CyberSource UK Online Fraud Report

Cybersource UK Online Fraud Report. Some interesting points in there, worth a quick read.

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

Revealing Latent Potential: Incentivise Data Disclosure (Or, Let People Tell You Stuff So You Can Co-Create )

I've been following property sites for a while because I think they lead the way in business model development. The amounts of money to be made from Hot Leads, is akin to Hot Search results, or the database of intentions. But what if people don't declare their intention? Usually, your surmise their intention from context, and their history of interaction with you, and with others. Another way to surface intention is to pay: Techcrunch reports that a clever new company called Notchup will enable you to let companies bid for your time to interview. So, you are a competent, succeeding manager in financial services, happy with your employment and internal prospects? Surely you would be tempted to interview if someone was willing to pay you $500 for an hour of your time?

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

Interactions Build Trust: You Have The Data, You Should Know When To Call Me!

OnCustomer has a nice piece on customer service 2.0. How do you build "Trust and Credibility with Customers"? Well one thing you can do, is make your relationship a bit more "transparent" by letting the customer know where they are in your process. I for one really like it when Amazon tells me that my product is delayed, or that one half has shipped etc. But I would really like it if they told me "It should be with you tomorrow", because then I get a whole days anticipation, which is part of the pleasure of the purchase. There are practical implications as well, such as actually being there for the delivery. As other people were doing this January, I had a look at some Credit Card deals. I made an enquiry to one of the big ones, they asked me some questions there and then (note: have your bank details around you when you make this kind of call!), and then they told me that they would contact me soon to tell me if I was approved. Three days later, I get a call, a live call, telling me I had been approved and they would send out the forms. A full week later, those forms are on my kitchen table. That's one full week for me to change my mind, look at other card providers, or for me to just fall into apathy and stay with my current provider. Now as you can see this post has shifted towards a kind of "VoiceSage is great for form follow on's and turning prospects into customers", which is true: but why the hell hasn't my existing card company, who can see my spend pattern, and who no doubt know that I am shopping around, why don't they contact me and make me some offers? Frankly, because I haven't acted as if I am going to switch. The minute I pick up the phone and call them, only then will I appear on their radar. Silly silly. I am going because nobody bothered to contact me. They have done nothing to build my trust, they are obviously doing nothing to help me. UPDATE: as if by magic, the new credit card company just called me! So I will be returning those forms today, and I will overcome my inertia. I was feeling like someone should have called me, and someone DID call me, which probably means there is a predictable time within which customers expect to be reminded, even subconsciously.

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

The Price of Failure

Ok. Who thinks that their web site/web service will be up all the time? If you absolutely depend on online presence you have to go one step further for your users. 37 Signals, the leading 2.0 site, went down and Dreamhost went down as well. We deal with companies in the financial services sector that have extensive plans in place for such outages. Yes, I know most 2.0 firms and smaller hosting companies don't have the customer service staff to man the phones, but you don't always have to. A simple outbound message to the end users phone giving them the message, and a sense of how long the delay will be, would go a long way to alleviating anxiety. AND I suspect that showing that you are more than a web site by going "out of band" would go a long way towards increasing your brand equity with them (fancy way of saying, "everybody fears that the services they use will fail, but if you recover very strongly and with great integrity, you will not only win loyal customers, but advocates"). "Our agents await your call!"....

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

Phone's Produce Data: Now Go Forth and Multiply

When (note when) data becomes more open, public, and portable new information service opportunities will arise. Great article today from Brian McConnell guesting on Om's site. If phones produce "flow data" that is "location aware", anonymous data can be used to generate an analysis of everything from average Q lengths to data that can help design better people flow through shops, airports, and public transport systems. The guys over at Telco2 have been talking about this for ages and ages. How you expose your phone and identity data will become the issue, and how you tie this to your personal profile data, and not a la Beacon from Facebook, but more along the lines of Google, Jaiku and Google trends. Now here's the kicker: there is one level of service opportunity that the data aggregator can get (i.e. the Telco) and they can sell that on (or make it available for revenue share), and their is another level of data that is added to this (from other data pools) that match this meta-data against a particular individuals "profile" in the context of their relationship to your company. Thus building up your customer data is a strategy that is only going to become more and more important.

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

Co-ordinating Physical Resources: Some Thoughts

I was in the UK recently and needed to go from plane, to train, underground and taxi, all within a particular timeframe. Although I left home with a plan, inevitably something will change: a meeting is longer or shorter than expected, or an opportunity to take another meeting presents itself. Many 2.0 companies look at "cheapest ticket" solutions, (www.kayak.com www.skyscanner.com) but I think there is a whole other market out there. If I could buy a "Live Ticket", I would. It would tell me that "the next train is 2 miles from here, or 20 minutes by cab (do you want to book a cab, do you want to check train availability etc.). It would be linked between transport systems ("your train is on time"), it would push a text or call to me that allowed me query ( al la www.tellme.com, contained a weblink, or put me through to help desk). Even a simple 2.0 service that allowed me to set up my journey in advance (on Google Maps?) and then texted me with updates as to the current status of my plan, or "next train", "Next plane", and gave me "options" at the end, this would dramatically improve my current experience. If these options are push (appropriate time, place and mode of course), it would decrease the stress and pressure of travel, i.e. it would have strong psychological selling points. It could dynamically "suggest" that I "re-schedule outbound flight at this point in time", it might have learned that I do not like to have less than 45mins at the airport prior to flight time or base it on an evaluation of optimum price : value : risk profile that I have. To those that follow the online space, this all sounds pretty "semantic web". But it doesn't have to be that hard, I think. What would participating companies get for participating in opening up their data? Everything. I don't buy flights, I buy "on time attendance at meetings", (paying for predictable and reliable flights); I buy "ability to take a speculative meeting" (due to low price point); I buy the total cost of getting me to that meeting. A vendor like Blackberry/Nokia with a simple Google Maps application could be pretty much ready to go "out of the box". And it is very much in the telco's interest to enable this as volume of interactions would be exponential. I think we are going to see a lot more of this kind of thinking in the next two years as companies find their train times, flight times, reviews etc. mashed into other services. It will begin with simple outbound texting, but will quickly move to "intelligent co-ordination". And there are very few industries out there that couldn't benefit from thinking about how the confluence of low cost sensors, mashed data, and ubiquitous mobile phones will effect them.

Update: As if "by magic" Forbes Article on Semantic Web and Travel. Sramana Mitra is always a good commentator on the strategic thinking behind Semantic Web. Her thoughts on next generation 3.0 Enterprise can be found here.

AT&T Billing and Payments Issues

So, by any chance are you a telecom company finding that you have "sub prime" customers? AT&T seems to think so: AT&T's market capitalisation went down nearly 5% as they reported that people were not paying their phone bills on time. One way of looking at this is that billing and payments management are notoriously difficult to manage well. That's why when analysts look to the core competencies of large carriers, they rarely look at the access technologies, they always point to the billing and payments management. That's why when you declare that you are not "on top of it", you get hammered. You get hammered for "not managing cash flow" in every industry. I've been following Telco as a space for quite a while now, and it has always bugged me that Telco's can't seem to use the billing moment to declare value delivered, not minutes consumed. Of course their are also some customers that should just not be allowed run up a bill.

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

Mass Market Radio Online

Sometimes I listen to the radio, well, on the radio. Other times I like to listen online. I don't mind registering some basic info, or logging in with my OpenID. So why do radio stations play me stupid mass market advertising when I am online and so blatantly available for a more targeted, geo-specific direct offer?

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

Best Customer Service Letter Ever

Couldn't resist posting this: hat-tip Damien Mulley "Best Customer Service Letter Ever"

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

Cost Savings Go To The Bottom Line: Fast

Interesting Stat: “It takes at least $5 in new sales to equal the same impact as a $1 reduction in procurement or supply chain costs.” So if you saved 100,000 pounds in delivery-to-the-door efficiencies that would take £500,000 in new revenue wins?

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

The Plasticity of Customer Interaction Strategy

A bit of a nerd-out point today, "unintended consequences of ad targeting" by way Seamus. Seamus's insight is (in my opinion) dramatic:

"Last year I commented that some friends and I had found the easiest way to be alerted when ski chalets became available at the resort we wanted to visit was to knock up a wiki page with the name of the resort and a few words about skiing, run AdSense over the page and then wait for the relevant ads to be brought to us. As ad targeting gets more precise (and accurate) it becomes trivial to simply design a page so that the right ads come to you. AdWords are not just commercial messages: manipulated the right way, they're a tailored newsfeed about things you want to buy".

Now, that's a pretty neat way to use an intelligent alerting service. How long before we start writing up "Asks" by setting up contexts on our own blogs and websites, and waiting to see what offers "ad sense" makes? but Seamus also used the service in a very, very unusual way:

"Yesterday I found what I'm confident will become another use for ad targeting. Pondering attending a pub quiz, I had a look at some web pages that talked about the pub in question. The ads alongside those pages were all for distressed-credit services such as LogBookLoans, debt consolidation and other financial services clearly designed for what marketers would euphemistically call the C2-D/E audience. This gave me pause. If the ads were targeted correctly (and increasingly they are), perhaps this wasn't the event or the venue for me".

Of course the context here might have been that the "page" Seamus was visiting only related tangential to the pub in question, or maybe there just were not many links elsewhere on the web to that pub, so that page had an "unrepresentative weighting", but the overall architecture of the argument holds, surely. How long before posting something like "Paul Sweeney" is going to "Pub DC1", in "Location ABC" begins to affect the offers that are made to me in ad sense and how long before this "event publishing" begins to effect my own credit rating? Seamus's points show that a lead user can re-purpose your service to deliver even more value. Your challenge is to enable them to do it, potentially by being as open as you possibly can. Would Google allow you to "hack" such a solution together for alerting purposes? You bet! why? because it would increase the value of their ad sense platform, and make it stronger. At VoiceSage one of our customers took the capability of having a postal address confirmed by a respondent and turned it into a completely new type of service offer for the company. Other customers have "hacked together" business continuity alerting solutions, and potential fraud alerts.

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

VoiceSage In The Financial Times:

VoiceSage has been picking up a bit of mainstream coverage as of late, and today saw us covered in the London based Financial Times, with some neat points made about the break down that sometimes occurs between ordering things online, and actually getting them on your doorstep: (hint! you have to be actually there to receive them!)

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

The Bond of Trust: The Sword Is Forged In The Fire

Neville Hobson has an interesting post today on what he perceives as a service failure by Virgin Media. The nub of the problem is that trust has broken down between Mr. Hobson and his service provider. Psychologically, after a service failure, and a perceived lack of customer support in and around a service outage, Virgin does really have to be exceptional in its support. A number of things stood out to me in Mr. Hobson's description of his experience: (1) An outbound phone call to him had a strong positive impact on his attitude. If the company phones you it is an explicit statement that your problem IS important, so important that we are contacting you, not the other way around. The fact that they charge you for your technical support (in reality) indicates that you are nothing but a commodity, and we do not want to interact with you, because you have no future value add to us. How hard would it be to email customers in low broadband performance areas and give them the statistics PLUS the applied discount PLUS a click to call option if they want to know more? (2) The concept of “Knowing” is important to customers; in this case, knowing was evidence of measurable broadband performance. Customers tend to like knowing that they are in a logical problem solving process, because this is more likely to result in a resolution. Good problem definition, based on measurables, preferably visually represented, give you the feeling of a “common ground” from which this resolution can be built. (3) Levels of “perceived professionalism” in employee performance leaves a strong impact. In this example it was the professionalism of the field engineers. I don’t think its a mistake that it was the engineers. Many engineers have a high level of identity with the profession as opposed to the company. As an engineer, they believe that they have some kind of 'competence responsibility'. Finally, companies that successfully address a product or service failure through great customer service, tend to end up with customers that are actually MORE satisfied with your company, that are MORE loyal. That's because the worst has already happened and you were there, you delivered, there is nothing more to fear. I trust you know. "The Sword is Forged In The Fire"...... (update: hat tip to Tom Raftery's Shared Items Google Feed which was distributed via his Jaiku stream)

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

Lifecasting goes Broadcast....

Wow. lifecasting, i.e. telling everyone whatzup, has just crossed the chasm: It forms part of the story line at CSI, America's most popular programme. Now watch every mom and dad check out the service. Lets see if 18 months of attention to ease of use pays off. This is where customer interaction is taking place; this is where people are talking about your products; this is where somebody says "and that guy at the counter was really rude...."

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

The Business is A Social Network

Christopher Carfi has a note on the role of social networks within the enterprise: Key point is that they won't be advertising based. The point should be obvious to everyone, I don't understand how people could not understand this: organisations are networks of people, skills, information/knowledge and resources. Most of the benefits will not be reaped within any one function or application, it will be reaping the space between applications and processes. It won't be just a forklift upgrade from using the phone on your table with the Direct Dialling capability to using a softphone on your computer; it won't be a clever way of using/not using email. It will be in more granular sensing of what actitives are linked, and what needs to happen in the case of that event. To post a blunt example, I leave a comment on the recent Service Untitled post about a poor experience he had with Toyota. How does Toyota sense this? who should get a call, what "interaction opportunity should be offered"? Could they "sense" that this particular post was about the fact that a particular part did not function well, or that a particular dealer wasn't all that friendly? How could Enterprise2.0 solutions re-design how this is handled? It will be about giving people more power at the point closest to their task so they can define how they get the job done better. Sounding a bit fluffy? Well, its not. In the Service Untitled example, it would have been easy enough to have an automated system that knew which tow trucks were nearest the caller location, and patch them through so the driver and the customer could give each other directions and assurances. It should have been easy for the customer service person to give the customer an experience that had some kind of "relationship content". The fall-downs in the example are based on not knowing what is happening in other parts of your service network, or not being able to follow the conversation. For maybe twenty years some people have thought about the organisation as an inverted pyramid, with management and resources there to enable the front line person to deliver more effectively. One of the ways VoiceSage is built for these principles is that we allow you to customise the outbound contact campaign as much as possible, and we put you in total control around how you want this to happen. And hopefully, we've made it pretty easy to build flows that integate with other processes or triggers in your business. That's all pretty good, when you dig into other solutions, you might find some surprises in there. But we also allow the user to share their work with others in the company, so you can build a pretty damn good contact campaign, and share it with another worker, maybe on the other side of the world. We allow them to adapt that campaign and re-save it. Thinking about processes as something that can be shared, adopted, and adapted is part of what will enable companies to reap benefits from Enterprise2.0 initatives. And because it delivers real, measurable, and fast benefits, enterprises are happy to pay for the service. And that's why everything isn't about advertising models.

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

LouderVoice Reviews: They Get It.

I just signed on to the LouderVoice review site enabling me to manage my commenting, and make reviews of everything from the wine I drink to the films I see. One thing I can say very positively about the service is the complete ease of use, sign up, and registration. It was seamless, painless, and I saw an instant benefit (i.e. I wrote a review and it appeared on the specified location).Then they allow you to add a firefox extension to write reviews from where ever you are when browsing, and now also you can SMS in your reviews from the very place you are right now. Customer Reviews are becoming an incredibly powerful reference tool, (see Adweek) and the regular user is searching to find real and authentic others, that can help guide their decisions and purchases. Enabling you to make your reviews on the fly, and publish them where you will, is an attractive proposition. I haven't dug very deep into the service yet, so I am curious to know how these reviews are shared socially (i.e. on social network) and what benefit the poster of reviews is seen as getting. I am sure all will be revealed in due time.

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

Review of Die Hard 4.0

Die Hard 4.0

"In the style of Die Hard movies, and if you liked them, you will probably like this."

Pretty much a run of the mill story line, computer hackers and such (write your own story line from there), with lots of guns, cars, and one woman in the entire film. I think the genre has moved on and it was time for Die Hard to re-invent itself to regain the original appeal. Casino Royale did it, time for DH to Die and be Re-bourne.

Rated 3/5 on Nov 19 2007

Vote on Paul Sweeney's Reviews at LouderVoice

Review Tags: die hard 4.0, movies, review

When you try to change, you learn things....

I wanted to upgrade by Blogger template to the new template. The new template was going to clean things up a bit for me and offered me the opportunity to add new widgets to my blog from other 3rd party services "at the touch of a button". I value simplicity, so I was willing to do this. New Blogger gave me the ability to add modules into my side bar etc. I thought, that will be neat. Then I realised that: (1)It only offered a few limited module choices, (2)It had actually made it harder to add outside modules that I wanted to add, and (3)I couldn't add the "recent readers" widget from mybloglog. Besides the fact that I don't like being hemmed in with no way out, I was totally unwilling to give up my "recent readers" Mybloglog widget, which shows what other people have recently visited this particular blog. Why? because that's often the first thing I look at when visiting other blogs. Its like a virtual watercooler, it validates that this is still an interesting place to visit, it points me towards people that have a similar interest to me. The people that come to the blog, and leave a trace like this, are a "social object", and a valuable one to me. Think "enabling communities" and not "providing content", and I think that there are a whole range of customer service and customer interactions that could be radically redefined.

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

3 Months of Happy

A neat video from TED Conference on leading thinkers, (here) tells us some interesting things about happiness. In general. Like, we tend to forget anything good or bad that happened more than three months ago; that we are actually happier if we live with a definite decision rather than keeping it infinitely open ended. People are comfortable and are happy with "bounded offers" where the trade offs are known. Coupled with some recent thinking about consumer choice, and product scope choice in particular, companies are finding customers gravitate towards services where decision making is a bit easier. If you think about Google search, you hit a search term, and are presented with a page of possible answers destinations, and usually, you will pick one of the top three. The underlying assumption on your part is that Google does a pretty good job of understanding what you are trying to find, and presenting the more reputable ones higher on the list (implied perhaps, but still there). When even customers that have said they are happy with your service churn, what can we learn from this? Well, when you think about making customers happy, perhaps it doesn't count unless it happened in the last three months? Perhaps you shouldn't give them 10 upgrade options, just the one "do you want it or not".

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

Logistics API's

Listing of Logistics API's so you can track your deliveries.

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

Trendspotting Spoof

Looks like my "reaction" to Trendspotting pieces was more of a test of my moral reflexes than I had guessed: Dear Paul, We hope you enjoyed the very special trend briefing we sent you yesterday. If you didn't, then please pour yourself a strong cup of coffee and take another close look. It's a SPOOF. Fake. Not to be taken at face value. Even most of the sites we referred to are, well, ours—and entirely fictitious. We thought it would be fun, just for once, to mock overzealous marketers, crass consumerism and—above all—ourselves. :-) So please don't ditch your pet, stay in ugly hotels, pollute the earth, paint your walls turquoise or start marketing to unborn babies, OK? Rest assured that we'll back with 'real' trends in December, the kind of trends you've been getting from us since 2002. If you can't wait that long, check out our Trend Database or our 2008 Trend Report. All real, all authentic, all useful. ;-) Best, Reinier Evers Founder, trendwatching.com reinier@trendwatching.com

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

Apple Appointment Genius

Bruce Temkin over at Customer Experience Matters posts about his recent experience at the Apple Genius Bar when his apple laptop broke down. The great thing was he could find out online where an in-store customer service bar was open, book an appointment at that bar right there and then, and when he was in store it told him where he was in line. Pretty basic stuff you'd think. But perhaps not so: people in call centres have long known that the caller likes to know how long they will be waiting and where in the queue they are, but in-store solutions tend to be pretty poor at this. Also, the staff member that delt with Bruce's problem knew what they were doing, again, something you would expect online, but maybe you don't see in store an awful lot any more. Finally, this was a neat example of using online applications to manage your commitments in the physical world. With more and more customers performing their product and services searches online, and THEN going to their local store to inspect the product physically, the boundaries are blurring between strictly online and off-line in terms of the buying and consumption process. Simple "click-2-book an appointment" with some one that knows what they are doing, is clearly as simple but powerful idea. Having met that person, why not rate them and your experience, so that others can choose to book an appointment with them or with another in-store person? One of the take aways for me is again, "customer like to know where they are in a process and the major opportunity is to meld online and mobile interactions".

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

Ethics? Hello? Ethics?

This is a personal opinion piece, but I feel strongly about it. When I was in college we did this course called "business ethics". It was because big corporations were pretty much ripping everyone off, acting illegally, and the culture of these companies at the time, encouraged it! Things were cleaned up a little after the big "enron" type scandals but perhaps signs are that people have lost their way again? In The Big Five Trends that you should watch, Trendwatching calls one GenerationZ, i.e. below 3 years of age, and into the womb. Perhaps not so bad an example where their is a social network helping people "bond with their bumps", or get to know other mum's with a view to sharing experience and tips. (www.foops.com) (note: in private beta, link not live). But to say that the opportunity is to create "lasting brand tags" through creating songs, and entertainment for children, in the womb, is just plain wrong. If you don't know why, perhaps the legislation on marketing to children might point you in the right direction.

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

Just a Great Idea!

The Alarm Clock: has a really nice post on how and where to get those manuals, for all those damn gadgets and appliances you have, and you know you've got that manual somewhere right? OwnerIQ. Brilliant. Ah, the business model? Well if you know that people are looking for the manual, either the thing in question is broken, or the owner doesn't know how to use it. Knowing that, is a great way to make new offers to the browser and suggest other substitute products that have been highly rated by other users, even from other sites. This site should be "mashed" with GetSatisfaction and LouderVoice to make this a reality. Remember, uSwitch went for nearly £210m or $433m.

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

Microsoft Live Maps Actually Pretty Good?

I am not usually a big Microsoft fan boy, but I have to admit with being impressed by the news developments on Live Maps. Techcrunch gives a few really good reasons why its worth a look at. The two that get my attention are: —Landmarks are now given in driving directions that indicate you’ve gone too far. —Black is the new red. Traffic speed is now shown with four colours (green, yellow, red, and black). Black means total standstill, versus red, which means creeping logjam. - They have simplified directions so that you don't get "overly complicated instructions", which is pretty much the way most of us remember stuff. I like these developments because they focus on simplifying the user experience and making it more meaningful. It's interesting because of the messaging and interactions that will be required around these "Live!" services. Booked to go on a car journey across town or further afield? How about getting an sms to tell you that a certain intersection is now closed, and have a new map pushed to your phone, or dash? Perhaps you have booked an appointment with a doctor at 12.00 in the city centre. At the moment you could see a Google embedded map on the doctors site, and perhaps got some driving instructions on how to get there. But what if you could subscribe to get a live update from the "map" courtesy of the doctor to let you know that traffic was busy on that route and you might want to leave earlier or book another route? Its not a huge leap to say that this could be integrated and synchronised with a group calender function or deliveries software either. There are going to be huge process benefits to be reaped by closer co-ordination and synchronisation of people, assets, and places.

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

SMS In Financial Services: Where to Use?

Javelin report that two way sms is definitely on the way, and has many benefits for financial services. I agree, as I am sure our friends in ClairMail would too. The problem I have with these kinds of reports is how singular the focus tends to be. Taking the solution and examining the problem. People don't want text alerts per say, they want "to know", "to be alerted", to "be able to..." etc. etc. Absolutely SMS has a place in alerting, hell that's why we provide it, but to not even mention that Interactive Voice Messaging is making an impact on many of these areas is to do their readers a disservice, I think. Why do I think? Well, VoiceSage is delivering combinations of text and voice alerts for a number of retail banks and we get extraordinary results by brining voice interaction into the alerting strategy. If you want to know more about it, call our Director of Sales, Mark Oppermann. His contact details are on our website at www.voicesage.com

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

Sparks Crossing the Chasm?

Just as the sparks have stopped leaping across the gorges and canyons of California, home of lead users, I wonder will this be the year of "messaging 2.0"? People, individual users, have seen the power of micro-messaging, of geo-tagged-messages, and know it now as "better information and stuff about what is going on around me, because hell, fox news doesn't know", and this is going to leap into mainstream. Companies will want a bit more power and control, to begin with. VoiceSage is ready for this with SMS, Voice, Premium SMS, and a full XML API. Jaiku for the Enterprise anyone?

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

The Spoils of Data Are Assets About Assets....

Two Sneaky end of day posts:) and a forbidding title to lure you in ! Paul Kedrosky's presentation on predictability and interdependence in markets:(notes on link through to actual slideshare site).

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Jeff Nolan's point that the price of property is related to the reputation of its local school. So why isn't that on every property site? In even a very decent and 2.0 site like www.nestoria.co.uk, all they show is the location and name of the nearest school. From Paul Kedrosky's view, all asset classes are interconnected in a social network (of assets). The spoils go to those services that surface the interconnected data.

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

Mashing The Phone Network for Value

The popular lifehacker site shows you (in the US) how to get free incoming calls. Basically its a hack between Grand Central and Gizmo. Then there is another announcement that you can get a desktop alert to let you know that the price of the amazon book/film/game you wanted to buy has dropped to a price you are interested in. Now how about a meta-hack that let you get alerted when the price fell, and made your phone ring, so you could confirm and order. Something VoiceSage could do in a hack. If I were a company looking to undersell Amazon on the basis that most people go to Amazon for convenience and reliability, I'd be worred right about now.

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

California Fires & Mashup's

I've been thinking that mashups will break through in some way, and was positing that it would have something to do with property and real estate. Well, maybe the fires of California might be a turning point. ProgrammableWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb and The Official Google blog, all have lists of different mashup's that are helpful during this emergency. Marshall points out TwitterWhere which presents all the "Twitter messages" from a particular location and pushes them as an xml feed. Again, what is particularly good about these kinds of solutions is that they can be accessed from any browser, and can send sms updates when the network is jammed. I have to raise some concern around the delivery of such messages via sms however. I have personally experienced these kinds of messages coming in a full day late, not something you would like to contemplate in an emergency. Not all phones will be Instant Messaging enabled, and there are issues around prioritising call channels during an emergency, so at best, these unofficial alerting systems have to be strongly overlaid with the "official messaging systems" of the municipality. I thin we are going to see a little bit more data being used as well. By overlaying these kinds of maps with data such as prevailing wind direction and speed, level of traffic on the highways, further predictions can be made about the risk of staying in certain areas and the need to re-allocate resources. For early adopters and technically literate people, these mashups "seem easy to use", but for the man on the street, they are still just not easy enough for the mainstream. It may take someone like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to "push" relevant modules/gadgets/widgets to your front page for them to see true wide spread use.

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

Strange Little Communications Services Pt. 1?

Designing services a la Campbell's Soup matrix or Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, Communications Breakdown has a nice little list of services you may not have heard of. I should do one of these.

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

Availability versus Presence

Interesting to see EnThinnai (via NMSCommuncications )discuss the requirement for "availability status" as opposed to "presence status". It also has an interesting take on how you may, or may not, want to allow others to "ping your status". The other thing I find interesting (If I am understanding it correctly) is that due to a peer-to-peer network architecture, there is no central presence server required, and thus no server loads to be managed. Even better, they are using Amazon Web Services EC2 and S3 to give them scalability. EnThinnai will be interesting to watch, I must say, I like the approach but find the lack of company information and information on who has developed to the service a little off putting. Especially as this is a P2P play.

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

Lessons from San Diego Fire Alerting?

A great example of how messaging technologies are changing peoples capability of responding to external events. MobileMessaging2 shows how the state authorities are able to send out sms alerts to mobile phones on a geographical basis to alert people to the movement of fires in San Diego area. This is no small thing given that many of the networks tend to be jammed and thus near inoperable during crises times, as the first instinct for most people, is to phone loved ones. The piece also shows how individuals are using services such as twitter to keep each other updated directly about how things are going at the local or family unit level. The first solution is top down, and perhaps "official", the second is "edge, informal, and unofficial". By scanning the Twittersphere/ Jaikusphere for keywords, and geotags, the official central system could re-broadcast updates or advice around actions. Matching these two spheres could make for a compelling citizen action and co-ordination platform.

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

Build An Online Experience

Online advertising spend isn't online marketing spend. Many companies are looking to build better customer experiences for the consumer, to produce a "wow, you really made that easier for me" effect. One of these is Nike.

Digital media spending is doubling every year at many big companies, industry data indicate. But the research firm Outsell found this year that 58 percent of marketers’ online spending went to their own Web sites, rather than to paid ads. More than two million people visited Nike-owned Web sites in July, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Source: Platformeconomics Of course I am thinking that social media will play a big part in that spend, as will creating better company-individual interactions, online and offline, and crossing both. The relationship has to become more fluid, and relevant.

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

Post Telco2.0 Thought: Jaiku is Gooju and PhoneBook 2.0

Nobody paid that much attention to Jaiku and Google at Telco2.0, there were some passing references, but no real Eurika moments. I'd just like to take a moment to say why I think this is going to be important. Jaiku and Gtalk are both built on Jabber, an instant messaging protocol. That means that anyone with gmail, or gtalk, could probably start using those services as jaiku-like, or jaiku-enabled services. I sent a gmail to your gmail address? bingo: your on my gtalk list, and I can see what updates you post about your location, your thoughts, your conferences etc. It will not be very long before Gooju (just made that up!) will be able to tell who your near and far friends are, and place them on your "buddy list" in a dynamic way, in terms of gooju's interpretation of what you might want to see, given your interpersonal context. So, would you rather that, or would you rather just have a brick there with a number on it? That's the fundamental difference between a "presence flow" and a "phone number". Now download the gooju client onto a mobile phone, and gooju knows where I am, who I am with, and who we want to talk to. Combine that with our use of maps, and gooju can make some pretty accurate assumptions about what we want to do. Oh come on man, nobody wants that? If his is your reaction your are thinking sequentially, not in parallel. I've seen what gtalk does when a group of friends puts it on blackberry. Weird things start to happen. People update their facebook profile with Jaiku and Plazes, they change the status bar on their Gtalk to be ironic about their availability, in short their phonebook becomes a social application. The phone company, (oops, the Telco), is thinking about location based services, is thinking about presence. Their is a world of opportunity out there for location based data that is available, mashable, and re-packagable. By trying to ring fence where the revenues are going to come from in the short term, they are removing themselves from the innovation that is occuring in the channel and at the edges. Its not data services as you know it fella's, its the data inside strategy....

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

Late Appointment Thoughts

Again, Service Untitled with some thoughts on how to manage the late appointments issue. As a customer of many services I have to admit that the thing I hate most is turning up and waiting an hour or two because a service provider "stuffed the waiting list" in expectation of cancelled appointment times. Perhaps I am crazy, but a little analysis of common underlying trends in who is late, what time slots tend to be late, and time of year effects might yield further insights into why people are late. Such measures as "distance from the office/hospital", "previous arrival history", or "transportation mode" might act as predictors. Either way, I really appreciate it when people phone me and tell me "sorry, the office is running late your 4.00 appointment is likely to occur closer to 4.30, if you'd like to speak to our office receptionist please press one". When I get the update I can take more time to find a car parking space, grab a coffee, perhaps bring my book with me. If you don't call me it just feels like "yeah, we've loads of business, we really don't care if we waste your time, because its not as valuable as our time". Harsh?

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

Inbound Calling Alert!

A post over at Service Untitled discusses how to avoid inbound calls. These are all pretty good ideas (1) better email support (2) better online self service (3) an easier to use product (4) alternatives such as click to call. I'd like to add a further spin to that: before you try to put in inbound call avoidance strategies think about why and when customers, or prospects, are phoning you in the first place. In a previous life I did some research on the reasons behind inbound calls and you know 75-80% of them had to do with order status, the "where's my stuff" question. Just by putting some customer self service checking into your extra-net companies could avoid all those calls. For particular sets of customers, or times, or late changes you might think of pro-actively calling customers to give them an update. UPS has done a wonderful job ot enabling companies to bring this capability to the desktop by enabling to get your alert to the desktop. The email company Zimbra had a nifty feature that allowed you to send an email with an "embedded live link" to data in the UPS systems so that when you checked an email that was send two hours ago, it contained Updated information on the product delivery status: i.e. it was live information. A neat solution. Could your outbound email system contain links to live order status and delivery information? could it contain click to call links to live operators available at that time?

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

Cutomer Survey Around Specific Interactions for Results

Patty Seybold of the Seybold group is a clear advocate of 2.0 principles for the new services and products paradigm of "bringing the customer in", thus the name of her blog "outside in". So it may be a bit of a surprise to hear her say that a great way of findout out about deep customer issues is "to ask them". Yip, pick up the phone and interview them about their experience. But the key difference is that you might look at interviewing your clients around their experience around a specific process or transaction, not just the "overall relationship". That way you get specific recommendations. Great idea, and pretty easy to set up.

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

Reflecting on Telco2.0

Telco2.0 is brought to the industry by STL partners and its executive brainstorm is positioned as a genuinely open environment where industry people can challenge their own assumptions and gain insights. Let me boil it all down for you: (1) "if the browser is the gateway to the pipe, how in the world are telco's going to make some serious money"? (2) "is there anything in the mobile experience that can be tied to the telco network capabilities that delivers superior user experience" (3)"to get real breakthrough services, you need to have a deep understanding of the social-anthropological background that people use these services in: social networking is a result of peoples de-communitisation in the physical realm, that's why they play with age, identity, and relationships in the virtual realm". (4) "what's the point of innovating at the edge where even complete absorption of the online advertising industry would barely move the needle for the CEO of a major telco" (actually those figures are quite frightening). There is just so much money involved in network based investments that its hard to walk away from this kind of thinking. This is where Martin Geddes analogy of the experience of the shipping industry when it moved to the container based model had its real import: "the money was in shipping. with containers, it moved to the ports". I took this to mean "the edges". This is big strategic thinking here, and I am not sure how many people in the room really understood this. Sure, graphs and charts of value migration might have hammered the point home, but the overall narrative in the room was still rooted in "we have huge assets, how can we muscle in". Our CTO Graham Brierton had a clear idea of what the telco's needed to do to support innovation and companies like VoiceSage: hosted apps, hosted services, hosted data, common standards. Finally, I think that VoiceSage received a lot of very positive attention at the event as a great example of the "new thinking". We met a few people that very much "got it", and we look forward to continuing the conversation.

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

Telco2.0 Innovating From The Edge

This thought may strike some people as a bit strange, but innovation is happening at the edge of networks, at the edge of social networks, and in the edges of the enterprise, and in short, at the edge of your business. Sick of waiting 12 months for an approval process, business process owners such as Customer Service Directors, and Logistics Managers, are making smaller below the radar adoptions of products and services. Customers are adopting new and innovative ways of interacting with you, through blog posts, wiki contributions, ratings, or even forming pressure groups on facebook. Companies like GetSatisfaction are doing a great job of inverting the customer service issue and making "problems" and "issues" public, and encouraging customers to help each other out, often called "crowdsourcing" customer service. These trends are a big deal. The same thing is happening from the Telco perspective. The big innovations aren't solely happening in the core of the network, in the network switches, and fibre optics. They are happening when customers decide to use a capability in a new way, that suits them and their particular sets of needs. A lot of people are calling this 2.0 Thinking. Here's an example I came across today, and already two people I know are using it. Damien Mulley pointed out that you can use Google Mail to filter spam from your eircom (or any other) account. eircom have a nice product in providing you with a hosted security service, but with google buying out postini how long before I can get a similar hack or mash up for this functionality? Now imagine that I am connected to a network of other people that can share tips such as these, and that I can share them, and adopt them easily. Yes, free voicemail. Yes, Free conference calling. Free wireless roaming. Free International calling. The only thing stopping this now are information asymmetries ( a fancy way of saying you just didn't hear about it because there are barriers to you hearing it). Well most of these functionalities are available on facebook, today, and as social networks open out to each other, pretty soon everyone else. Once your friends start using it, so will you. When you give customers access to your product, allow them change what they wish, recombine, customise, re-purpose, you open out a world of opportunity. One company might use VoiceSage for an appointment remindering service another might use a variation of this routine for soccer practice or event management. So far, so traditional. You sent messages, and take messages from the people that you know. However, more and more of our presence and friendships take place, or are mediated, by our internet participation. In a company, it might be ok to have a click to call button straight to my work number from the company website, but do I want that capability from my Facebook profile? The difference here is context, and context is everything. Do I want to hear from someone that knows someone that I know when I am in city I am travelling to? meetup, pairup. FOWA (Future of Web Apps) London was some fun, and from a 2.0 technical perspective, interesting. What was missing (besides the GetSatisfaction guys) was a clear sense of how 2.0 thinking was going to effect the enterprise space (or E2 as it's been monikered). Now comes the time for the Telco to think about its role in this whole emerging ecosystem. More interesting for us is that VoiceSage will now be presenting in the Innovators Zone of Telco 2.0 Brainstorm in London, Oct 16th to 18th. Not only is this a global forum on the future of the internet and telecommunications, but some of the true thought leaders in the space will also be there. Strong Irish contingent at the show, unsurprisingly, as Ireland has a cluster of telecommunications software and services companies. Acision, Aepona, Openet, as well as Google, Yahoo. One of the core themes in the show is Voice and Messaging, and what is next in that arena, because that is what is driving value today, and what will continue to drive value in the future, a future that is looking far from bright for traditional telcos. Wondering what is driving internet stocks up and telecoms stocks down? One word: Google. Its thus even more of an honour to be guest panelist speakers for this thread. Later in the day Thomas Howe, he of US Voice Mashup fame will be giving a presentation and we look forward to what Thomas has to say. For those of you interested in that kind of thing, you can see a presentation Thomas gave here. VoiceSage is invited to this kind of conference because we are not an ordinary company. The next six months will see a lot of interesting developments coming out of this company. How do you know you are doing something right? Key "2.0 questions" to ask yourself if you produce a product or service : - Am I doing everything I can to build applications that learn from your users? - Does my application get better with more users, or just more busy and more crowded? - If "Data is the Intel Inside" of Web 2.0, what data do I own? - What user-facing services can I build against it? - Does my platform give me and my users control, or take it away from us? Source:ReadWriteWeb. So, I'll put the offer out there again: "If you are a leading edge 2.0 Company, give me a call. I want to work with you". Simple message. Lets see what happens.

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

McKinsey Study on Inbound Call Automation

Mckinsey Quarterly has a good article this month on Inbound Call Mangement. While its relatively easy (for the call centre operator) to see where there is value in turning inbound calls into an automatic voice response system, it is somethimes easy to loose sight of the fact that engaging with customers that have the right type of query can be very valuable. In the McKinsey study, they found that what we might regard as routine questions are actually customer signals that they are in a certain mode of thinking with regards your company. If I phone you about gaining clarity on my price package, I am not doing so in order to re-emphasise the feeling of fantastic value I am getting in this relationship. However, If I am phoning in to see if I am still booked for that appointment tomorrow, then that has a different motivation, and probably contains a low probability of cross and up selling opportunity. While the McKinsey analysis is a good analysis of inbound calling, dare I say its not a very good analysis of customer interation management. By pro-actively calling customers with approved upgrade offers, or better pricing tariffs, you can make a massive difference to measures of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. By thinking about the type of information a customer wants to be presented with and leaving it up to them whether they want to know more, confirm, buy etc. you can drive a range of other organisational measures other than "average operator time per call". Given that questions surrounding "bill payment" are key to overall profit contribution of the call, why is there not a recommendation to pro-actively call customers that have certain bill detail parameters? If a persons bill "varies by 25% from their last bill, call them, and give them this offer....", not very hard to do, and I for one would welcome such an intervention before I put my telecom bill down on my kitchen table, frown, and surf the net for better deals.

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