Tag Archives: customer service mashup

Its only a matter of time….(multiple issues)

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Well some people must be reading this blog because we’ve had a number of enquiries about enabling web2.0, voice 2.0, and related services. Thanks for getting in touch and there are some interesting projects coming forward. We are also about to make a number of announcements about client wins with our enterprise offerings so stay tuned. We will also get to talk a little about the results our clients have been achieving through the service, and that will be good too.

Now some other notes:

(1) Mashups have begun in earnest, and I’ve liked to just keep an eye on one sector in particular and that’s real estate. It ticks a number of boxes for me in terms of people cruise the internet looking at pricing of houses in their area, they compare other areas, and its fairly high involvment as a decision type. Maps has proved to be a very valuable baseline asset; now if you can get others to overlay their data assets you begin to get some serious analytical capabilities. For example see www.nestoria.co.uk which has built up a huge amount of interest through this kind of strategy. Now take something like a map of reported crime figures and overlay this data http://www.mibazaar.com/unsafecities/ overlay data relating to the rate of sickness in an area; and you begin to see that the next range of mashup services could very well be mashed-analyics.

Why is this link to unsafecities interesting to me? well the video it chose to link to for it’s number one ranked unsafe city, was a user generated review of a boating tourism attraction in the city. The review was largely possitive, but that will change with better faceted search. User reviews, and user commenting are powerfull because they are often returned first in search, and browsers trust reviews more than companies, and they trust reviews from friends more than all the rest.

And by putting all of the above together, you can see why I am so interested in Nestoria and Facebook: (still my absolute favourite app is Plazes.com app on facebook: stunning).

(2) No, we are not overcome with fb hysteria, but we do think that fb offers some genuine opportunities to develop and test applications ideas that may have broader applications. In short, its a great place to innovate. We do have a facebook application in alpha, and we are going to release an upgrade sometime next week. We are just fixing the sign up process, and some look and feel issues, so thanks to everyone for their feedback.

(3) Looks like we are going to go to the FOWA London, so if anyone is planning on going let us know and we might meet up and have some conversations around the event. Looks like an interesting event.

(4) Finally, the very best of luck to Pat Phelan, Sean O’Mahoney and the cubic telecom crew at Techcrunch40. They are in amoung the big boys of the Internet world and my guess is they will walk away the lions share of the news coverage.

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You’ve been noticed! Musings on customer interaction.

Data Will Present Itself – What Would Your Heat Map Look Like?

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Well, I have to say, I saw this one coming. Having seen a sickness tracking mashup, to track how colds, flues and other illness are geographically dispersed, I thought that it was only a matter of time before people started adding crime related statistics onto real estate maps. These guys could get a double impact by tying into a Trulia API. Then you could track the effect of crime rate on house and commercial property prices. These kinds of statistics will become presented as easy to read Heat Maps.

What’s this got to do with customer service, and marketing? It has to do with information asymmetry, and the roles that people play in a service exchange. Can you imagine if your car owners network began posting data about parts failures? But this is far from being bad news for the enterprise. How many times have you spoken with someone about a restaurant they were at only to have them tell you “oh, actually, it wasn’t that great, I felt kinda ripped off because the meat wasn’t good”, and when you ask them what did the restaurant do when you told them, they say “Oh, I didn’t tell them, I just didn’t tip that well!”. Surfacing the customer issues and dealing with them well is what this new data availability will enable you to do.

Imagine if your marketing person left a message on this car parts network with all the name and number of their local dealer, telling them that they are within warranty etc., or better still, with a click to call option that lets that network contributer contact the marketing person to resolve this issue to everyones benefit?

If all the data you currently hold in your customer care system was available on the web how would that change the way you think about what the purpose of your customer service?

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You’ve been noticed! Musings on customer interaction.