Behaviour and Action, Cause and Effect

 Oh Great Shiny Bubble

The New York Times gives a great visualisation of house value declines in the USA. Irish site FinFacts gives a long history of warning signs that went unheeded, and practices that drove this frenzied behaviour. But the question I really have is that even with all this information, and other information besides, would our behaviour and actions change? I mean lets face it lots of people knew we were in a housing bubble but most were still drawn to its shiny bubble surface. I think I need to dig a little into decision making within certain timeframe's and unreasonable weighing up of "perhaps lots of money next year", versus "reasonable money in ten years" (i.e. delayed gratification). Another way of looking at it could be the "problem of the commons" in that by acting in our own short term interest we brought about a collective collapse. Most commentators to date have focused on bad lending practices, but what about our own bad borrowing practices and our attitude to credit?

Data Is The Path To Insight?

I have been thinking that the key capability of a company may be the ability to generat Insight. But now, I am not so sure.(HT: Denis Pombriant)

“The necessary outcome of strategic planning is not analytical insight but resolve” (David Maister)

By this I am sure he means we know that the right things to do are, its just not always that interesting to keep doing them or to get them done. It does remind me of Werner Vogels at Telco2 saying that they knew (Amazon) that they had to focus on scope of catalogue, building visitor traffic, and lowering costs everywhere. Their "platform strategy" had to be a committed strategy, and joined up, and the management had to have the resolve to see it through, even though shareholders were unlikely to understand what they were doing, initially. Perhaps some of this resolve came from the CEO who has invested in some "dogs" in his day, but the learning led them to Platform strategy, and to Kindle, both billion dollar businesses. That and a "relentless focus on being customer centric".

So Why Is Customer Service Still In Trouble?

Well, perhaps its the small things that count. Mashable just posted up their take on a recent pew report that shows we are absolute crap at getting customer service, particularly around Tech support.

- 38% of users with failed technology contacted user support for help.
- 28% of technology users fixed the problem themselves.
- 15% fixed the problem with help from friends or family.
- 15% of tech users were unable to fix their devices.
- 2% found help online.

Consumers’ Attitudes About Various Forms of Tech Support:

- 72% felt confident that they were on the right track to solving the problem.
- 59% felt impatient to solve the problem because they had important uses for the broken technology.
- 48% felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem.
- 40% felt confused by the information that they were getting.

Wow, nearly 60% were so convinced the company wouldn't be able to give them good service, that they just didn't bother to call ! It felt like it was going to need a "big effort to fix", that it was making them feel "impatient", and then probably "discouraged" and angry? I think this may be a case of "interaction friction" before the customer even gets on the phone, or the web.

All This Miracles And We Are Still Miserable?

Eric over at Demand Satisfaction posted this video that just shows, perhaps, how unacceptably jaded we have become about the miracles of technology.

Tweet Tweet ! Your Company Has Flu...

I think I said this a good time ago now, but we are only barely using the Internet to track information that is socially useful. The BBC reports that Google is now helping map the spread of flu by tracking keyword searches.

Chis Barraclaugh, STL Partners at Telco2 last week had a great slide showing how all of Google's recent moves were investments in customer data.

Over at SAS Blog there was a nice back and forth on the strategic use of customer contact. It is so easy to forget that in large companies each section, dept, division wants to send messages, calls, letters to the end customer. These requests have be filtered, rated, and evaluated by the company itself.  Something in the back of my mind tells me that something this overall approach is ripe for some new thinking, like, here for instance. As if to reinforce this point, I saw the original SAS Blog entry because their SAS Magazine Editor is on Twitter, and she tweeted a link to the post.

Now what's with the pig? Well it goes to authenticity and two way value creation. I am a great believer that all customer interactions should be build to reduce the friction within the interaction, and should be seamlessly bound to the business process itself. We are on that journey here at VoiceSage.

Post Telco2

Telco2: Janus or Dear Jesus?

I think Mr. Enck called it well when he pointed out how impressive and pertinent Mr. Vogels presentation was. The clarity of strategic vision, the simplicity of focus, was awesome. What I found intriguing was that each iteration of the platform thinking defined a new element of the fly-wheel, a new virtuous reinforcement mechanism. They brought the merchants (merchant platform), so that "the catalogue" was the biggest on the web, your "go to" destination; they built traffic (Traffic Platform) through a kind of open linking strategy, opening out book references, and giving  incentives traffic of 4-7%revenue share. Most people would stop there, hey we have great customer traffic flow and the best stock available, cool. But no, they saw that they had to be the best price possible too, and this implied that they had to reduce the cost of infrastructure (answer: open out your Fulfillment platform so any merchant can send their product through the amazon warehousing network), and then the webstore platform, the enterprise service platform which is like a managed service for other web retailers (and a Labour platform, a Digital Media Platform, an Infrastructure Platform, and yes, a Telco Platform). As amazing as this journey, this evolution was, three things struck me with laser clarity:

- These guys have complete clarity on their strategic principles and will take big hits to protect them;

- They pay attention to "micro-incentives" and "micro-barriers" to desired behaviours;

- They innovate around things that remain important over the long run, not just "new things".

If I were in the Strategic section of a Telco, I'd be looking to workshop my Two Sided Telco play with these guys in the room. On a personal level I met some old friends, and I think met some new and interesting people that I hope to follow up with.

Hack The World: Health and Telecommunications

Again, the excellent RRW has a piece on how mobile communications is being used in Africa to encourage people to see the Doctor and speak about their health concerns relating to TB and Aids. "Please Call Me" text messages are issued from Doctors to the population to encourage them to engage early; "Text reminders" are used to remind people to take their medication or attend a clinic; the call backs are handled by a virtual call centre of "people like you" that will understand your condition, your life, your emotions; mobile blood testing units are brought to the people so that they don't have to suffer the stigma of having to stand in line. If Telecommunications companies are wondering how context, content, community and communications can be braided together in ways that actually improve the state of the world, well, this is one fine example.

Note To Self: Human Beings Are Not "Self Loading Cargo Units".

Open - Networking

Hard Times For Big Vendors and Little Ones Alike?

In cold times it would seem mobile telecoms are still a Hot item (Tim Bray, Sun Microsystems, at FOWA London). People will give up that glass of wine, but not a $1.50 iPhone Application that gives them real value. And now that iPhone and Google have offline capability you can do a lot of great stuff. It is indeed a great time to build mobile applications, but I would also caution that 1998 was a great time to build a website, and building a website doesn't have a great reputation as a sure fire way to making you rich. Today the New York Times features Sun prominently as a company with big problems, so perhaps Tim's FOWA talk was from the heart. Some of these problems are good old fashioned competitive pressure in core product markets, and others are good old fashioned product development slippages. These are combined with the "slower than anticipated" update of its open source programs and initiatives (BTW: great piece from JP here on why Open Source may be stalling at the large enterprise level).

If you are thinking of building an application, Tim says "build it for yourself, its hard to understand the needs of others", there are others out there a lot like you and they will probably buy it. And watch out for the VC's, they don't understand 2.0, and they don't bring value (mmm, not sure of that one, know plenty of smart VC's). Gosh, this sounds like a sure way to end up on the bread line to me (but you will have your snazzy iPhone to keep you occupied). There is a reason people like "product managers" exist, just saying ye know. Its probably safer to think of Tim's comments as prods to get yourself multi-skilled, and to develop a "Career Portfolio".

The Elephant in the room is that most people are going to want to pay zero upfront to save money and are now being educated to "think like Google". I want it for free, or some version of it for free. I want it super simple. I want it to do one thing really really well. Agreed. One of my take aways from JP's posting is "the Enterprise has been trained to think like Microsoft", and this frames all enterprise adoption arguments in Microsoft's favour. What I particularly found interesting was the focus not on Excel, but on Excel Micros as a significant barrier to adoption of OpenOffice, and that the cascading effects this had on the need to redesign the Macro's, estimate the cost of the same, estimating the cost of failure. At the end of the day, the purchasing dept used the study to beat up Microsoft on price, and buy, uh hum, more Microsoft product.

What Do Tough Times Mean For The Enterprise?

Tim Bray was of the opinion that tough times might mean that companies look more to SaaS and to Open Source solutions. I do like the emphasis on "SaaS" and "cloud based" applications and services, of course I do, that's what we do around here. But the take away for me is the need to seriously look your "customers life right now" (i.e. the real life issues they are facing, the hard choices, the unpalatable trade offs). In my opinion, its easy to say "we are your partner" in good times and ask for some hefty integration and consulting fees to prove it. Lets see how good a problem solver you are now; lets see how flexible and adaptable you are now; lets see how your DNA shines through?. As a provider of SaaS you should now be looking deeply at some strategies for maintaining your value proposition. Tough times for the Enterprise customer means even SaaS entities need to bring a razor sharp focus on time to meaningful ROI.

I think its a great idea that Tim was encouraging developers to not only skill up, but look at legacy skills (Cobal etc), and cross-skilling. Companies can equally do the same thing.Taking charge of your own Identity by building your own personal network, blog, twitter, get into social networks, and social network at events are great personal brand builders. Get known, and get known for something. Now ask yourself, "what is Sun now known For"?

Some Cool New Media Business Models

Have you ever needed to read a children's book from cover to cover before you bought it because let face it, you will be reading it every night for a long long time. Lookybook lets you see the whole book before you buy it. And here's the one we have to buy (Its Not Fair), as we have a new arrival due in March 2009. Music sites like Ineem and LaLa have similar models for music in that they let you play the content, in its entirety, while you remain browsing on the site, no doubt hoping that the longer you hang around the more likely you are to buy a web song for 10c. I think a lot of companies are going to have to look at approaches that enable you to have a complete "experience" and that you may then proceed to commit to buying it, owning it, sharing it or some other upstream action that is predicated on shared value creation. It is a deep delayering of the digital value chain, with the understanding that some parts of the chain can better gather and aggregate data from multiple services and location, and that this will help them outpace offers that are more vertically integrated.

So here's the tie up: people buy experiences.

The enterprise customer is a person like you, and they want a great experience of your service, they want to be able to test and trial it and experience it and not pay for it until they know they like it, that it works. They want reliability, they want security, they want credentials, but these are "hygiene factors". The Enterprise's professionalised buying process will simply not allow them to buy in services that don't "stack up" in the traditional purchasing decision cycle. I personally believe that their will be an iTunes for Applications at the Enterprise level. Click Click Click. Done.

Let's Get (meta) Physical?

Linkedin goes Social: now you can add applications and collaborate with your contact network. This is so boneheaded it beggars belief IMHO. I can see social objects as being useful to Linkedin in that they are social evidence of influence, popularity, or expertise. Thus, your sheer volume of network contacts speaks volumes about your rolodex if you are a sales director; your online presentations show you as an expert marketing person capable of speaking to C-Level executives at conferences; your embedded Google Spreadsheets show a deep understanding of risk and analytics. I have begun to think of Linkedin as a good forum for social validation of a contact (hey, what do you think of John, did he really do such a great job at company x?) and an extendable element into other environments (Everyone on SAP could now have a linkedin directory of both internal and external experts and contacts through a linkedin mashup).

We are the Adobe Reader here, the Recruiters are the Adobe Acrobat. Give the recruiters the heavy tools, just make it 3-click easy for us to use.

(and what's with the Meta-Physical? Linkedin encourages us to only linked with people we actually know, ie. real contacts).