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About
Notes and views on CRM, open business models, and what the Web means for customer relationships. [more]
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Speaking at:
Telecoms CRM, CEM and User Experience 2008
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Low-tech channels aren’t going away
Is Google making us stupid? Probably not, but assuming that Google is the universe, and hence what isn’t there does not exist, that’s pretty stupid alright.
There are still people who are not on the internet. People with dumb enough phone* they won’t use a third of the features their mobile tariff includes. People relying on the physical channels in their day-to-day lives.
Says James Gardner of the BankerVision fame about the iPhone hype:
[I]f people aren’t going to do the Internet, what chance have we got of getting them onto apps on mobile phones? And last time I looked, no traditional bank has 100% adoption of the Internet channel (and though I don’t have numbers in front of me right now, I’d bet that direct banks also have this problem, though to a lesser degree).
But it not the hype over the mobile channel that fascinates me, because there is always some fashionable channel in the news. It is the fact that everyone has fixated so heavily on one particular device.
You could argue how the iPhone is revolutionizing this and that, but no matter how breath-taking it might be, revolutions in the internet age tend to be short-lived. Who knows what Android can do in a year or two?
The point is, there is always going to be low-tech, simply because the high-tech is advancing so rapidly, and the businesses will need to support the low-tech (or no-tech for that matter) for as long as there are late adopters and people without advanced gadgetry.
Is that something marketing / product managers at banks and telcos are actively thinking about? Or are they primarily focused on launching the next big thing that will push the envelope further still?
*no offense, I got one of those as my personal phone 
Additional reading
Quote of the day
Jeff Atwood rants against Apple’s walled garden, the iTunes:
[L]inks to any sort of music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks or anything else available through Apple’s iTunes store requires custom software to be installed on your computer before they will display thing one to you. Is it so unreasonable to expect links in your browser to resolve to, oh, I don’t know, web pages containing information about the thing you just clicked on?
Yours truly has, on occasion, spit many an unkind word in the direction of Apple’s Evil Empire™. Yet Apple doesn’t cease to flourish in spite of that or any other unfavorable opinion thrown in its face.
Jeff points out how AOL’s custom “gateway to the Internet” hasn’t quite stood up the test of time.
Just wondering, though: would its fate be any different now, with the Web being what it is, a vast universe of endless choices?
Perhaps the mind-numbing complexity of the Web does indeed create a space for an orderly sub-space within it that is much more restricted but also, in a fashion, a lot more consistent and elegant
There is demand for both open and closed business models, but the trend towards more openness does not signify an imminent totality thereof; more things will become open, yet many will remain closed still.
Many will continue to prefer a padded cell to a messy jungle.
Sphere: Related ContentAdditional reading
What will it take for mobile advertising to take off?
Ajit over at Open Gardens analyzes the pre-requisites for mobile advertising to succeed. He concludes:
a) Advertising on the Web is expected to take off substantially over the next two years
b) By viewing the Web and the Mobile Web holistically – we could capture some of that new advertising revenue on to mobile devices
c) Specifically, services that are present on the Web can be accessed on mobile devices through subsidization by the ad model – this includes content accessed from RSS feeds, email, IM etc(and I think only the ad model will work for these because people will not pay on the mobile for content which is free on the web)
Can we view the mobile and the web through the same viewfinder? I believe there are some substantial challenges, the primary of which is: your phone display is not a miniature version of your laptop screen. Plus: the use cases for mobile web are different from those for desktop web.
The question shouldn’t be, how do we push advertising to mobile users so that we can deliver them apps for free, but rather, how do we make great apps that users will pay for, and gladly so.
Like they pay for mobile access to their corporate e-mail.
Why pay for mobile Twitter client or mobile Facebook? It’s free on the Web! Anything that can help me right now, right here, when I am out there (be it in the city, on the road, wherever) without my laptop, that’s where the mobile app developers should be headed.
Sphere: Related ContentAdditional reading
Quote of the day
Ron Shevlin on customer loyalty:
Switching providers — whether it’s banks or firms from other industries — is an act of independence. We switch because we can. We switch to make a statement. We switch to demonstrate that WE are control of our lives and our business relationships. [...]
Successful firms approach customer relationships as just that — relationships. A two-way street. It goes far beyond “customization” and “personalization”.
My take: having loyal customers is great, and trying to keep them loyal is a good business practice. However, as we start moving away from transactional to the relational, we should recognize that relationships aren’t set in stone and that they do end. And that it’s OK to let go.
Sphere: Related ContentAdditional reading
How does oil price affect CRM?
Denis Pombriant wrote an insightful piece on how the economy will change under the pressure of rising oil prices, and why CRM vendors should take that into account.
If fuel prices continue to increase — a reasonable assumption given rising demand for a limited (and most likely dwindling) supply — then we can expect more downward pressure on travel. Less travel means fewer face-to-face sales calls, and a greater reliance on technologies that will enable us to work with and administer customers in indirect settings. Less travel might mean fewer trips to the mall too, so I would expect that B2B and B2C commerce will be affected and that automatically means CRM.
We should see an acceleration of teleworking and, hopefully, a reduction in meaningless meetings and conferences - those that add little value beyond what’s already been stated in the agenda.
Likewise, I’d venture (and that’s a safe bet) a further increase of on-demand popularity. Instead of having to trudge to the office just so that you can log on to a dozen fat-client applications (or web-based, but equally firewall-protected), more and more office activities (=record keeping and communication) will be conducted online.
Having said that, I don’t see how the importance of human contact would diminish, even when it’s going to be a bit more expensive to meet. Some things are simply only going to happen when there are people together in a (physical, not virtual) room.
And so CRM is going to have to support both virtual and physical collaboration. It’s already doing both, and I suspect that, in the end, oil prices don’t represent the major shift that will steer CRM in a new direction - it’s already been happening for some time.
Sphere: Related ContentApropos customer experience
Customer Experience might be the “new Quality” (as in: the new Holy Grail everybody is pursuing), and I’ve heard several speakers attack the issue at the just concluded Telecoms CRM & User Experience Forum here in Prague.
It differs from Quality in one important aspect, though.
Quality is a characteristics of the product. Once you nail it down, you can probably keep the unknowables in check. You’ve fixed the fundamentals: the product works as advertised.
Customer exeperience is defined and perceived by the customer. In a large retail environment, this means - if you aggregate similar experiences - still a huge variety of scores.
Which is why a think a technocratic approach to this isn’t going to yield a result similar to that achieved in the hunt for Quality.
It’s quite a different game here.
Sphere: Related ContentMaybe CRM *can* save your soul
I am speaking about the “customer ecosystem” tomorrow. It’s a Telco event here in Prague. My talk isn’t Telco-specific but then, anybody can benefit from opening up a little, except perhaps prisons.
Soul-less businesses stand no chance in this brave new world. Just look at the beating AP gets for its ridiculous attempt to charge bloggers quoting its stuff. It’s time to cut those neckties and get real, folks.
Sphere: Related ContentQuote of the Day
Sun’s bs on social, social everywhere:
In order to continue the growth of social networking sites, I think that users will demand some changes. In fact, I’m probably not alone in being ready for some change. The big question is how this will be resolved. I think that some of the loose concepts around federation are very useful to help solve this. Depending on what kind of personal information you want to share, some it can be quite sensitive. Because of this, you want to be certain about how it’s stored and who you’ve given that data. The idea of a feed-based mechanism with a personal datastore like a Mine! can be quite compelling. In the end, the ability to manage and track my own data is the goal. The mechanism needs to be fairly straightforward and provide the ability for existing sites to adopt the functionality. In the short term, there may not be a lot of incentive for social networking site to adopt such a mechanism but it’s crucial for growth in the long term.
Social networks (and all other organizations keeping your data) would love it if they could keep it to themselves; customer data is the Holy Grail of CRM efforts and enables reasonably specific marketing communication.
I am more and more convinced, though, that they’ll have to give in to data portability (small-letter d and p) because we are all tired, tired, tired of filling the same registration forms again. And again. And again.
It’s your data - they should come to you and take a look if you let them. And use it according to your terms of service, not theirs.
Additional reading
Got Twitter
I just got Twitter. I got it on my cell phone. Suddenly it makes sense.
On my computer, I can always get more information via e-mail, instant messenger, blogs. I don’t need tweets to learn about Iowa floods; I get it from Drudge. I don’t need conference twitterblogging when there’s liveblogging and, yes, live video streaming. Twitter can’t compete on detail nor depth of these channels.
On mobile screen, though, the experience couldn’t be different.
I am not a masochist to fire up Internet Explorer and try to scroll right, left, top, and down on AJAXed web pages where half of the stuff doesn’t work because of missing plug-ins, flash, etc., all that on miserable EDGE speeds. If I can have a status update, though, a teeeny bit that I can get back to later, a tweet can do that.
Hmmm.
I wonder about the adoption rates of desktop vs web vs mobile clients. Is the mobile community growing any faster, by any chance? Too late to find out right now, but I’ll get back to you later.
Not exactly an early adopter, am I.
Sphere: Related ContentAdditional reading
Doc Searls on VRM
Doc Searls explaining VRM to a Telco crowd at Mobile Monday in Netherlands:
Worth watching. CRM 2.0 and VRM aren’t neither synonymous nor adversarial but complementary, and I am glad to see that both camps are finally coming together.
Sphere: Related ContentAdditional reading
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