Its only a matter of time....(multiple issues)

Well some people must be reading this blog because we've had a number of enquiries about enabling web2.0, voice 2.0, and related services. Thanks for getting in touch and there are some interesting projects coming forward. We are also about to make a number of announcements about client wins with our enterprise offerings so stay tuned. We will also get to talk a little about the results our clients have been achieving through the service, and that will be good too.

Now some other notes:

(1) Mashups have begun in earnest, and I've liked to just keep an eye on one sector in particular and that's real estate. It ticks a number of boxes for me in terms of people cruise the internet looking at pricing of houses in their area, they compare other areas, and its fairly high involvment as a decision type. Maps has proved to be a very valuable baseline asset; now if you can get others to overlay their data assets you begin to get some serious analytical capabilities. For example see www.nestoria.co.uk which has built up a huge amount of interest through this kind of strategy. Now take something like a map of reported crime figures and overlay this data http://www.mibazaar.com/unsafecities/ overlay data relating to the rate of sickness in an area; and you begin to see that the next range of mashup services could very well be mashed-analyics. Why is this link to unsafecities interesting to me? well the video it chose to link to for it's number one ranked unsafe city, was a user generated review of a boating tourism attraction in the city. The review was largely possitive, but that will change with better faceted search. User reviews, and user commenting are powerfull because they are often returned first in search, and browsers trust reviews more than companies, and they trust reviews from friends more than all the rest. And by putting all of the above together, you can see why I am so interested in Nestoria and Facebook: (still my absolute favourite app is Plazes.com app on facebook: stunning). (2) No, we are not overcome with fb hysteria, but we do think that fb offers some genuine opportunities to develop and test applications ideas that may have broader applications. In short, its a great place to innovate. We do have a facebook application in alpha, and we are going to release an upgrade sometime next week. We are just fixing the sign up process, and some look and feel issues, so thanks to everyone for their feedback. (3) Looks like we are going to go to the FOWA London, so if anyone is planning on going let us know and we might meet up and have some conversations around the event. Looks like an interesting event. (4) Finally, the very best of luck to Pat Phelan, Sean O'Mahoney and the cubic telecom crew at Techcrunch40. They are in amoung the big boys of the Internet world and my guess is they will walk away the lions share of the news coverage.

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

Social-Texting/ PC - Mobile

From eMarketer: "It may be far from a mainstream activity as yet, but according to Telephia, 4% of UK mobile users have already uploaded content created on their mobile phones to social networking sites, video- and picture-sharing sites, blogs and personal Web pages". How often have you been in a store, or in your car, and wanted to take a picture on your mobile phone and upload it to your "things that stupid people do" zone, the one you share with your colleagues and friends. In Ireland, someone took a picture of the guy that had come to install the broadband, but who instead, decided to take a little kip on the couch. De facto we are in a surveillance society, and we, the crowd, are Big Brother. Services such as Twitter, and Swarm-it.com are truly set to benefit from this mobile-pc-mobile communications. But with in-video tagging capabilities now coming on line from multiple vendors surely its only a matter of time before such interaction sets find their business application?

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

Mobile Marketing Trends

Interesting report from eMarketer on mobile promotions and advertising. A survey of 50 leading brands in Europe by Vanson Bourne found that the top three categories for tactical responses that brands look to drive through mobile marketing included requests for more information, making a purchase or booking, and discovering new attributes about a brand. "Brands, agencies and carriers will need to cooperate in deeper, richer and more complicated and interrelated ways or risk losing out on the world's most prevalent interactive platform," says Mr. du Pre Gauntt. All players in the mobile space must be prepared for change — and they must get over the perception that mobile is a "premium" communications or media channel. This must be a massive opportunity for companies that develop a genuine understanding of when, and in what contexts, customers want to be communicated with, and by whom.

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

NextAlarm: Rise of The Machines!

Another year, another advance in the world of customer and interactions. Alex Saunders reports that NextAlarm have announced that they have the next generation home alarm system. We said before that we believe that device-activated alerting will be important, well NextAlarm send you a notice (phone) as to the status of your alarm, and whether or not your alarm is in working order. So far, so much as you would expect. The "killer sales idea" for NextAlarm is that as people move from Plain Old Telephone Service (or POTS) to pure VoIP services such as Vonage, they lose a lot of the home based services they take for granted (i.e. your alarm system that operates on POTS!). But what really gets me, is that their CEO seems to get that "its not about the alarm stupid, but the exception reporting around the true status of the device".... "Loosely speaking, Broadband Alarm Monitoring ties in with “Web 2.0″ alarm monitoring. What the hell does that mean? It means we’re aggressive in pursuing standards like RSS, REST-based web services, and other means of allowing customers to stitch together the fabric of their alarm service into other applications, portals, etc. For example, we have over 1,000 customers using My Yahoo (which in turn uses RSS) to track their alarm history, never needing to log in to the NextAlarm portal at all (at least not for daily use)". For me, this is a very quite but significant change in the ecosystem. What next, your car status?

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

Friends Will Be Friends, Connectedness

Bruce Hope at Connectedness has an introduction to building social networks and a link to a handbook that helps you get a better understanding of the practicalities of undertaking this activity (download from here)

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

NTL: Atomised Payments?

As reported in the Irish ElectricNews.net NTL have taken to charging customers a "handling fee" if they choose to not pay by direct debit. At a company level one understands that it costs more to bill those people that are not on direct debit, and it costs more to administer their accounts. The question I would have is what are the demographic or psychographic profiles of the customers that are not on direct debit? For instance, if I am a pensioner, with a post office account, and don't use a bank account, will this look well on the Joe Duffy radio show! "The paper also says that cable company NTL has defended its decision to impose a surcharge for late payments on customers and forcing them to use direct debit mandates. The company has been criticised by the chairwoman of the National Consumer Agency, Ann Fitzgerald, for deciding to charge customers an extra EUR2 per bill if they do not pay by direct debit. Customers who do not pay their bills on time will be charged an extra EUR7.68. A spokeswoman for UPC Broadband, the parent company of NTL and Chorus, said Chorus was already operating the late payment fee and it was being introduced to NTL to standardise both operations".

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

Changing Service Providers Is Like Being On A Blind Date....

What happens when you are switching to a new service and the guys don't turn up when you expected them to? Well, you are one unhappy little puppy. James Enck is a pretty well informed telecommunications consultant and when his new service provider didn't turn up when they said they would, he just could not, could not, understand why he wasn't fore warned. I think in the case James is referring to their was a genuine Technology SNAFU and where your data is corrupted their is very little you can do "instantly". In speaking with one client such as the one James mentions in his post, VoiceSage was told that sending out SMS/Text reminders for appointment scheduling and appointment confirmations, actually drove inbound traffic volumes to the customer care center, as customers felt that had to personally "take an action" if the they were to truly feel comfortable withe the confirmation process. This isn't the first time VoiceSage have found that in some situations(types of information) customers are not comfortable with text. In Financial services for instance some customers feel that "updates" via SMS are "spewed from some machine in the basement that knows my account details....". Again, we emphasize that there is no substitute for a pilot when rolling out any new service.

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

Your Customer Service As A Predictive Market?

Courtesy of Read/WriteWeb a number of high profile companies ran experiments to see how they could get better decision making by using the principles of "internal predictive markets". In this way, decisions get made under "market forces" and not hierarchy, or the manual, or just plain old this is how we don things around here: This is what they found. 1. Prediction Markets are a great mechanism to extract knowledge already present within the organization and to make better predictions 2. These markets highlight both the collective wisdom which no one person knows individually, and common knowledge which no one is willing to talk about openly 3. They work properly only when they have an adequate number of knowledgeable participants who work individually 4. Participants must have reasonable incentives (financial or social) to make their efforts worthwhile 5. If the group is large enough, the ratio of experts vs amateurs does not have much impact; often, the real experts are unexpected 6. The results of a Prediction Market are probabilities; they must be confirmed through other, external, means Written by Nitin Karandikar from The Software Abstractions Blog.

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

Passive Purchasing: Are You For Sale?

From the world of Media Economics comes a very interesting concept: "When is something for sale?" Perhaps it's not when you decide to sell, perhaps its when the market places a certain value on your asset and you feel that you have to now consider this option? Over at Virtual Ecomomics a good example being looked at is the housing market. Basically, can there be a mechanism by which you don't say your house is for sale, but that you are "persistently open to offers" or perhaps "valuations". By extending the concept into Web 2.0, and Semantic Web type reasoning, if an extended network of individuals put a value on an asset, and you own this asset, this might "trigger" your interest in initiating a sales process. Surely this represents a massive "information aggregation and arbitrage opportunity" for someone who understands the power of social networks. This kind of thinking, coupled with ideas of social search, and persistent search, may yet have legs. Given how much money is involved in each property transaction, maybe mortgages, and UK and Ireland real estate agents will be the first to pursue it? (www.zillow.com). On this blog we have spoken before about how VoiceSage see a whole range of triggers that could be initiated from the web, appliances and devices, it might be fun to post a few ideas before Christmas on this theme.

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

Attention Defecit Disoder

Interruptions, and interruption management are going to be key in the new attention, and intention economies. Colleagues, friends, family are all vying for attention time, and we, collectively need to get things done, and agreed, in "intention-time". Creating Passionate Users are making some fun of a service called Twitter, that enables people to send simultaneous sms messages to people on a list. Somebody pointed out that this was a bit like micro-blogging (hey, why upload this stuff, when I can just Twitter). There are a few services like this including www.swarm-it.com. I was following a conversation over at www.bubblegeneration.com on the future of social networks like Linked-in, and the key issues seems to be "make your service messy at the edges so that people can invent their own uses for the service". It would seem that people believe that Twitter is so easy to see going big, because it allows for this customer based innovation. Question remains: if its the customer's time, it will be the customer to determine how and when they want to interact with you. As a service provider, its your job to figure out what the "intention-interactions" are, and what the subsequent "attention interactions" have to be. My two pence.

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