeable membrane", i.e. people/ water could get in or out, but the boundary still had integrity. In a way, this is a useful way to think about click to call functionality and presence technology. Of course, being available on your desktop and IM is one thing, but to be really useful it has to extend to the mobile phone, and this is why Agit argues that "mobile 2.0" must be considered in tandom with and in the context of, Web 2.0.

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

E-Mail Bankruptcy?:

It's happening. People are declaring themselves "e-mail bankrupt". They are so behind in answering emails that they issue a statement (yes, often an email!) just telling people that if they sent an email in the last month, call me, because I haven't read it. The latest, Jeff Nolan. You know Jeff, you could just mash your contacts into VoiceSage and send a voice message to everyone. At least you'll know that they received it, and listened to it.:) On a serious note though, communications 2.0 has to do something about this. E-mail is broken. Raise your voice.

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

Customer Contact Has To Be Exceptional

Aspect Software and Lee Shapiro & Associates released an interesting vendor report today. It would seem that customer experience of call centers is still falling short. To put a number on that, about 19% of all customer interactions with the call center. For me that headline here is that companies need to deliver "exceptionally good experiences", only truly exceptional experiences deliver the wow that drives increased loyalty to the company. Even the competently delivered service now results in 1 in 6 customers looking elsewhere. It reminds me of the McKinsey report a few years ago that showed that if a customer called a customer service department for any reason at all, they showed similar patterns of switching behaviors. Some of the Reports Findings:

Customers that have an exceptional experience are more likely to do business with that company; 75% Customers that have a bad experience are less likely to do business with the company, with 60% of these saying they would do much less business with the company. In terms of modality, 73% of all interactions with the call center are still over the telephone, 24% via email, and 3% via chat.

Now for some of the stunners:

only 57% of the exceptional experiences begin with an automated system. Consumers who reach an automated system, rather than a live person, say they will do less business with the company. Sixty-six percent of consumers who had an exceptional experience are more likely to do more business with that company in the future. One in six consumers who had a typical customer experience is likely to switch companies

Many of these concerns play straight into the VoiceSage Click To Call product set. One of the neat things it does is that when a customer clicks, the system only connects you to the relevant operator when they and you are available. Result, zero waiting time, right person contact, live person interaction. Seems to me to be a combination to deliver exceptional performance, as long as the Customer Service person has the information, authority, and empathy required to close the call off on first contact.

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

Great Ideas for Using Twitter for Marketing Rohit Bhargava of Ogivly Interactive points out a few innovative ways of using Twitter. 1. Capture the live pulse of an event 2. Deepen a static experience through live commentary - Hey, how about tying this one into an episode of 24! Now that would be compelling 3. Facilitate collaborative watching - When it comes to watching video content online or on television, Twitter can allow you to sharing feedback and ideas 4. Add a new dimension to promotions - Scavenger hunts, user generated content campaigns, and other reality based marketing promotions are growing popularity as ways to encourage interaction from customers. I think these are pretty neat ideas and in a few months you will wonder why you didn't just do it.

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

Politics and Social Networks

Paul Greenberg is a passionate guy, and you have to love that. When he looks at Politics, Marketing, and Strategy you should pay some attention. When he shows you some figures such as the fact that Obama is using Social Networks much more effectively than his rivals, its time to sit up. Obama has circa 100,000 doners, Clinton has 50,000 paying twice as much. Importantly, Obama is providing his base with the tools they need to be active advocates. Paul then goes on to comment about Romney (pity that's not Rooney). He is a member of the The Church of the Latter Day Saints, or Mormons. They have a very tight community, and they are active. And where do they get their campaign kit? SalesForce.com's "CampaignForce". A commentator on Paul's site says that Obama has 900k plus friends on mySpace. The next nearest candidate has 20k. Perhaps this will be an example of "network based competition" as outlined by John Hagel III Creation Nets.

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

CrowdSourcing Technical Capability ?

Tim O'Reilly makes an interesting point when he notes that TellMe took a huge leap in voice recognition capability when it launched into directory services. Nothing changed from a technical point of view but they had a larger data set to work from. And there is that term again, DATA. Ditto now with Google Translation services. So perhaps "Crowdsourcing" and "datasourcing" are now coalescing.... Another way of looking at this is "what is your distribution channel to customer data?". If you make directory enquiries through TellMe or Google, you will also probably hand on your mobile phone number (hey, so we can text you back the information!), which of course is linked to your account information (on google, or MS), and when the Telco's go all Adserving friendly (as per Telco 2.0) then your GPS data gets handed over. So the questions I have for every service provider I can think of is "do you know what data underpins your competitive advantage and what is your data acquisition strategy" For the simple start up company perhaps the question is "what makes your data sets interesting to GYM?(Google, Yahoo, Microsoft); what is your data acquisition strategy, and what is the time value of this data acquisition path?"

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

Who Is Sick In Your Area, Family, Work?

I was saying a while ago, that IrishHealth should think about building out its community of users capability. Via VentureBeat I read that a site called "who is sick" lets you post who is sick, and to list symptoms. Could this become an AllRecipes.com for over the counter medications? Interesting to see that concerns of spoofing are being looked at by logging the IP addresses. Why this area is interesting to customer service and to company strategy, is future success will depend on your ability to become a honey-pot for customer data today. If you could track symptoms by area, then you could send warning messages to registered users, and even advice on where to get the most highly customer-rated flu remedy, from the nearest available pharmacy that stocks that product. If I were Proctor and Gamble I'd get right behind this king of thinking. Thinking about it some more, wouldn't I want to be pro-actively notified if "symptoms such as X, Y, or Z" were showing up at my postal code? or if "x number of people registered with my office, or my kids school" caught the flu? This isn't "out there semantic web" stuff, most of this could be delivered with a mash up of Google Maps, Me.dium, Rapleaf, and VoiceSage.

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

A Short Note On Trust

You don't negotiate with someone that want to kill themselves, you listen. That's the trade off, you listen to them, and then they have to listen to you

. Businesses often look to other arena's of expertise to learn how to do things better. Dealing with the very distressed on a suicide line is one of those areas where you just have to know what you are doing. So when your customer service staff are "negotiating" with a late payer, or with someone with a real gripe, perhaps an interesting statistic might be what percentage of the first 10 minutes your customer service person was speaking in relation to how long the customer was speaking. What is the a correct ratio for this in your business process? Paraphrased From Trusted Advisor Associates.

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

SpotScout : Parking As Customer Interaction

Via Alarm:Clock we find a number of interesting new ventures. This is a great example of a zero-infrastructure solution with a clear value proposition. Boston's SpotScout has launched an online marketplace where drivers use their mobile phones to reserve private spaces in garages and driveways, as well as to swap public parking spots in real time, with vacant spaces going to the highest bidder. The service is young but already has some smarts built-in. For example, bidders can avoid doing business with laggards through a feature that will allow users to rate their experiences with other users. Those with bad reputations are shunned. SpotScout is free to join and it is also free to browse the network for spaces. When you users make a reservation or choose a spot it take a percentage of the transaction which are made via Paypal. There are other solution vendors out there like www.parkatmyhouse.com in the UK. If you can imagine that the technology underlying www.ecourier.co.uk was made available to someone like ParkAtMyHouse you would also immediately see how long it was going to take you to reach that parking spot, that will become available in 20 minutes. THEN, when it actually works as a marketplace, the guys in www.upcomming.com, and www.meetup.com and even www.confabb.com will be able to post up on their sites the relevant areas for parking around a particular event, and people going to the event will sign up for the parking service, book in advance, and manage in real-time. And these are all "Customer Interactions" deployed through "Business Mesh Applications" to create New Service Propositions. The difference is zero-infrastructure build; edge not centrally controlled; network effects.

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

GPS and Goofy Phones:

GigaOm reports that Disney Mobile, a MVNO, which has been in business for a year, says nearly 30% of its subscribers use GPS location-tracking services once every other day, and about 70% come from the handset. 56 percent of Disney Mobile subscribers are adults. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before parents get SMS updates when their kids leave a certain area, when they are "near" kids they are banned from meeting, or places they are banned from going? It could all turn very strange. For the enterprise though, the exact same processes could be used for tracking delivery staff and ensuring that they stay within their zones? Geo location developments like GeoRSS when meshed in with Mapping Applications could even give you a Live feed of what business colleagues are in your area right now and presence applications like iotum talk-now could tell you whether they are interruptible for coffee!

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

Contacting Older Customers

TomBomb reports that Unlike their Bubble Generation counterparts, Baby Boomers tend to get online insight from offline sources: 79% would respond to promotional e-mails about products and services 92% have read about a Web site in a print article (magazine, newspaper) and then visited online 89% have seen a print ad and later visited the online site 83% have seen a Web site advertised on television and later visited it online 65% will visit a Web site address after hearing it on a radio commercial Tom makes the point that there is no real additional technical or cultural barriers to their use of 2.0 applications, so what explains the surprising latency?. For me, the point, is that to reach the older consumer you still have to go through trusted media, i.e. old fashioned newspapers, magazines etc. Yet, most of these comments relate to the first stage of the process, i.e. awareness and search. I think it would be realy useful to know how many older people read blogs? have ever downloaded a widget? etc. At VoiceSage we know from experience that when contacting an older demographic, their is nothing to beat a phone call.

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

Official Google Blog: Flying high with Google SMS

Official Google Blog: Flying high with Google SMS

Get RealTime SMS Alerts From Google?

Google are going to do more and more of this kind of linking to the mobile phone, because they know that customers will use it. No doubt they will move to other alert types. For the enterprise, it will actually turn into a challenge. Think about it. If every one starts to get their SMS alert from Google, then you lose your opportunity to hook the customer back into a customer service conversation in order to manage their expectations. SMS alerts via Twitter API will also enable this kind of alerting. It would seem the time has come to really think about closing the interaction loop so that what I get alerted about, is actionable. Flying high with Google SMS from Official Google Blog by Molly Graham Posted by Deepak Sethi, Software Engineer, Mobile Team Ever spent 15 minutes on the phone shouting answers at the automated airline attendant while rushing to the airport? How cool would it be to get real-time flight info just by sending a quick text message? Well, now you can, using Google SMS. Simply text your flight number to 466453 (‘GOOGLE’ on most mobile devices), and the status information will be sent back to you. Or text a specific airline name, and Google will send back the main phone number to call. Google SMS is available for flights departing or arriving in the U.S., and all of the information is provided by flightstats.com. And as always, it’s free. Give it a try, and let us know what you think.

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

Marshall Kirkpatrick Knows His RSS

Marshall Kirkpatrick Knows His RSS. How we get alerted, and how news gets noticed, will involve, at its core, RSS. Some people, right now the technorati, want to know right now when something happens. Its their business, first off the blogs gets the early traffic, and the google juice. See, some technorati-talk. But for the everyday business executive, knowing what is important to know now, and what can wait is all a part of time and priority management in general. I don't generally re-produce lists without generating some value add, so here is Marshall's list first : 1. IM me if I’m online, if I’m not then SMS *and* email me the URL of the feed item if I’m not online (Rasasa and zaptxt each fill different halves of this request) 2. Let me set the hours I want to recieve SMS alerts, outside those hours email me. (rasasa does that) 3. Send me the first 25 characters or however much is possible from the feed item, not just its title (anothr.com does that by Skype IM but no SMS is avail) 4. let me unsubscribe from alerts for a particular feed by responding to a text msg 5. don’t send me alerts an hour or two after the item was available - if I select “as soon as it’s available” then send it to me within 15 minutes every time. I hate getting an alert for something only to find that it’s already got 5 comments and 3 trackbacks on it. Experiences like that really mitigate my trust in the service. 6. filter for duplicate URLs, titles or both at my request. (feeddigest can be folded in to existing services if you want to do the leg work) 7. let me exclude particular feeds from my search results. i want to know when my name is used online, for example, but not when it’s in the author field of my own blog. 8. easy integration with Dapper, Yahoo Pipes or some other feed creation tool so I can get alerts from feeds that don’t exist yet would be nice. 9. easy import and export of OPML files. So, (1) ASAP has timeframes for Marshall, within 14 minutes of hitting the wires, after that pretty much don't bother (2) Send the alert to the appropriate channel and mode, ie. after hours sms me. (3) Use Smart Clipping, not just the whole header (Give me the gyst, like Snap-for-RSS (3) For Gods sake, some smart filtering people! (nobody likes repetition and duplication) (4) Integration with feed management tools like Pipes, Dapper, and Teqlo. Marshall is clearly a lead user in this area, and I for one look forward to what his company Spashcast are launching.

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

Who Knows I'm Here?

Niall Larkin over on Chuky Flow draws our attention to an interesting paper by Daha Boyd at Etech2006. The basic underlying problem is how and when do we want to "exposure our presence" or even our "existence" to unknown others? Would you be happy if just anyone could call you at any time? Can just anyone ping your messenger? I tend to think of this as being a bit like buying a book. I could go on amazon and buy it if I know what I want, I could ask friends for recommendations, or I could just browse and discover a book by walking around the store. For customer contact solutions, these nuances are important. Should you enable your customer to speak to other customers "like them?" in certain situations, and if so how do you "expose their existence and presence to each other?" When you you open up an invitation to speak with a customer service person to someone who is only browsing? Perhaps its not there yet, but I believe that a mix of "presence engines" like www.iotum.com and http://me.dium.com are leading companies looking to address this kind of issue.

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

Drinking From A Firehose is Nothing New

Every manager likes productivity gains, don't they. That's why multi-tasking is almost a job requirement these days. But does multi-tasking lead to increased productivity? Alec Saunders reports on recent reports that when a knowledge worker is interrupted by an email or call, it can take as long as 15 minutes for them to get back into the work they were doing. It was with interest that I saw Sam Seti of Vecosys cover the evolution of RSS feeds being turned into voice feeds. With this new service from HearMeAnyWhere the content provider gets a phone number and subscribers ring that number to get the feed as Text To Voice. Another company KnowNow has launched itself into the big time RSS-In-The-Enterprise space, landing over $12m in funding. KnowNow seem to be positioned as "information flow through RSS control" but that you can control that flow through subscribing to the flow (think of it as persistent search within the enterprise). The "push" element of KnowHow's Enterprise RSS should be of interest to anyone that is looking to move to the next level in their outbound email campaigns. As employees are "subscribing" to feeds with similar "tag clouds", it might also be possible to uncover previously submerged social networks within the company, and between the company and its ecosystem of suppliers, partners and customers. What all this is crying out for is some measure of "Return on Attention". Call centres and customer service managers have known for years that they need the right information in front of the agent to close out a customer query within the first call. In this instance, Return on Attention would be measured as the return on the systems and processes that you have installed to enable your agents to close out more calls within the first interaction. It might be worth while checking out Teqlo to see how their new RSS feed management modules might simulate a KnowNow functionality, and then you could trial and pilot how RSS feeds could be best sculpted to your real needs.

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

MicroLending and MicroCollections?

Lifehacker, a site giving productivity tips to geeks, (ok, perhaps others as well), has an interesting story on one persons experience with Debt on credit card. They put their debt up for sale on Prosper. So you have 5,000 in debt, running at APR of 15% or something, and you get 9.8% on Prosper from a group of individuals, the world becomes interesting. How long before the price of this debt is reduced due to better "Social Ranking", ie on Rapleaf, or eBay? I think we may be seeing the world of Micro-lending re-engineering the world of traditional lending. Instead of just "Bad Debt", perhaps people will respond to "Bad Rep", and pay on time? I mean who wants to look bad in the eyes of friends and colleagues? Addendum: The Social aspects of Prosper surface the Risk Assumptions that underpin the Risk Rates and how they are applied to individuals with various formal credit rankings. This means that Prosper is effectively acting as a Prediction Market for risk.

There is so much to write about

Watch out for Debt 2.0, a subset of finance2.0.

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

Tom Evslin Nails Skype Potential

Skype and Paypal were always supposed to go together. Call, Query, Buy. Simple. But, and this is a very big but, what if people actually wanted to pay you in order to phone you and tell you things? What if, you had your own 1890/1900 number? Tom puts his finger on it when he says that this is a straight forward "dis-intermediation play". In this case, the telemarketing companies, or business intelligence agencies. If customers publish their own "lures" in the form of tags, or "attention streams", and then they can alter their "presence" to reflect the fact that, hey, for the right reason, and the right amount of money, I'm gonna let you interrupt me, then the world of direct marketing just does a spin on its head. Welcome to Telemarketing 2.0. (OK: Caveat: it may not take off, or may have limited take up within the Skype customer base because it doesn't break out into any phoneline, anywhere. How long before the advertising funded Mobile Phone companies hop onto this bandwagon?)

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

Customer Emotions: When To Call?

Via The Wise Marketer: Six million UK savers state their intent to churn Nearly 6 million British savers plan to switch savings accounts, according to a survey by MoneyExpert.com and Defaqto. The study found that 5.99 million people intend changing their savings accounts for a better interest rate during the next 12 months. Savers are reacting to recent cuts in rates by leading financial providers. The study interviewed adults aged 18+ and found that 57% (26.5 million) regard improving their savings as one of their biggest financial challenges for 2007. Around 3.6 million people said they do not understand savings accounts well, representing a significant opportunity for institutions that are willing to educate potential customers as part of an acquisition campaign. As a consumer myself, perhaps it would be more useful for the Banks if they identified their own "at risk" customers (switchers) and called them to invite them to discuss "what their concerns are" with a local customer service representative. Research conducted by Abhay Padgaonkar (president, Innovative Solutions Consulting LLC, 2006)and supported by other research ("Manage Your Human Sigma" – Harvard Business Review, July, 2005), indicates that

There is increasing evidence that emotionally satisfied clients contribute far more to the bottom line than rationally satisfied clients, even though both groups may appear to be equally satisfied

. This resonates with my today, having heard Jeff Bonforte from Yahoo at the eTel conference speak about "emotional" products, and products that address an emotional state. The example Jeff gives (rather colourfully) is that people hate getting their telecom bill. Hate is a strong emotion. Products that address this hate, will get customer attention, even customer action. Where the cost-benefits for the new service aren't even clearcut, customers will react "irrationally" because they are driven by emotion. Skype users hated their telco bills, so put up with bad initial voice quality, and a low number of "connections". Banks and other Financial Service organisations have very nervous, anxious customers at the moment. Yet, I wonder how many organisations have a segmentation variable that surfaces individuals that may need a call, right now.

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

The Pre-Search Space

A found these guys when they launched and their name caught my attention, BazaarVoice. Their new service SyndicateVoice does something very interesting. It takes authentic customer reviews, and makes them searchable under natural language terms, i.e "is the dell x90 any good?". They provide some good statistics on why "user reviews" are important: * RoperASW reports the value of word of mouth as the best source of information on products has exploded from 67% in 1977 to 93% in 2001. * BizRate found that 59% of their users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews. * Marketing Experiments Journal® tested product conversion with and without product ratings by customers. Conversion nearly doubled, going from .44% to 1.04% after the same product displayed its five-star rating. * The Shop.org State of Retailing Online study, conducted by Forrester Research, found only 26% of the 137 top retailers surveyed offered customer ratings and reviews, but 96% of them ranked customer ratings and reviews as an effective or very effective tactic at driving conversion. When combined with the potential of something like http://me.dium.com the pre-search environment is becoming very interesting from a marketing perspective.

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

Seriostity, Seriously?

VentureBeat has an interesting post on how one company is looking to solve the email overload issue. The idea is that people spend virtual money, or points, in relation to how important the email is. Thus, no doubt indicating that this is important, you should read it. The problem is that it is the receiver who ultimately puts the value on the email, so it should be the receiver that is empowered, not the sender. If you could rate "Jim", "Jim's CC's", "Jim"&"after 18.00" then you might have someway of ranking someones email. Seems to me an opening for social ranking within the business of the source of email, from the receivers of email.

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

Time Is The Resource

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

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

Anyone Seen This On Google?

I saw that one of my contacts was "out" on Google IM. I went to leave a message so that they could pick it up whenever they logged on. In red, over the bottom pane where you write, Google message said "X is busy, you may be interrupting". The use of language is interesting here, and perhaps indicate that Google are listening to the problems of the Always On culture. This evening on TodayFM there was a long piece on various forms of nervous disorder based around the idea of compulsively checking your email, and the norms of messaging in terms of how long you can leave it before you have to reply to an email. I think this might be the year that terms such as "attention", "interruption", and "intention" hit the mainstream.

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

Dell Get Interactive

Sadagaopan posts interesting news on dell 2.0. Basically, dell are soliciting information from customers on how to do things better. This is a good start to "opening up the conversation". Given that dell has millions of customers that are "trained" to design their computer their way, is there room for dell to enable customers to post up ideas for entirely new computer-electronic products or services, have other customers vote on them, and then specify "if we hit this level of interest, we will make it!". It's there for consumer products at CafePress and broadband companies have been using "sign up triggers" for demand management for a few years now. If Dell did this it would be a big wow. And dell have a core competence in delivering this kind of thing from a logistics point of view. In effect, they could change from a Computer Logistics company to a "network collaborator", or as John Hagel III puts it the orchestrator of "Creation nets".

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

Blackberry As A Status Symbol

Putting a slightly different spin on a survey reported by Alec Saunders,: if Blackberry users actually do work longer hours, and do get paid more, and do overachieve, is the Blackberry now officially a fashion-based product? This might seem an odd comment right now, given that Blackberry is all about the email, but as services like Talk-Now, and Push-2-Talk become pervasive across devices, maybe the emotional and social connotations of being a Blackberry user will become more important than pure functionality. Just a thought. For VoiceSage users, it means that there are many Blackberry users out there that want to keep connected away from the desk, the question is which mode is appropriate for that communication, and if everybody you need to reach is not on a blackberry, how do you connect across devices, quaranteed.

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

Young People Disloyal To Banks? or Just In General

So its official, Young people have no loyalty? The Wise Marketer reports on the Claritas 2006 market audit's results, which (broken down by age) showed that 12.6% of the so-called Generation Y (under 30 years old) households said they had no primary banking institution. Other age groups, such as Generation X (age 30-39) came out at 11.4% while Seniors (70+ years old) came out at 11.1%, Baby Boomers (aged 40-59) came out at 10.4%, and Empty-Nesters (aged 60-69) came out at 8.6%. It is interesting to consider this piece of research the day after Vanson Bourne for Irish IT firm CA, found that 60% of Irish people now solely dealt with their bank on-line, and 30% dealt solely with their credit card company on-line. They find it more convienent, and less costly than calling a 1850 number were contributing factors, as was the fact that:

A worryingly low 8 percent of people found getting information from call centres on additional products and services a snap. Meanwhile, 69 percent of people have been asked to call back because the (in this example, telecom providers) provider systems have been slow or have gone down. With more than half of consumers willing to jump ship to telecoms rivals for bad service, companies would do well to keep an eye on the quality of customer service.

I think the on-line environment is a ripe space for customer migration. Once customers can compare and migrate with little or no barriers, you as a company are competing on the quality of your customer data, what you do with it, and how you use it to invite customers into conversations.

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

Message Modes During Meetings

We've all been at meetings where people are checking sms/text messages, emails, even their voicemail. But how do you feel about that? Personally, during a meeting I think its pretty ok to check an sms, but not to take or initiate a phone call. Paul Kedrosky over at Infinite Greed quotes the WSJ survey of people's feelings about checking email during business meetings. It would seem from that graph that Talk-Now from iotum is addressing a real pain. The underlying thinking here being that both sides of the communication must come to some kind of an agreement about the context in which they want to be called.

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

Financial Services Fraud: $6,383 Average Loss Per Person

Ken Elefant over at VentureBeat makes some interesting points about credit fraud. Yes, it costs $49.3bn and $6,383 average cost per customer. But most of the "solutions" are based on data analytics and data aggregation.

The solutions they offer are typically client-server based, requiring months or even years of installation and training

. And what are banks doing according to Ken?

The reality is that banks have a hard time telling if the individual in question was a fraudster or simply someone who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay their bills. It takes work to figure it out, with the effort traditionally performed by fraud analysts working the phones to try to solve it. It’s a costly approach that hasn’t scaled well as identity fraud losses have risen in recent years.

As is the way with Blog conversations, one of the comments to that VentureBeat post is very interesting. A guy called Tom Fragala of www.myTrustOn.com quotes a Javelin study on customer attitudes to Fraud, and guess what, the customer sees it as their problem! In my books this means that if companies give the customer the option of adopting a fraud prevention option, they will usually buy into it. With nearly 100% of consumers carrying mobile phones, surely their is a process that can be deployed that could call a customer to ask them to validate a transaction? I don't think I would be giving the game away if I said that VoiceSage were talking to a number of financial sevice organisations about this very issue.

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

Tick Tick! Credit Timebomb?

Maybe it's the media mentions, but debt is becoming an issue for everyone again. John Kennedy over at Silicon Republic brings our attention to a recent report by Intrum Justitia, which handles over 95% of all the Telecommunication companies debts in Ireland, that :

Consumer debt levels in the telecoms sector in Ireland are the fastest growing of any industry sector over the past 10 years.

And we are not talking small change, the average outstanding debt is reported at 300 euro. For smaller entrants into the telecoms market, the ability to finance this outstanding consumer debt could even be considered a barrier to entry. Perhaps we will see more start up's adopt pre-paid models to overcome this financing requirement? Pat Phelan reports that Vodafone are now enabling miropayments (and potentially perhaps even making their "text credits") convertible to cash through a deal with CityGroup. So the question might become, "Are Telecommunications Companies poised to become the next generation of credit management companies"? And perhaps the very nature of debt and debt communications is about to change. What if you could loan your friends money directly via your mobile phone? What if a group of people could give a micro-loan to another group of people? Well, with Vodafone now connecting people on social networks, and with an exchange mechanism, this now becomes possible. Watch out for Prosper and Zopa in this respect. Micro-payments and Micro-debt may also change the absolute amount of debt outstanding due to the mechanics of "systems dynamics" and "feedback loops". For instance, I am not waiting until the end of the month to get my credit card bill, or my telecoms bill. I know how much I owe every day, and demands or reminders might be due on those obligations at any time. And as if to announce that debt management is now firmly on the agenda, in the same SiliconRepublic piece Intrum report that they have just done a deal with Goldman Sachs to purchase about 200m euro in debt from other Irish business sectors this year.

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

Can Emails Be Made Useful?

For most executives, email marketing is at the top of their list for online initiatives. And God knows, there is nothing wrong with a good email newsletter. What Don Peppers of 1to1 Marketing has a problem with is that "newsletter" does not equate with "relationship". he quotes extensively from a Forrester Research study on email marketing "The Best and Worst of Email Marketing In 2006,":

"A lot of emails are still newsletters, with no call to action and no way to interact with what's been given to me," says Shar VanBoskirk, senior analyst and author of the report. "And a lot are still brochures -- they send a pretty picture, but I have no way to respond with what I think about it or to get more information."

This kind of language is exactly what VoiceSage likes to hear: "call to action". How simple it would be to have a click to call function at the end of your short and to the point email alert, where when the person clicks, the call is automatically routed to the right person, because you know who got the email, in what context, and what they probably want to talk about. This kind of thinking probably brings a better focus on why your customer would want to receive the email in the first place (i.e. is someone receiving an email to enhance their relationship with you? do you benefit from receiving this email?) Forrester studied 63 email marketing campaigns in six verticals -- business products and services, consumer goods, financial services, media, retail, and travel. The research found that from start to finish, the emails are still plagued by misdirection and a lack of customer focus. Thirty-three (52 percent) of the subject lines described the email content, but did not hint at the value the user will experience by opening the message. And only 11 programs passed basic usability requirements: easy to scan, had a digestible volume of content, and effectively used bullets and headers to aid navigation. Twenty-nine programs placed calls to action below the fold, and 25 were almost impossible to understand without graphics. Surprisingly, financial services firms ranked last among the verticals. Typically they are considered leaders in online customer contacts, but VanBoskirk is unimpressed with their email strategies. "Two factors are dragging financial services down. They have been slower to adopt email as a medium, so they haven't had as many chances to try different things," she says. "And their emails are very focused on pitching products. [Customers] want their needs met, not just to hear about what you have to sell them." Media companies, retailers, and travel were the top three verticals, helped along by calls to action, the ability to transact, good use of text and images in tandem, and good marketing communication. Consumer goods and B2B companies followed, with financial services in the bottom spot.

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

The Cost of One Bad Apple?

It seems obvious that happy customer service staff give better service to the customers. But could one disgruntled bully wreck an entire customer service team? William Felps and Terence Mitchell of the University of Washington Business School think so. They report in their study of 51 manufacturing teams, that teams with one bad apple were more likely to have conflict, poor communication and cooperation breakdowns. The outcome was inadequate performance. Felps says that "Managers at companies, particularly those in which employees often work in teams, should take special care when hiring new employees,". "This would include checking references and administering personality tests so that those who are really low on agreeableness, emotional stability or conscientiousness are screened out," he said. Considering that a recent report "Multichannel Service and Support Survey" by www.supportindustry.com estimates that 17% of companies will lose a customer if they have 2 negative experiences, and a full 41% of the responding organisations to their survey said they would lose a customer with 4 negative experiences, perhaps there is value to be reaped in old fashioned team profiling tied to old fashioned customer satisfaction measures.

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

VoiceSage Nominated For Best Irish Business Blog?

It would seem so. Well, we are of course very pleased to be nominated for Best Business Blog in our first year of Blogging. If you are a reader, and find what we do interesting, why not pop over to the Irish Blog Awards! Of course we wish everyone nominated for awards the best of luck and hopefully new and interesting connections will be made through them.

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

Device Ecosystems

When devices connect to the internet, and to widgets, you can get some pretty interesting personalisation. For instance, the new Nike-iPod relationship means that you can "connect" your running times from your shoes, to your iPod, and then examine your data for performance. If you take it that 97% of all music players are iPods, and that, lets say, 30% of all running shoes are Nike... that's a pretty big data field. Now if this data tells us (perhaps through a widget that we post on our mySpace account) that Paul is hitting targets but has a potential high blood pressure issue, that is interesting advertising information. If you make gym equipment, or personal fitness equipment, or if you provide personal fitness services, ask yourself "how will I get and share the data to create value".....

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