I was in a shop with a colleague recently and he picked up a bottle of wine and said “oh that’s a bit on the expensive side’, and put it back down on the shelf. I told him I didn’t know that much about wine, but I knew one bottle and how much it should cost, so I looked for that brand, and that gave me the “price point” for the shop (everything here is 20% more expensive). It’s my personal heuristic.

When I do a check in or check out at a hotel I pay a lot of attention to what is going on because it more or less “signals to me” how the rest of the hotel is likely to be run. For instance last evening, I handed over my credit card when booking in, and as he was taking my credit card booking she told me, with a smile, we’ve upgraded you to superior room. Great I thought. Then I remembered she was the same person I spoke with when I made a late booking for the room two hours earlier. She originally thought I was calling to cancel a room booking, but became jovial and upbeat when I said no, I was calling to book a room, and it would be my first time at the hotel. Obviously the lady at reception was going out of her way to extend a welcome to remember.

It reminded me of being in Brown Thomas buying some expensive cosmetics and skin products the month before. As the assistant was punching the obscene number onto the terminal pad (how apt), she reached under the machine and pulled out a lovely gift pack, beautifully presented, with numinous objects. It seemed to have a lot of stuff, and as we poked through the “free stuff” our attention as deflected from the events at the painful terminal pad.

In both cases, by design or by chance, the free-gift exchange occurred at the most painful moment for the customer; handing over the money. We are already going to be anxious about handing over money, so making me wait to have the act performed upon me, is just going to build, and increase the tension. As consumers we remember the painful moments and the joyful moments, not the hundreds of mundane routine moments. Making the payment moment as easy and painless as possible is important to not creating one of the lows. When you consider that low moments weigh more in cognitive and memory terms, means that waiting to pay, being frustrated with the wait, not having the paperwork in order and at hand, and “looking messy” leaves a disproportionate impact on the overall customer experience, you would think that companies would be super slick. There is nearly always room for improvement.

I think my hotel this morning understood this. When they saw a que of 3 in a row building they immediately opened two other check out desks.  It had the look of a hard wired rule (”never more than 3 people in a que to check out”), but it got me wondering why everybody in the que has to be treated on a first come first served basis. It also got me to thinking about how the hotel might offer you something on the checkout moment, i.e. a copy of the Irish Times for the journey home, or a take away coffee. I think it might work.

Here’s Dan from Predictably Irrational talking about some of these issues but from the theme point of “Sometimes we don’t act rationally when it comes to making decisions around money”.

*(note this post is my personal opinion, not necessarily those of VoiceSage, etc.)

CEBP – How To Put a Number on  A Market Size

An interesting thing happened a few weeks ago. I followed up on a comment made by Melanie Turek from Frost and Sullivan on Twitter, and we exchanged email addresses off line. I was asking her what value are analysts putting on the CEBP market (I needed an external benchmark for a business plan). The stimulating to and fro ended up in a blog post,  which was re-tweeted by some very interesting people. The upshot is:

- Some people don’t think CEBP is a market of its own, but a collection of other assets and capabilities (presence, IVR, SMS, Conferencing, ect)

- Some people see CEBP as a subset of Unified Communications (UC), which still makes it a big market;

- Some people agreed with regards CEBP being disruptive to professional services and Systems Integrator plays (i.e. if you are charging a stack of money for integration, maintenance, and upgrade of CEBP related initiatives, you are dealing with the wrong people).

In the same week Pat Murphy, formerly of Jaduka and Alan Quale, Respected US based Telecoms analyst (and eComm presenter), released a “What is CEBP” report. This report put the CEBP market at circa $3-$4bn by 2012. Outbound messaging, Hosted Outbound Dialling Services; Alerting; etc. These are are all existing “product-meta-tags” that size the early CEBP market at circa $4bn. This gives the early entrants something significant to aim at (note, if you think this is a big number SMS Alerting notifications for the UK enterprise market alone are about $1bn). According to Pat and Alan the early technology pieces are now in place and it’s time for CEBP to “Cross the Chasm”. Patrick tells us the report has been downloaded nearly 3,000 times, indicating a strong interest in the subject. This certainly reflects the welcome we are seeing for the VoiceSage offer in the UK marketplace and beyond.

This week sees a new Opus Research report on “Recombinant Telephony“, (authored by Dan Miller of Ovum, and Thomas Howe, of  Light and Electric) includes all the different types of communications  modes that can be re-mixed, re-presented, and re-packaged for new and interesting use-cases. The report says that recombinant telephony will be a $50bn market in 5 years time. The big slices of this are likely to be Unified Communications (UC), Cloud based infrastructure investments; and Services businesses (System Integrators, BPO’s, and related) with a relatively stagnant “Client Install” (traditional on-premises?) segment as well. The report does not have a specific take on CEBP within that recombinant marketplace. Other reports and conversations might lead one to believe that Unified Communications players believe that CEBP will be a significant driver of their $9bn opportunity. The Telco2 Report “Voice and Messaging 2.0: Innovators Directory 2009“, has some useful definitions and the term “Integrated CEBP Specialist” for VoiceSage which is an interesting perspective, in that like the conversation with Melanie Turek, the “integration is already in the product”.

A recent Telco2 email update from their most recent industry brainstorm in Nov 2009 indicated that over 60% of those in the room believed that the major opportunity for Telco’s moving forward was in enabling business processes. We are seeing similar announcements from others in the information-communications convergence space. CEBP is moving front and centre.

My initial instinct was that if UC isn’t radically redesigned, it wasn’t going to hit that future revenue mark.  Then Cisco came out with a series of announcements : Pulse, and broadening the invite cycle (see Dan Miller’s excellent take on it here ), and the central role of “Social Software” approaches in the new “Open Innovation- Collaboration Nets” paradigm. Yes I used the work paradigm. This, in the same week in which Microsoft announced that their Azure Cloud will allow you to find and download applications in an “iTunes” like manner that is radically simple, is also a huge shift. Make no mistake about it, Microsoft will have Outlook 10 in the cloud, and will have very cool ways to integrate it with their Unified Communications offer. IBM release Smart Analytics Cloud so you can build your own private information analytics cloud. I also happened to be at a presentation at BarCamp Cork on vBlock by Damien Sheridan of Nexus Technologies , and I was struck with how vBlock made massive scaling a doddle for IT managers (more here). These are seismic shifts in the infocoms space.

What will be interesting to see is if the “release of these assets” to the cloud enables people to deliver the benefits they were seeking from “recombinant telephony” and communications services. This may become a matter of standards and integration approaches (i.e. can I integrate “this” with “that” seamlessly, and without dropping context).

So, I think CEBP will be cloud-SaaS based, with the Enterprise end user (be that the individual user, or the IT/Comm Dept), integrating various information and communication services “in that cloud”. Individual components such as “presence” and “conference” will trend downwards in terms of cost. But information, and knowing what to do with it, will trend upwards. And by “freeing up the information flow” many, many new areas will open up for CEBP. The more “loosly coupled – tightly integrated” you can be, the better I think.

Some Issues In Relation to Market Segmentation in CEBP

When you are proposing something the customer or client has no experience of buying before they have no way to evaluate your offer. In consumer settings people with no experience around a decision tend to make poor judgements around risks and exposures involved in that purchase. Mostly they over estimate the risks, and underestimate the benefits or visa versa. In the enterprise setting companies might just straight out “reject” a concept that is “not on the agenda” before formally investigating the offer at all . This is why some companies seem impermeable to innovation. By selling to an existing understood need, where there is a solution in place, you give the customer something to compare against. The competing solution gives you a frame. New products and services need a sponsor, with a budget, a frame, and with the drive to make something happen.

Consumer product companies understand this very well. When the original inventors of Instant Coffee launched their product they aimed their product against Ground Coffee (which you didn’t always have the time to make). It was a convenience product for the busy housewife (as she was the one who shopped, bought, and made the coffee). More recently Nespresso treats coffee production as an integrated system (i.e. you buy the entire easy to use system for producing a high quality coffee, every time, but are locked into using their coffee pods – for quality of coffee reasons. You also join a “club” or “tribe” of coffee lovers). People didn’t mind being locked in to using the pods because it guaranteed quality, ease of use, and “good coffee every time” (consistency). So, those that are experts that will probably still want freshly roasted beans that they grind down at home to make their own gourmet blend; there are the Nespresso “Masstige” segment, a near mass market segment who can get a near gourmet coffee quickly; you can get filter coffee which is pretty good and pretty fast (though not as good as Nespresso or gourmet), and of course Instant, which lacks depth but is often good enough, and is very fast. Now that you have suffered that Marketing Positioning 101 paragraph, what was it all about?

When I hear debates about Communications and Information technology in general I find that the same kind of thinking is behind the most successful companies. You can be a gourmet and grind your own API’s; you can get filtered services through mashup’s; you can get instant solutions through online pre-packaged services. You can also get Nespresso CEBP, iTunes for Enterprise, and Integrated Systems that enable you to do a very good job, at very high quality. And there is a place for all of the above. But no one seems to be putting out any taxonomy as to which approach might suit which customer, and at which stage of the industry evolution. Or indeed which kind of solutions might be best for different parts of the organisation, or at different stages of an organisations development. My take away, is I don’t think the industry has a good “positioning” on the various CEBP segments as of yet.

Why Should A Service Provider Pay Attention to Market Positioning?

The evolution of any market is something you have to think about up front. In straight head to head technical testing and evaluation, VoiceSage has beaten competitors head-on in ways that the customer can easily understand and evaluate (number of right person contacts, successful transfer rates, etc.) . We’re always better in ways the customer can measure in actual numbers. The challenge is to not become “boxed in” to some early category definitions (Oh those guys only do X, Y, Z) because their is more value to be delivered in a broader implementation.

To get a truly great disruptive solution through the gates you need to understand that your early customers aren’t always your future core customers, or that their needs, wants, and behaviours will be the same as later customers or later customers within the same company. Yet CEBP has so many uses across the organisation that the true value of it lies in applying it in as many places and processes as you can find. Again to quote an Industry analyst opinion “The opportunity for CEBP may lie between the existing product definitions”.  What I really like about the Cisco Pulse product is that it “automatically generates context” and understanding these contexts is one of the first stages to understanding organisation flow.

CEBP as A Matching Service

Pity there isn’t a set of “customer-needs-meta-tags”. Or is there? Well what about “Metrics”? Every role in the company usually has metrics attached to them (some soft, some hard). What if you were able to say that your Product-Meta-Tag was aimed at this Customer-Need-Meta-Tag? The VoiceSage Logistics product is aimed at the near elimination of the customer metric “Customer No Shows” (i.e. when a van pulls up to the door the customer is not present, even when a confirmation is in place). The Internal Resources that need to be aligned are the People (driver, call centre agent, customer, person on premises to receive delivery); the Things (object to be delivered, the truck, the drivers mobile device, the tools, the forms), the Process (The confirmation cycle, the co-ordination, the communication loops etc.). In a manner of speaking, the internal resource and communications pattern needs to be “balanced” with the “external needs and context pattern”. A pretty round about way of saying “we need a better way of matching our customer needs with our internal resources” or “our availability and resource flows”. Is this a problem worth solving? Datamonitor/Ovum thinks it is costing about $340bn a year.

Ah so far, this all sounds very like standard sales practice? Define your target, define the customer need, match the product deliverable to the customers measured need. Yes. Thank you. We’re on the same page.

So back to Melanie and the re-Tweets. Nobody is waking up in the morning and saying “What I need is a CEBP solution to address this problem”. Likewise they aren’t saying “What I need is Google wave”. What they do say, is holy cow, I have 300 unread emails, people are texting me to read that document before the meeting, oh the pin number for the conference call? That was in the original email! They are saying is “we can’t just keep adding call centre agents as the volume of our customer interactions scales”.

The current definitions of “the Market” are how incumbents have defined it. Good for them, they’ve educated a customer base about how to buy a product. And if they have “bad value” on the table you should take it away. Breakthrough products need to redefine markets. They need to take away the ‘bad value” and not just give “good value”, but ideally should create new value.

So, Is Social Computing Creating New Value?

One of the core pieces in the new Cisco announcement is that business is social (you may have read that as collaboration, but you would have misread it IMHO). Pulse is about generating and sharing personal context within the business, a bit like Twitter;  presence is gTalk; Enterprise Collaboration Platform is the “Facebook” of the enterprise; Directories are the LinkedIn,  I was thinking about Structural Equivalence and what it would take to build a great collaboration platform using web based, readily available solutions. The missing piece of the flywheel is the data release and capture of enterprise information. For the enterprise user/ sponsor, the security of data, and traceability of access, are key factors. That is why Salesforce.com may actually get some traction for its Social Enterprise play. It has security down to the field from its Force platform. Not to be underestimated in its importance to the Enterprise buyer. So I guess where I am zeroing in on is “Do people believe that enterprise 2.0/ collaboration/ social computing will provide value as an emergent property, due to the self organising, mutable, plastic nature of its capability?”. My guess is no. My guess is that the enterprise will become a demand-pull chain, just like Dell, but with the employee-collaborator accessing tools, resources, and people as they need, to get their job done. But they will do this within a defined colloboration network of teams, groups, and communities enabled by an underlying infrastructure of resources. The concept of Process will coalesce with the concept of flow. Metrics will evolve from hard wired “number of calls/hr” to metrics that underpin behaviour and emotion.  You can’t drive customer loyalty: you can drive the activities and events that drive customer loyalty.

We are only at the very cusp of Social Software development.

And Now, back to your normal programming.

eComm Amsterdam

VoiceSage are Platinum Sponsors of eComm Europe this Oct 28-30 in Amsterdam. We are going there as part of our commitment to bringing the CEBP message to the Telecommunications ecosystem and to hopefully find new and useful ways to make life easier and more productive for everyone. As such we won’t be “plugging our products and services” but speaking about the broader vision for CEBP.

Lee Dryburg the founder of eComm was reflecting on the San Francisco even in March of this year and it occurred to him that you didn’t really need to theme threads and modules. What you needed to do was have consistently high value engaging speakers and then let the eclectic knowledge bases “bang off each other” to create new connections and new conversations.

There are a number of different speakers at the event which might not only bring a spark to the conversation, but bring the kerosene as well:

Michael Jackson, former COO of Skype and currently a partner at Mangrove-VC, will speak about “Investing in Disruption”. As someone who has done it themselves, and who reviews and invests in opportunities, Michael is going to put forward some thoughts on common attributes of successful disrupters. There will follow a panel discussion with top Investment people who have also been entrepreneurs (CEO & President of Rebtel, Hjalamr Winbladh); and another high profile investor with extensive disruption experience (TBA) and also, Mr. Umair Haque who will hopefully discuss why current investor models are mostly broken.

Umair Haque will also bring his “New Capitalism” model to the current Telecommunications incumbents. I don’t know exactly what he will say here but it would be interesting to see what lessons can be learned from the Financial Services value meltdown.

Thomas Howe will speak about how he sees the CEBP market evolving, and he should have some great insights here as he is an advisor to the Telco2 guys, and has worked with nearly all the parties in the relevant ecosystem. The Title alone is intriguing.

Graham Brierton, VocieSage CTO will speak about “Edge as Value/ Value as Edge” where he will explore how there is a universe of “dark data” that could be repurposed to open up flows, and create new value. This will tie in to some of Umair’s research on Creating New Value, not just shifting old value along the value chain.

eComm is born out of a community and is looking to develop along those community values.  To get the best deals on flights and hotels etc. I would advise you to start booking now. The event itself is relatively inexpensive as far as these things go. Have a look at the full list of speakers. I think its pretty impressive.

During the course of my foray’s into the world of social media, I have developed an interest in Social CRM (#scrm on Twitter) and a thought has occurred to me: what if everyone didn’t actually want to be social with you?

Let me explain. There are certain people and certain times when you “just want the job done”. You don’t want your bank to reach out to you and ask you how you are feeling today because you seem to have eaten a lot of chocolate; yet you might want them to let you know that a transaction has been delivered into a foreign contractors account, and that the contractor has been notified by SMS.

As when email is free the true costs of social media may be buried in the fact that they consume time and there does not seem to be any clear “value exchange” in terms of this investment of time. The metaphor might be that although we all need the filtering that FriendFeed provided, very few of us would go to the bother of actually setting those filers up. Facebook enables you to set up “Friend Groups” and filter the stream of your contacts. Filters that are “pushed” also tend not to work too well either. Google Reader “knows” what I spend my time reading and presents a list of “interesting or frequently read” RSS feeds on my home screen. I never use it. I always go to my Folders.

The problem is that I have not been allowed or helped to build a filtering process that is meaningful to me.

So “What is the job of CRM”?. At base, what “work does it do for the customer”? IMHO it helps the company “group” the customers / users into “like groups” according to criteria correlated with different facets (Buying behaviour/ Psychological profile/ etc) and then “matches these groups” to the organisational assets (people+processes+ objects+data) that can best deliver to those needs. So “the work” of the CRM is to “match” the “external customer pattern” with the “internal resources pattern”. Social CRM adds another facet to these matchings by bringing more data about “who you are”, “who you know”, “what you know about what you know” which is also called “meta data” about your relationships”. This grouping then gets down to the layer of 121 relationships.

But what does it help the customer do? and I don’t mean in some kind of lame “you qualify for a phone upgrade kind of way”. How does your current version of CRM help the customer live their life?

Now with all this meta-data floating about, the question becomes “how do I as a customer-person-interactor” build filters for all the modes of interaction, including my social networks at work and at play, that are meaningful and productive to me”? If someone calls me and they are a second order connection on linkedin, surely that has to be treated as more important than someone with no connection to me?. If I have an appointment this week with someone related to this second order connection, the meeting and this call request may be related. It makes sense right? Yet I would bet you that all but the very best companies you know, would have no way of ever making such connections from the customer perspective, would they?

So the final question I have is “How would approaches to social enterprise actually make another persons life easier to live, more enjoyable, in ways that would not be possible without this relationship?”

This isn’t the end of the topic discussion by the way, I want to use this space to think aloud about it. I have some ideas and Twitter stream is proving to be an excellent source of leads in this regard. Hatips in the next few posts !

This is a test to see if I can update from MSFT Live Writer.

Explore Tags: test

And Welcome back.

The New, New Thing & The Old, Old Problem.

Werner, Amazon CIO, said an interesting thing at the last Telco2 in London: "we only look for old problems, and innovate to solve them". Getting your latest newest thing to integrate with the slightly older newer thing, isn’t going to deliver you any meaningful innovation. JP has an interesting point to make on one of his recent post on Confused of Calcutta: "The customer is the scarce resource". JP goes into an examination of peoples response to companies that create "artificial barriers" that create "artificial scarcity". Citing a study that indicates that those pirating games do so largely because the "free route" has less "friction to adoption" (i.e. less passwords, less pin numbers, less reconfirms, less etc. etc.), means that it is just easier to go free (if still, illegal). In a way these ties in with something Norman Lewis of Telco2 was saying; his kids made an estimate as to how much the artist themselves would make from any particular delivery channel, and chose the route that compensated them the most. I think both points are related: People Like Fair.

What stinks of "not fair"? Ummm, banning Google Voice from Apple for one. Me not being able to get my LastFm on my iphone (both of which I pay for by the way). If you ask a kid, they can mostly tell you what the definition of Not Fair is, and here’s another thing: in psychological experiments children will reject an unfair deal even if it means getting nothing at the end of the day. The child would rather not have anything, than have an unfair deal. And this kind of Fair Deal imperative seems to be in all cultures, it is embedded in our human design.

So when I start thinking about Innovation, and Products, and Services, "what’s fair" is not a bad place to start. What’s fair will have an audience. What’s fair gets a market. So perhaps the "Old Problem" is "How do we create and deliver a business model that is more fair than the solutions we see around us?".

And Speaking of Fair: VoiceSage

The people at Telco2 are lining up more sessions to progress the ideas of the two sided business model for Telcos. They are also releasing a report on Beyond Voice and Messaging which goes into some detail as to how CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes) can deliver significant business value. I am delighted to say that one of VoiceSage’s customers is the focus of one of the 8 detailed case studies on the use of CEBP and the customer in question has gone from strength to strength as they continue to use the VoiceSage service and business approach to enable process after process.

There are many other companies now starting to say that Unified Communications is really just a bunch of CEBP’s tied together. I’ve spoken directly to a senior analyst at a top firm about this, and we are of one opinion on that particular "marketing approach".

Real thought leaders are asked to speak at places like eComm uh hum …. and we use these forums not to speak about what we do, but what can be done. I am particularly thrilled that we will be on just before The Umair (Umair Haque) of the most consistently thought provoking, passionate, and genuinely "Disruptive" thinkers out there.

The Good, The Bad, and Just Being Able to Breath

I found this piece on an IBM Forum and thought it worth sharing. It basically says that many CFO’s, in even the largest companies, need to have a look at what is tying up cash. Incorrect billing information, incorrect buying policy, or poor compliance with already agreed "blanket purchasing deals" result in millions going uncollected. In the IBM example it was $250m, for one company. GULP.  Not giving credit where credit is not due; not allowing your late payments to age and turn into bad debt; not being rigorous about removing all points of payment friction, will cost you a fortune.

(Disclosure: I am an the Advisory Board to eComm).

A brief hiatus dear reader(s). Just putting together a new blog structure. Meanwhile, why not jump over to @paulsweeney to follow my inane updates.

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

I have been following with interest Irish company Dial2Do and I thought I’d extend the invitation to Sean O’Sullivan to tell us what they do, and why it might be important.

1) For those that don’t know what Dial2Do do (sic) can you give us a brief overview?

Dial2Do is a phone service that’s designed to help you get things done, hands-free. It’s a regular phone number that you call, and you speak to get stuff done. So you say “text” to send a text message, say “email” to send an email, and so on. It doesn’t require you to download or install anything on your phone – it’s just a local number that you dial with any regular phone (fixed or mobile). We have about 50 things you can do – from texts, emails (both listen and send), twitter, reminders, and so on. We’ve put quite a bit of work in to stitch the popular “web” services in to Dial2Do, so you can use Google Calendar, or Gmail, or RememberTheMilk, or a range of other popular web tools and services, all by dialling a number and speaking.

(2) You guys seem to connect to a lot of Social Media services such as Twitter. What kind of thinking lies behind this focus?

There are a few reasons for this. One is that we’re trying to “add voice” to the services that people already use. So if they use Gmail, well let’s try and let people listen to their Gmail, and send their Gmail emails by speaking. Same thing with twitter, and with other services like Evernote (for saving things you want to remember) or RememberTheMilk (to do lists) and so on. Really our goal is to “add voice” in as simple and intuitive a way as possible for services people already use and love.

Another reason is that we have a partner-driven approach to building our business. So our business goal is not really to get people coming to dial2do.com and using the service – it’s to enable partners with millions of users to add voice to their service using the Dial2Do platform. The Social Media services are some of the key partners for us here, and they’re very interested in new ways for their existing users to stay connected and engaged with their services. Dial2Do can help them do that.

And lastly – many of these social media services are viral. When an update goes to twitter via Dial2Do, you’ll notice it says “…from Dial2Do” at the end of the update. This helps promote the service among other twitter users, who then try it out, and in turn expose it to their followers on twitter. Email, texting, twitter and many other social media services are great for building awareness for Dial2Do.

(3) Have you learned any lessons about developing for a “social phone” that are any different than other 2.0 services?

I’m afraid so When you’re developing a “purely web” service, everything is about the web site itself, and making that web experience the best it can be for users. And when you “open” your site, it’s open, world-wide, the instant you push the button. It’s inherently global.

With services that work from the phone, even ones like Dial2Do that don’t require anything to be installed on the phone, things get more interesting. For example: we’re open in 24 countries (meaning, we have local access numbers for calling Dial2Do in 24 countries) – it turns out that not all networks pass caller ID through to Dial2Do in the same way, so the system needs to be aware of the vagaries of how caller id might be managed in different places. Or take text messaging: it’s a little tricky to reliably deliver a text message (and to ensure it has been delivered) in all the countries in which Dial2Do operates.

As a result, we’ve tried to put a lot of thought in to making the experience via the phone as consistent and usable as possible, in every country where we have a presence.

I think the other big think with respect to the “social phone” is how to successfully merge your phone contacts with your online contacts (from social networks, or Gmail, or Outlook). No one has really cracked this yet, and whoever does will be on to something big.

(4) In one of your recent blog entries you say that remindering is a popular application on Dial2Do. Are there particular use cases that are driving this (birthdays, just regular to-do’s etc.).

That’s right – reminders are really popular. I think there are two reasons.

One of the reasons is simplicity: it’s one of the simplest services to use – just call the number, say “reminder” and then say your piece. People find it’s very habit-forming – every time they think “oh – must remember such and such” they hit the Dial2Do number and do a quick reminder. It’s easy and you’re done in 20-30 seconds.

I think the second reason is that we’ve had a focus on the driver. One of our things has been to position the Dial2Do services as a great set of services to use while driving, if you have a Bluetooth headset or a hands-free carkit. And it turns out that people do quite a bit of, well, thinking, while they drive. On the way to work they think about their day ahead, and as they process what’s in store, they start triggering little reminders – “must tell Ted about this” or “better not forget to mail that”. I guess intuitively we all know that, but we see it in action with how some drivers use Dial2Do. During their morning commute, they create reminders, send texts, add things to their calendars and fire off emails – all en route to the office!

(5) Given the wealth of Interconnecting API’s Dial2Do what kind of role do you see for API’s in your companies future?

Well there’s two parts to answering that. One is, we’re obviously big consumers of APIs from other services. So for a start, we’re trying to be good citizens in terms of using emerging standards like OAuth and the like, and offering people additional protection for their Dial2Do accounts (like the optional PIN protection we added last week).

Dial2Do of course, is really a value-add voice platform, to enable other players to “add voice” to their own services. And so, we’re working on our own API which we’ll make available in a future release. Today we work with one or two key partners to trial the API and ensure we strike the right balance between simplicity and functionality, as befits a service like Dial2Do.

(6) How are you going to deal with the body blow loss that Leinster will suffer at the hands of Muster?

I’m in good shape for that game, as both my parents hail from Cork city centre. So it’s clear which team I’ll be supporting on the day I’ve lived in Dublin most of my life, but the Cork roots go deep. On a serious note, it should be a fantastic occasion, and in fairness to Leinster, the tag of underdog will suit them to the ground – I’d expect a ferocious battle with both teams at full tilt before a packed Croke Park. Can’t wait!

Explore Tags: Dial2Do

The Harvard Business Review has friendly matrix that tells us that all retail buying is now up for re-evaluation as consumers change their mindsets. Marketing departments have to adjust to the new realities with some "old fashioned" thinking:

- Support your brand and brand values, it’s "good investment" spend because in the long run, brand value is a huge profit generator for companies;

- Prune products and brands that were ailing in the first place or are unsuitable for current economic conditions. Also prune back to "core products" and abandon weak product line extensions;

- Maintain brand positioning; don’t move down to value category just to fill short term revenue objectives, you will alienate your core customer base, and leave yourself poorly positioned for the upturn when it comes;

In deciding which marketing tactics to employ, it’s critical to track how customers are reassessing priorities, reallocating budgets, switching among brands and product categories, and redefining value. It’s therefore essential to continue investing in market research

The responses to recession also include the introduction of lower priced brands; cash incentives, credit plans, etc. etc. I found that other interesting points buried in here were:

                 REMOVE FRICTION FROM ADOPTION

            BUILD TRUST IN YOUR BRAND

            BRANDS ARE BUILT ON EXPERIENCES

You don’t need to blanket reduce costs by 20%. You need to target cost reduction at the right products, in the right segments in response to shifting customer psychology and the realities of your product category.

Consumer confidence is currently shattered by fear. As a company some of the ways you can begin to think about the challenge this sets is to think about how your customer contact strategy needs to be amended and augmented to build trust in your brand. These shifts can be subtle (i.e. Agent Scripts) or fairly dramatic (focusing on emotional responses not agent minutes as a critical metric). I think that the companies that make the very special effort to treat customers well, and to deliver exceptional experiences, will be the ones that build deep seated trust. Cutting back on customer service will do the opposite.

Taxonomy of Web Business Models: What I like about the wheel below is that someone thought it would be neat to lay it out in a non-tabular format. Having created a standard table, this new view gives us clearer view on what the popular models are. Imagine if you cross tabulated with actual "likelihood of success" measures available elsewhere.

Incentives To Cheat: scale, probability of detection, group membership, and importantly (for me) signaling to ones sense of self, and sense of group. If everyone in group keeps the rules, I won’t break them: the further we move from the object itself (i.e. money) and more towards its abstract (derivatives), the more likely we are to cheat, or perhaps act irresponsibly. I like how these ideas could also be related to how we agree to actions, and future actions, in terms of paying bills, keeping appointments, and other social routines.

Retail Therapy: Reinvention. The SAS blog has an interesting piece on large scale retailing and how the downturn is affecting it. Yes there is a need to reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, with fewer available resources and with no capital expenditure, but there is also a need to realise that the actual consumer is changing from a badge wearing object seeker, to a "social customer" that will need to be engaged through social networks, and perhaps with definitions of product/ service that may be significantly different than those we employ today.

Concluding Thought: Wouldn’t it be great to see how new web2.0 business models might be applied to "traditional retail" organisations, and informed by areas such as social psychology & behavioural economics?