Just a few very cool little gadgets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News Updates etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update on Symbian Release

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