Every manager likes productivity gains, don’t they. That’s why multi-tasking is almost a job requirement these days. But does multi-tasking lead to increased productivity?
Alec Saunders reports on recent reports that when a knowledge worker is interrupted by an email or call, it can take as long as 15 minutes for them to get back into the work they were doing. It was with interest that I saw Sam Seti of Vecosys cover the evolution of RSS feeds being turned into voice feeds. With this new service from HearMeAnyWhere the content provider gets a phone number and subscribers ring that number to get the feed as Text To Voice. Another company KnowNow has launched itself into the big time RSS-In-The-Enterprise space, landing over $12m in funding. KnowNow seem to be positioned as “information flow through RSS control” but that you can control that flow through subscribing to the flow (think of it as persistent search within the enterprise). The “push” element of KnowHow’s Enterprise RSS should be of interest to anyone that is looking to move to the next level in their outbound email campaigns. As employees are “subscribing” to feeds with similar “tag clouds”, it might also be possible to uncover previously submerged social networks within the company, and between the company and its ecosystem of suppliers, partners and customers.

What all this is crying out for is some measure of “Return on Attention”. Call centres and customer service managers have known for years that they need the right information in front of the agent to close out a customer query within the first call. In this instance, Return on Attention would be measured as the return on the systems and processes that you have installed to enable your agents to close out more calls within the first interaction. It might be worth while checking out Teqlo to see how their new RSS feed management modules might simulate a KnowNow functionality, and then you could trial and pilot how RSS feeds could be best sculpted to your real needs.

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

Explore Tags: attention economy, enterprise 2.0, knownow, teqlo

Gilman Louie of Aslop Louie Partners in a presentation on The Venture Capital Approach to Finding and Driving Innovation points out the the number one asset a VC manages is their time. It’s a brilliant insight in that a key input to the process is dealflow, and quality of dealflow. How you distribute your attention thus underpins your success. As if to underpin the point Seth Levine of VC Adventure recently turned his Dash device to silent and found that he felt much, much better, and probably got more work done. In a way, we have allowed the “default settings” of our devices and services to define how the world will interact with us. People are going to demand more control over their interactions. You can’t just drop mail on their carpet and expect them to act.

There is also a lot of emerging talk on tracking “RSS streams” as they are “attention streams” and thus, one can tell what you are interested in, and maybe even what the “intention” of your browsing is about. Someone somewhere probably calls it “attention stream mapping”. From a customer service perspective this might not be a bad idea. If you were a financial institution, and your customers allowed you to see their RSS feeds, a la Grazr, you might see that their “intention” is to discover what is going to happen with Mortgage rates. Being in a position to make an “interruption” that was of value to that customer would thus be high impact. Waking up in Ireland this morning we are now told to expect up to 7 separate interest rate hikes on our mortgages. There are going to be a lot of very nervous people out there this month, many of them will start actively looking to assess and compare the value of their financial products.

From the VoiceSage perspective I guess we are interested in when people need or want to be reminded of things and actions they need to take. If people simply “forget to pay” their bills, managing that interruption effectively, and with true value add, could be a really important competence. If I was a mortgage provider I would start pro-actively contacting my “at risk” customers, and offer to advise them on how to re-organize and handle their payment schedules in order to manage my own bad debt exposures.

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

Explore Tags: attention economy, gilman louie, seth levine, vc adventure

I saw that one of my contacts was “out” on Google IM. I went to leave a message so that they could pick it up whenever they logged on. In red, over the bottom pane where you write, Google message said “X is busy, you may be interrupting”. The use of language is interesting here, and perhaps indicate that Google are listening to the problems of the Always On culture. This evening on TodayFM there was a long piece on various forms of nervous disorder based around the idea of compulsively checking your email, and the norms of messaging in terms of how long you can leave it before you have to reply to an email. I think this might be the year that terms such as “attention”, “interruption”, and “intention” hit the mainstream.

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

Explore Tags: attention economy, google IM, intention economy

As if to demonstrate the “power of interruptions”….uber cool.

hat tip to Alec Saunders.

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

Explore Tags: attention economy, humour, interuption

Interruptions, and interruption management are going to be key in the new attention, and intention economies. Colleagues, friends, family are all vying for attention time, and we, collectively need to get things done, and agreed, in “intention-time”. Creating Passionate Users are making some fun of a service called Twitter, that enables people to send simultaneous sms messages to people on a list. Somebody pointed out that this was a bit like micro-blogging (hey, why upload this stuff, when I can just Twitter). There are a few services like this including www.swarm-it.com.

I was following a conversation over at www.bubblegeneration.com on the future of social networks like Linked-in, and the key issues seems to be “make your service messy at the edges so that people can invent their own uses for the service”.

It would seem that people believe that Twitter is so easy to see going big, because it allows for this customer based innovation.

Question remains: if its the customer’s time, it will be the customer to determine how and when they want to interact with you. As a service provider, its your job to figure out what the “intention-interactions” are, and what the subsequent “attention interactions” have to be.

My two pence.

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

Explore Tags: attention economy, Customer Interaction Report, intention economy, swarm-it, twitter, voicesage