Process: More than "the computer says no"

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

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

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

examples (of micro-processes) might include:

• Customizing an existing sales presentation for a meeting with a new prospect
• Designing the agenda and preparing materials for an internal brainstorming meeting
• Putting together the briefing materials for a quarterly business review meeting
• Analyzing and making sense out of a competitor’s recent pricing announcement

These micro-processes are characterized by:

• A small number of steps
• Ad hoc design created by the knowledge workers responsible for the process
• Loose definitions of the beginning and end of the process
• Loose notions of control, sign-offs, and approvals
• Technology-enabled, if at all, by email and office suite tools.

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

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

Odds and Ends of Week

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

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

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

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

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

CEBP + ME

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

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

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

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

Just a few very cool little gadgets

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.

Nokia OpenSource Symbian ? eh, What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Change Matter

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

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

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

My Data or your Data?

Hatip: Geek and Poke:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

29% of Agent Time Spent Talking to Customers

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

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

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

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

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

Some Observations on Customers and Technology Use

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outstanding Debtor Days

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Take Away:

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

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

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

Dirty Small Bad Things:)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Recently Insolvent Companies

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

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

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

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

"we wanted to maintain good relations with customers"

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

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

Source: www.mybudget360.com

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

 So what's my point?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theme-Synchronicity

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

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

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