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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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Del.icio.us back in Web 1.0
Delicious.com?
Mis-spelled and “dotted” domain names have become the mandatory feature of Web 2.0 sites. I’d venture to say Del.icio.us was, if not the first one, then certainly in the first wave of companies of this sort.
Delicious.com?
Not only the domain name but also screwed-up user experience has pushed the new release of the social bookmarking site back into Web 1.0 world where its parent, Yahoo, resides.
Let me qualify that: the very first contact I had with the new release was when I chose to sign-in from the del.icio.us Firefox extension. It led to a Yahoo page saying I wasn’t authorized to access that page.
Unauthorized to log in?
I hope that once I get in, I’ll find a reason or two not to churn.
Damn.
Sphere: Related ContentUnsupported customer
So I hear Apple is now blogging to calm its customers who are none too happy about MobileMe flaws.
Apple? Blogging? Is the sun still rising from the east?
Apparently Firefox 3 isn’t a good enough browser for me to see it for myself. Clicking repeatedly on “Continue” had no effect - this is the only page I could access.
It’s been long since I’ve been discriminated against by a web site, mostly because all the major browsers now support all the features you can imagine, so discrimination makes no sense anymore. This reminded me of the days when companies assumed I’d install software just so that I could see their web site.
In 1999, I might have bothered.
Sphere: Related ContentLow-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 
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 ContentWhat 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 ContentQuote 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.
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