Damien Mulley, a popular Irish blogger, had a bad customer service experience. It’s the usual thing, somebody didn’t treat his concerns with respect, and now he is angry, and evangelical. He blogged the entirety of his experience, the outcomes, and how he felt about the whole thing. Then he set up his own moaning site for customer service failures www.iwillnothold.com

For any (remaining)company out there that does not get this, this is not just some “crazy guy” setting up a website. He has readers, collaborators, family, friends. Now they will share the experience, gripe about their own experiences, and probably cause some significant brand damage. Now imagine that Damien was on line right now with a customer service team and “broadcasting the experience” to his network, LIVE! It is not farfetched. Customer service is not a set of metrics, it is an experience at each individuals level. When Paul Greenberg gets bad service, he posts up the entire interaction process online. Tom Raftery does this to a gut wrenching extent, but has become a reliable recorder of experience as a result.

When performing an online check of companies and their reputation for service, all your Adwords will not negate the effect of a well written, and highly evidenced customer experience.

Just to prove it, I googled the search term customer review sites and restricted the results to Ireland. The Result

Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » An Irish Customer Care Portal?

Wow Its like a circular argument, isn’t it?

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

Explore Tags: CIM, service transparency, web2.0

Tim O’Reilly makes an interesting point when he notes that TellMe took a huge leap in voice recognition capability when it launched into directory services. Nothing changed from a technical point of view but they had a larger data set to work from. And there is that term again, DATA. Ditto now with Google Translation services.

So perhaps “Crowdsourcing” and “datasourcing” are now coalescing….

Another way of looking at this is “what is your distribution channel to customer data?”. If you make directory enquiries through TellMe or Google, you will also probably hand on your mobile phone number (hey, so we can text you back the information!), which of course is linked to your account information (on google, or MS), and when the Telco’s go all Adserving friendly (as per Telco 2.0) then your GPS data gets handed over.

So the questions I have for every service provider I can think of is “do you know what data underpins your competitive advantage and what is your data acquisition strategy” For the simple start up company perhaps the question is “what makes your data sets interesting to GYM?(Google, Yahoo, Microsoft); what is your data acquisition strategy, and what is the time value of this data acquisition path?”

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

Explore Tags: CIM, crowdsourcing, datasourcing, directory services

So its official, Young people have no loyalty?
The Wise Marketer reports on the Claritas 2006 market audit’s results, which (broken down by age) showed that 12.6% of the so-called Generation Y (under 30 years old) households said they had no primary banking institution. Other age groups, such as Generation X (age 30-39) came out at 11.4% while Seniors (70+ years old) came out at 11.1%, Baby Boomers (aged 40-59) came out at 10.4%, and Empty-Nesters (aged 60-69) came out at 8.6%. It is interesting to consider this piece of research the day after Vanson Bourne for Irish IT firm CA, found that 60% of Irish people now solely dealt with their bank on-line, and 30% dealt solely with their credit card company on-line. They find it more convienent, and less costly than calling a 1850 number were contributing factors, as was the fact that:

A worryingly low 8 percent of people found getting information from call centres on additional products and services a snap. Meanwhile, 69 percent of people have been asked to call back because the (in this example, telecom providers) provider systems have been slow or have gone down. With more than half of consumers willing to jump ship to telecoms rivals for bad service, companies would do well to keep an eye on the quality of customer service.

I think the on-line environment is a ripe space for customer migration. Once customers can compare and migrate with little or no barriers, you as a company are competing on the quality of your customer data, what you do with it, and how you use it to invite customers into conversations.

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

Explore Tags: CIM, credit card management, financial services

Ken Elefant over at VentureBeat makes some interesting points about credit fraud. Yes, it costs $49.3bn and $6,383 average cost per customer. But most of the “solutions” are based on data analytics and data aggregation.

The solutions they offer are typically client-server based, requiring months or even years of installation and training

. And what are banks doing according to Ken?

The reality is that banks have a hard time telling if the individual in question was a fraudster or simply someone who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay their bills. It takes work to figure it out, with the effort traditionally performed by fraud analysts working the phones to try to solve it. It’s a costly approach that hasn’t scaled well as identity fraud losses have risen in recent years.

As is the way with Blog conversations, one of the comments to that VentureBeat post is very interesting. A guy called Tom Fragala of www.myTrustOn.com quotes a Javelin study on customer attitudes to Fraud, and guess what, the customer sees it as their problem! In my books this means that if companies give the customer the option of adopting a fraud prevention option, they will usually buy into it. With nearly 100% of consumers carrying mobile phones, surely their is a process that can be deployed that could call a customer to ask them to validate a transaction? I don’t think I would be giving the game away if I said that VoiceSage were talking to a number of financial sevice organisations about this very issue.

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

Explore Tags: CIM, credit and collections, credit card management, financial services

For most executives, email marketing is at the top of their list for online initiatives. And God knows, there is nothing wrong with a good email newsletter. What Don Peppers of 1to1 Marketing has a problem with is that “newsletter” does not equate with “relationship”. he quotes extensively from a Forrester Research study on email marketing “The Best and Worst of Email Marketing In 2006,”:

“A lot of emails are still newsletters, with no call to action and no way to interact with what’s been given to me,” says Shar VanBoskirk, senior analyst and author of the report. “And a lot are still brochures — they send a pretty picture, but I have no way to respond with what I think about it or to get more information.”

This kind of language is exactly what VoiceSage likes to hear: “call to action”. How simple it would be to have a click to call function at the end of your short and to the point email alert, where when the person clicks, the call is automatically routed to the right person, because you know who got the email, in what context, and what they probably want to talk about. This kind of thinking probably brings a better focus on why your customer would want to receive the email in the first place (i.e. is someone receiving an email to enhance their relationship with you? do you benefit from receiving this email?)

Forrester studied 63 email marketing campaigns in six verticals — business products and services, consumer goods, financial services, media, retail, and travel. The research found that from start to finish, the emails are still plagued by misdirection and a lack of customer focus. Thirty-three (52 percent) of the subject lines described the email content, but did not hint at the value the user will experience by opening the message. And only 11 programs passed basic usability requirements: easy to scan, had a digestible volume of content, and effectively used bullets and headers to aid navigation. Twenty-nine programs placed calls to action below the fold, and 25 were almost impossible to understand without graphics.

Surprisingly, financial services firms ranked last among the verticals. Typically they are considered leaders in online customer contacts, but VanBoskirk is unimpressed with their email strategies. “Two factors are dragging financial services down. They have been slower to adopt email as a medium, so they haven’t had as many chances to try different things,” she says. “And their emails are very focused on pitching products. [Customers] want their needs met, not just to hear about what you have to sell them.”

Media companies, retailers, and travel were the top three verticals, helped along by calls to action, the ability to transact, good use of text and images in tandem, and good marketing communication. Consumer goods and B2B companies followed, with financial services in the bottom spot.

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

Explore Tags: CIM, email marketing clicktocall financial services

Bruce Hope at Connectedness has an introduction to building social networks and a link to a handbook that helps you get a better understanding of the practicalities of undertaking this activity (download from here)

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

Explore Tags: CIM, Social Computing, voicesage

As reported in the Irish ElectricNews.net NTL have taken to charging customers a “handling fee” if they choose to not pay by direct debit. At a company level one understands that it costs more to bill those people that are not on direct debit, and it costs more to administer their accounts. The question I would have is what are the demographic or psychographic profiles of the customers that are not on direct debit? For instance, if I am a pensioner, with a post office account, and don’t use a bank account, will this look well on the Joe Duffy radio show!

“The paper also says that cable company NTL has defended its decision to impose a surcharge for late payments on customers and forcing them to use direct debit mandates. The company has been criticised by the chairwoman of the National Consumer Agency, Ann Fitzgerald, for deciding to charge customers an extra EUR2 per bill if they do not pay by direct debit. Customers who do not pay their bills on time will be charged an extra EUR7.68. A spokeswoman for UPC Broadband, the parent company of NTL and Chorus, said Chorus was already operating the late payment fee and it was being introduced to NTL to standardise both operations”.

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

Explore Tags: CIM, Credit Management, Late Payment Management, voicesage