VentureBeat has an interesting post on how one company is looking to solve the email overload issue. The idea is that people spend virtual money, or points, in relation to how important the email is. Thus, no doubt indicating that this is important, you should read it. The problem is that it is the receiver who ultimately puts the value on the email, so it should be the receiver that is empowered, not the sender. If you could rate “Jim”, “Jim’s CC’s”, “Jim”&”after 18.00″ then you might have someway of ranking someones email. Seems to me an opening for social ranking within the business of the source of email, from the receivers of email.

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

Explore Tags: email, seriosity

We’ve all been at meetings where people are checking sms/text messages, emails, even their voicemail. But how do you feel about that? Personally, during a meeting I think its pretty ok to check an sms, but not to take or initiate a phone call. Paul Kedrosky over at Infinite Greed quotes the WSJ survey of people’s feelings about checking email during business meetings. It would seem from that graph that Talk-Now from iotum is addressing a real pain. The underlying thinking here being that both sides of the communication must come to some kind of an agreement about the context in which they want to be called.

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

Explore Tags: communication, email, interaction, meetings, sms, talk-now, voicesage ioutum

According to the “8th Annual Online Fraud Report,” released by CyberSource, losses from online fraud in the US and Canada in 2006 totaled $3 billion, a 7% increase over 2005.

But the percentage of revenues lost to fraud improved slightly — dropping to 1.4% in 2006, down from 1.6% the year before.

This is the third consecutive year to show a decline in the percentage rate of revenue loss, but because e-commerce sales continue to grow at more than 20% a year, the overall dollar-loss amount showed a rise.

With only 1% of accepted orders ultimately turning out to be fraudulent, merchants are erring on the side of caution by rejecting roughly 4% of their incoming orders due to suspicion of fraud. That means about 3% of total e-commerce revenues may be lost each year as valid orders are turned down.

For US and Canadian online merchants, overseas orders present the most risk.

While 61% of online merchants accept orders from outside the US and Canada, and those orders represent 17% of their total order volume, respondents reported that in 2006 2.7% of those orders were fraudulent, a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate associated with US and Canadian orders.

Not surprisingly, merchants report that they reject 12.7% of international orders, a rate three times higher than orders originating in the US or Canada.

Sounds like a broken process to me:

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

Explore Tags: ecommerce, email, online fraud