Category Archives: Telco

Developments in The Telecommunications Industry, Research, and Trends.

Customers, Products, and Feedback Systems

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JP Rangaswami (@jobsworth) Former Chief Scientist at BT, and now Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com posted a link via twitter a few weeks back http://bit.ly/c6XaCZ . It was in relation to a little running, personal exercise management application called Runkeeper. You run, it tracks your route and performance, and you can share that with your friends or compete with others.

It plays on a number of themes I am personally interested in:

(1) Personal Data Loops

The Personal life of Data: with relative ease we can now measure our own performance, track our progress, get suggestions as to how we might improve in ways that were impossible prior to the iphone / android mobile experience. This personal data is radically horizontal in some respects such as your location data and your social graph (Facebook) and your availability to others (Google Calendar, Outlook, or Tungle see this ). But now that “the location” is being tracked could another application not offer you the ability to see how your movement through a city centre affects how much money you spend? Retailers have known this for years, it’s called footfall and there are some pretty big decisions made about where to put retail outlets made on the back of it. But could this data about your location be made useful to you? Well I think we’re about to enter an era where you are about to find that out.

(2) The Game Mechanics That Change Behaviour: so you’ve gone for a run and now you share it on Facebook. Why? because by publicly posting (or setting it to automatic posting) you are signalling to yourself that you better do your best because everyone is going to see it. Basically you are taking what was a private activity and making it social so that your private behaviour is changed. Where decisions are to be made public we alter some of our decisions. Sharing also opens up some competitive dynamics in that we want to do better against ourselves, and competing against others creates a strong motivational incentive.

(3) Sensing to Create Data About Our Behaviour: so you’ve heard about the Sleep Cycle App? It’s an iphone application. You put the iphone on your bed and it measures your tossing and turning during the night and its makes a map of your sleep including R.E.M cycles. Pretty useful if you want to find out if you are getting enough sleep or to locate environmental reasons as to why your sleep is being broken. I was speaking to a technical guy and he and his wife both measured their sleep cycles to see “who got the best nights rest”. The one with the best nights rest got the job of driving the kids to school. Maybe that’s a reverse incentive at work there, but it illustrates that data often wants to be social, and people will create competitive dynamics to drive personal or collective goals. As the ‘raw data” about ourselves and our behaviour becomes available it will become used in ways that we probably don’t appreciate at the moment.

(4) Product Centric Data Versus Customer Centric Data

So the Runkeeper guys have a great little application that is not tied to any device, that is inherently social, that is linked to the other great platforms of our day. It has built up a strong community around the application of people that want to connect, compete, share. So they should be terrified of a new application from Nike, Adidas, and other footwear specialists right? Well the big marketing spend by Nike et al actually drove up sales for RunKeeper because it grew the overall market. But in the long term the “family of devices” approach will lock RunKeeper out, right? i.e. Sensors in Shoes, bio sensing wrist strap, etc. that all “just work” because they are from the same family, right? I am reminded of a business case from 20 years ago called the All in One Media Center: it had TV, Video, Radio, all in one. It was cheaper than buying all three separate, saved space, looked great. But people didn’t want an all in one because if anything at all broke down they were without any entertainment system at all. I’d also speculate that the mother might want to bring the radio into the kitchen for company as she completed the after diner clean up (something my own mother did), or the teenager wanted to bring the cassette recorder up to their bedroom to play some music or make a mix tape (something I did). It was a failure in understanding the ‘product in use’, the job the product does for the customer, and the social use of the product. The All In One was Product Centric Thinking.

I am guessing that the “customer lock” of the device based approach of the Apple/ Nike/ Adidas is actually a “design around inter-operability issue”. If working standards were in place any device would connect and share with any other device. As Apple say “we do the integration so you don’t have to”. So as long as this integration stuff is hard to do, or inconvenient to do, pre-integrated offers will still be attractive to some.

What Job Can The Data Do – Can Data be Product Centric ?

So it got me thinking. Are the devices “doing a deep enough job” for the customer to warrant being a “closed system”? There is (to the best of my knowledge) data equivalence between the Nike-Apple closed system and the RunKeeper system. Having the shoe as a closed element just isn’t doing enough “customer work” to justify the lock down. The product isn’t differentiated enough, and the customer experience isn’t inherently enhanced because nothing extra is baked-in. A more customer centred view of data sensing, sharing, and utility may have produced different service directions. Let’s ask a very simple question:

Why Do People Run? What Job Does Running Do ?

I haven’t done the research on this yet, but I am going to speculate that people run for a variety of reasons: decrease weight, decrease health issues, increase energy. I think of these as a desire to ‘take responsibility for our health’. Then there are reasons related to “feeling better”, “feeling healthier”, “feeling connected to ourselves”, which I think of as self identity issues, and ‘taking responsibility for our emotional state’. Motivations relating to feelings of socially located identity, or aspirational identity are probably also in the mix (I am the type of person who runs 5 miles in the morning, high energy, an achiever, who values balance and drives a Prius). I am also going to guess that some people run in order to get out of another environment (work, home) and create some personal space, away from the chatter of others. So running might do a “number of jobs” for me.

If Nike thought about their devices (shoes, bands, watches, clothes) in terms of Added-Health then why doesn’t it sense the weight distributions of your body as you run in different terrains and make assessments for you? You are literally standing in your shoes yet it doesn’t take basis weight measures? Do your shoes help you manage your stride length or adjust your stride for maximum overall goal attainment? What are those shoes doing that intrinsically provides unique personal data that can only be captured in that closed system deployment? And isn’t most of this data probably attainable with an intelligent insole, as opposed to an intelligent shoe? Why didn’t Nike create an insole that would work for any shoe? Because they weren’t really customer centric they were product centric.

Am I running in the morning? Did I get enough sleep for a good run? should I recalibrate my objectives for this run based on my sleep cycle? What other personal data can be collected that helps me make better decisions? What is the life of the customer that can be enhanced with better design, better experience delivery? What is the wider context of my life that these new data streams can help me with?

What Nike did well was to understand that the mechanism of competition could be deployed through a virtual race without destroying the benefits of running alone (you time, reflection time, connection to yourself time). They socially augmented the private experience. What they haven’t done is expand the concept of the product through the concept of “product as service” or “product as end result of a customer collaboration”.

Feedback Loops – Sensing, Data, Behavioural

A lot of this talk about personal data, and data about the physical context of our personal lives, and its social context is about providing the sensing necessary to create the opportunity for feedback loops. Without feedback loops that are close to the ‘event”, timely and accurate, we are not afforded the opportunity to re-steer our course. We are less Agile. Tighter loops are more effective at correcting courses. The problem with behaviour is that sometimes the effect is not obvious, immediate, or certain. If you take up smoking today, you may not feel ill for a whole bunch of years, or ever. And since you’ve never been old before, you have no idea what the affect could look like in the future.

As companies and organisations we should be constantly looking for the opportunity to create feedback loops. Most companies think of this as including website feedback mechanisms, commenting, and official customer surveying. Those to do with on-site navigation and customer journey’s are probably the most top-of-mind.

These are Voice of the Customer (VOC) initiatives and to do it well requires some skill. One of the best I know is Scott Rogers (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/scott-rogers/0/20/31b) most recently head of Strategic Planning at Dave’s Bridal, a major US Retail Chain. In some recent posts  for the Accidental SCRM (@ac_scrm) Scott was making the points that (a) customers value their time at three times their actual hourly pay rate, so you really do need to make it feel that it was worth their while taking the time to feedback; (b) you need to drive the customer experience metrics, not just customer satisfaction metrics; (c) you need to drive insights into why people have certain beliefs, reactions, experiences etc. as only then can you create appropriate sets of actions. When you are at scale, like at a large scale internet retailer, generating an active Voice Of the Customer strategy is a key customer feedback loop, but you most follow it through with serious analytics, capable of working on unstructured data, and then worked on by a a thoughtful analyst.

Just as a person might smoke and not think of the lung cancer, a retailer might offer product on credit to those that can’t pay/ won’t pay, or at risk of not paying. Often a sales person gets their commission calculated on the sale, not on the money collected. In effect there is a missing feedback loop between sales and the credit function. Indeed we have seen the macro effect of this in the mortgage and real estate crises.

Thinking About Feedback Loops Between The Enterprise, The Customer, and the Not- Yet-A-Customer.

The new data streams from personal data, social data, and specific data relating to the customer-enterprise relationship will be key elements in creating these feedback loops but to entice participation in the feedback you have to start start thinking a bit more about exactly how this helps your customers life, and not how much it populates your CRM system with more data to sweat.

You need to think of Architectures of Participation more than Architectures of Perspiration.

Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) could reinvent postal services.

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The US postal service is once again running billions of dollars in deficits. Its total volume continues to decline by billions of pieces each year. The number of employee layoffs increases. The requests for rates increases and reduced services continues. A Newsweek post argues that this decline in the postal service is actually good for the economy.

My colleagues in the UK tell me about the rather unique tradition of regular postal strikes that tend to be timed to cause maximum disruption near holidays. To be fair, it can be argued that the Royal Mail may have turned the corner at least from a financial perspective if not with service improvements. Their total volume continues to decline too. Despite declining volumes, revenues, and technical obsolence postal services remain some of the world’s largest employers.

Despite these negative signs it is understood there are remaining social contexts and regulatory demands for ubiquitous mail services.Yet, that is really the only supporting argument. Many of the  business related reasons for using traditional mail are obviously outdated already. For the majority of us the mail has become a test of our commitment to recycling rather than a useful government service. It is difficult to imagine a true transformation of something now popularly referred to as snail mail.


At the same time, we can look at the Telco industry (once also a government protected monopoly) and ask if it has a hope of evolving into anything more than a dumb pipe. The next question that comes to my mind may seem a bit unusual.

What if Telcos or possibly a major CEBP focused business process outsourcer decided they were going to directly compete for business revenue and functions that traditionally go to the postal service?

For major Telcos and BPOs  the first question is whether the potential market  is large enough. Are there billions rather than millions in potential revenue? The postal service is a perfect example of a two sided market that benefits from winner take all economies. Thus, the revenue numbers attached to even niche processes such as enterprise sent consumer mail  are in the tens of billions of dollars in the US and hundreds of billions globally.

The  only major difference between the business functions provided by the  postal service and CEBP solutions is in terms of the  marketing function.  At least in the US and UK, permission based marketing is the regulated and cultural standard for telco inspired solutions .  A similarly enforced permission based marketing regulation would be the final nail in the coffin of mass mail marketers who rely on gross volume to generate  single digit responses.

This “marketing” difference is not as clear cut in many developing countries that use affinity marketing as a means to subsidise mobile phone adoption and mobile payment transactions.  Interestingly, I wonder if many of these same countries have as strong a history of government sponsored mail services compared to the UK and US.

This current marketing difference is more a problem of creative business models and culture than one of technology. Being able to proactively send a customer a targeted appreciated  marketing message by voice or sms will become more common as consumers and retailers  continue to get comfortable with social media and understand the value of creating opt in permissions for their trusted networks of friends and businesses.  Marketing guru Seth Godin bluntly describes the difference in business models as smart versus dumb.

If one goes through the range of reasons why mail has traditionally been most useful for all industries VoiceSage’s clients have already found many more productive solutions through the use of our CEBP application. In many instances the client uses CEBP solutions to remove the need for postal mail entirely from their processes. In other cases the enterprise uses CEBP solutions to improve the experience of any remaining paper based communications.

Our  UK, Irish, and US based VoiceSage clients rely on CEBP solutions to provide logistics, collections, communications, and customer service  business process improvements every day.  With a global Telco or BPO style strategic partner, new VoiceSage clients in parts of EMEA could immediately tap the marketing power of CEBP.

We have never thought of ourselves as competing with the largest postal services in the world. Maybe we should.

Patrick Murphy

VoiceSage USA

July 12th, 2010

ECOMM 2010, San Francisco recap: CEBP and API Platform discussion continues

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Despite the volcanic eruption that shut down much of Europe last week,  the US version of the biannual ECOMM event was certainly a success.

Although I have been following ECOMM since 2008 and VoiceSage has sponsored the 2009 EU event this was the first time I had the chance to attend.

ECOMM is three full days of presentations done in 12 to 15 minute bites. A couple of keynote speakers may be allowed 20 minutes but even they are subject to the time clock “gong”.  The goal of the event is to be a force in reshaping the world’s telecommunications industry. The first two days of this event were primarily focused on Telco subjects that are current but may still be considered cutting edge by the main stream media.

The third day was dedicated to Augmented Reality which by everyone’s definition is on the bleeding edge of technical innovations. My takeaway from Day 3 was a simple one. There are seriously talented people spending a lot of time and money in AR. Over the next few years, we will see amazing results.

On Day 2, I had the opportunity to present the VoiceSage Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) story in a way that everyone in the room could appreciate. Our  amazingly fast response helping American Airlines deal with their passenger communications needs during the volcanic disruptions across Ireland and the UK showed the power of CEBP applications and Cloud Communications in general.  The previous keynote speakers, including Martin Geddes, had all used the language of CEBP or touched on the topic briefly.  Fortunately, I had the opportunity to drill into CEBP and differentiate VoiceSage as a leader in the space with our focus on moving clients’ business metrics.

Telcos are looking for new ways to replace traditional revenue streams that are going away. CEBP applications clearly open up billion dollar business process optimization market opportunities.  One variation on this theme is for Telcos to open up or buy API platforms that will leverage  their infrastructure to the innovative creations of the world’s developers. In my opinion, the few big winners and many losers have already been decided in the Telco API space.

However, regardless of their size or scale,  firms that view themselves  as developer platforms miss the game changing opportunity to directly understand and impact clients’ business processes in the valuable way that is  available to VoiceSage or other CEBP applications. Replacing billions in old telco landline revenue with millions in developer api revenues is the tradeoff that many Telcos are grudgingly reviewing now. Replacing billions in landline revenue with billions in enterprise class CEBP revenue is a tradeoff that is also  available to Telcos but will appeal to a wider variety of enterprise focused vendors too.

Thanks to ECOMM, this CEBP message is being heard widely and clearly.

Patrick Murphy

VoiceSage USA

April 26th, 2010

Lost and Back and Lost Again….

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And Welcome back.

pig

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).

You’ve been noticed! Musings on customer interaction.