Stories about 'The Credit Crunch' are, of course, more than a little prominent in the news these days, with financial institutions in turmoil and defaults on mortgages at a 15-year high, not to mention the plethora of defaulted payments on a much smaller scale. Which is why I am going to mention them. It's an oft-overlooked topic.
It's not just the big bills that go unpaid at times like this, but the smaller ones too.
I recall that during the last slump in the early 1990s I was pursued relentlessly by the finance department of a mail-order music club, because I failed on a couple of consecutive occasions to cough up for the ‘CD of the month’ or make my selection from the catalogue - this was way back before we could do price comparisons, listen to preview tracks, and then order cheaply online.
I only owed them about £22.98, or whatever the sum cost of the new Celine Dion album and Mariah Carey’s Greatest Hits was, but the effort they went to was quite extraordinary, given the trivial amount.
On several occasions over the period of a few months they sent me reminders through the post, and on several other occasions they had an actual person phone up from their call centre to leave a message on my answerphone reminding me that I owed them a few quid.
Then, eventually, after numerous attempts, they cancelled my membership and passed the debt on to a debt collection agency – who started their own campaign of letters and phone calls.
Eventually they got their 20-odd quid, but the cost to them in postage, power consumption, billable staff hours and whatever other overheads were entailed in recovering a few pounds from me almost certainly made the overall deal a losing proposition for them. What’s the retail margin on two CDs? About six or seven pounds?
Technology has advanced since then, though it isn’t always utilised for maximum benefit.
Payment collection still relies heavily on sending out paper mail (which has a cost to the environment as well as financial) and call centre-staff, who all need to be paid.
For small debts in particular, the manual process of collecting payments is wasteful, inefficient and far from cost-effective.
Using new technologies, such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and SMS messaging to automate the process can save money in two ways.
Firstly, because once an effective automated system is in place, there is no additional overhead to settle additional accounts, however small the outstanding balance may be. And while the small balances might not be worth pursuing if it’s proportionately expensive to do so, they all add up.
Secondly, many customers are more likely to respond to a process that doesn’t require interaction with a human being. Computers don’t judge you, and telling a machine you can’t afford to pay the balance now but you’ll have cleared funds on Friday week is a far less stressful experience than trying to explain it to a real life person.
At HTK, we’ve identified Payment Recovery as a key market sector for interactive customer contact, and one that is likely to become increasingly relevant as recession begins to bite.
We believe automating the process of Payment Reminders and payment collection can significantly reduce the overheads of consumer debt recovery, as well as providing a more tolerable experience to customers feeling the pinch. If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to check out HTK Horizon Billing and Payment for more information!
Monday 13 October 2008
Thursday 4 September 2008
Power to the People!
I’ve been in the telecoms and IT industry (is that officially one industry now?) since 1991 and I set-up my own business in 1996. Things really haven’t changed that much in many respects. Without question, the most marked change is the fact that I haven’t had a land-line phone at home since 1996, but in that time I’ve only changed my mobile three times (yes, really). I change my voicemail message about once every two years to try and make myself sound younger. I’m 37.
People change their behaviour very seldom. People don’t like to change unless doing so provides a faster, cheaper, more convenient or more emotionally satisfying result. My mobile is convenient, and while I find text messaging cumbersome I do like the emotional response of anticipation when the phone bleeps (which is largely why SMS took off). I’m typical Generation X, with a feint derision of the youth today and fighting the uncomfortable personal compulsion to have a page on MyFace.
I think one of the seminal experiences of any Generation-X is the time they went round to their mothers house to plug-in the new PC that they had just bought her to avoid having to mend the old one. What a great day that was (you can hear the sarcasm in my voice, can’t you). Information technology has changed a lot, and the future is unquestionably “cloud computing” or Software-as-a-Service for those of us who like to use hyphens a lot. SaaS makes a lot of sense to the consumer, and Communication-as-a-Service is unquestionably a good thing for the modern-day Telco to embrace.
But, most of the applications that I’ve seen.... well, they suck. If I was Bart Simpson I might even be inclined to add that “they both suck and blow”, and that’s a big part of the problem with the telecom industry today. Nobody is building services that I want to buy and use. I may be a tricky customer, but I don’t think Bart and I have too different a view, and I certainly don’t think that the relative size of the early-adopter market will change from one generation to the next. A bad application is a bad application, marketing folks take note; generation Z won’t save you.
Mobile applications are not fun. Playing cricket is fun (if you like playing cricket) and computer games are fun if you like that too, but a mobile application is a tool to do something faster or cheaper, or more conveniently or with a more satisfying emotional response. That’s it, nothing more. A fad is just a fad and it won’t generate you significant or sustainable revenue growth, and having a whole product portfolio crammed full of fads is essentially the same as having a big can full of worms.
The word “innovation” means to do something in a new or better way, and yet it so often becomes confused with the production of meaningless, useless and indulgent drivel. Being “cool” is not enough. Having a cool application loaded on my phone won’t create the same warm-glow inside that I might get from wearing a cool pair of sunglasses, because the psychology is entirely different.
I’m going to give you an example of a useful application that should be built. Then I’m going to tell you how I think it should be built but why it still won’t work. There is no happy ending here, but given the right thought and focus I think this industry (or two) will work out just fine.
The great thing about the telephone is that there can be two of them. I use one and somebody uses another, and we talk. The really bad thing about the telephone is that a person has to be there to answer it (no, I haven’t just re-invented the answer phone). Specifically, let’s think about the contact centre industry – another that hasn’t really changed much in the last decade or two, despite some major bad-press that could be solved through a dash of Telco 2.0 gumption and a pinch of bravery. Make that a handful of bravery.
Contact centres are there to provide service; to answer questions and help people get where they want to go. The faster and more efficient the process and the better the emotional response (or lack of anxiety, frustration or even contempt) the more successful that operation will be. The industry is currently going through another period of “customer experience is king”, i.e. retention strategy rather than cost saving. As a telecom service provider, here’s a real opportunity to add value through a simple application that solves a big problem.
When I phone a company, I want to quickly get through to someone who can deal with my enquiry. If I’m phoning multiple times, then I would rather speak to the same person each time. That’s human nature, but there’s also a good degree of practical benefit too. What I don’t want is to be put into a queue, or speak to someone who can’t help me or asks me to repeat myself, or be forced to speak to a machine when the task I want to complete isn’t appropriate to self-service. What’s worse is when I don’t know which of those evils I might encounter, because I then feel out of control. All of those factors create a significant negative emotional response, but all can be avoided.
Presence and availability information are two of the saving graces of next-generation telecom network architecture, which is good because they’re also dead easy to understand. Basically, if I can see that the person I need to (or rather, want to) talk to at the insurance company is available today and is a five-minute queue away, and if I’m confident that the network will automatically route my call to that person because that routing preference is stored, then I have a choice. I can call now and wait a few minutes, or I can call back later if my reason for making contact is not time-critical, or I can request a call-back if that service is available, or I can select self-service. Whatever, the key is that I have knowledge allowing me to make an informed personal decision of whether to pick up the phone or not, and a positive expectation of what will follow.
This isn’t rocket science – this is just a solid use of technology to solve a real problem that millions of people face every single day, and a problem that puts contact centres out of business every year but especially now when the competition is most fierce. The great news is that it’s a problem that we, the Telco 2.0 industry, can solve. What’s more, the benefits to the contact centre are potentially tremendous so it’s a great candidate for a two-sided business model. I could also explain to you why this service will become one of the most significant social networking opportunities of the decade.
So, why won’t it work? Well, the challenge is that most contact centres like to hide their fears and inefficiencies under a very large bushel. Exploding the contact centre, opening the box for all to peek inside, is not a comfortable thought for most contact centre managers that I speak to. The tide will turn on that, I’m confident, and when it does the market for intelligent network-based contact centre solutions will explode too - right into the hearts and minds of the people that matter.
Power to them indeed.
People change their behaviour very seldom. People don’t like to change unless doing so provides a faster, cheaper, more convenient or more emotionally satisfying result. My mobile is convenient, and while I find text messaging cumbersome I do like the emotional response of anticipation when the phone bleeps (which is largely why SMS took off). I’m typical Generation X, with a feint derision of the youth today and fighting the uncomfortable personal compulsion to have a page on MyFace.
I think one of the seminal experiences of any Generation-X is the time they went round to their mothers house to plug-in the new PC that they had just bought her to avoid having to mend the old one. What a great day that was (you can hear the sarcasm in my voice, can’t you). Information technology has changed a lot, and the future is unquestionably “cloud computing” or Software-as-a-Service for those of us who like to use hyphens a lot. SaaS makes a lot of sense to the consumer, and Communication-as-a-Service is unquestionably a good thing for the modern-day Telco to embrace.
But, most of the applications that I’ve seen.... well, they suck. If I was Bart Simpson I might even be inclined to add that “they both suck and blow”, and that’s a big part of the problem with the telecom industry today. Nobody is building services that I want to buy and use. I may be a tricky customer, but I don’t think Bart and I have too different a view, and I certainly don’t think that the relative size of the early-adopter market will change from one generation to the next. A bad application is a bad application, marketing folks take note; generation Z won’t save you.
Mobile applications are not fun. Playing cricket is fun (if you like playing cricket) and computer games are fun if you like that too, but a mobile application is a tool to do something faster or cheaper, or more conveniently or with a more satisfying emotional response. That’s it, nothing more. A fad is just a fad and it won’t generate you significant or sustainable revenue growth, and having a whole product portfolio crammed full of fads is essentially the same as having a big can full of worms.
The word “innovation” means to do something in a new or better way, and yet it so often becomes confused with the production of meaningless, useless and indulgent drivel. Being “cool” is not enough. Having a cool application loaded on my phone won’t create the same warm-glow inside that I might get from wearing a cool pair of sunglasses, because the psychology is entirely different.
I’m going to give you an example of a useful application that should be built. Then I’m going to tell you how I think it should be built but why it still won’t work. There is no happy ending here, but given the right thought and focus I think this industry (or two) will work out just fine.
The great thing about the telephone is that there can be two of them. I use one and somebody uses another, and we talk. The really bad thing about the telephone is that a person has to be there to answer it (no, I haven’t just re-invented the answer phone). Specifically, let’s think about the contact centre industry – another that hasn’t really changed much in the last decade or two, despite some major bad-press that could be solved through a dash of Telco 2.0 gumption and a pinch of bravery. Make that a handful of bravery.
Contact centres are there to provide service; to answer questions and help people get where they want to go. The faster and more efficient the process and the better the emotional response (or lack of anxiety, frustration or even contempt) the more successful that operation will be. The industry is currently going through another period of “customer experience is king”, i.e. retention strategy rather than cost saving. As a telecom service provider, here’s a real opportunity to add value through a simple application that solves a big problem.
When I phone a company, I want to quickly get through to someone who can deal with my enquiry. If I’m phoning multiple times, then I would rather speak to the same person each time. That’s human nature, but there’s also a good degree of practical benefit too. What I don’t want is to be put into a queue, or speak to someone who can’t help me or asks me to repeat myself, or be forced to speak to a machine when the task I want to complete isn’t appropriate to self-service. What’s worse is when I don’t know which of those evils I might encounter, because I then feel out of control. All of those factors create a significant negative emotional response, but all can be avoided.
Presence and availability information are two of the saving graces of next-generation telecom network architecture, which is good because they’re also dead easy to understand. Basically, if I can see that the person I need to (or rather, want to) talk to at the insurance company is available today and is a five-minute queue away, and if I’m confident that the network will automatically route my call to that person because that routing preference is stored, then I have a choice. I can call now and wait a few minutes, or I can call back later if my reason for making contact is not time-critical, or I can request a call-back if that service is available, or I can select self-service. Whatever, the key is that I have knowledge allowing me to make an informed personal decision of whether to pick up the phone or not, and a positive expectation of what will follow.
This isn’t rocket science – this is just a solid use of technology to solve a real problem that millions of people face every single day, and a problem that puts contact centres out of business every year but especially now when the competition is most fierce. The great news is that it’s a problem that we, the Telco 2.0 industry, can solve. What’s more, the benefits to the contact centre are potentially tremendous so it’s a great candidate for a two-sided business model. I could also explain to you why this service will become one of the most significant social networking opportunities of the decade.
So, why won’t it work? Well, the challenge is that most contact centres like to hide their fears and inefficiencies under a very large bushel. Exploding the contact centre, opening the box for all to peek inside, is not a comfortable thought for most contact centre managers that I speak to. The tide will turn on that, I’m confident, and when it does the market for intelligent network-based contact centre solutions will explode too - right into the hearts and minds of the people that matter.
Power to them indeed.
Thursday 28 August 2008
The devil in disguise?
Last week I found myself trawling around various contact centre blog sites (here for example) and was quite surprised by the wide apprehension there still appears to be about the use of interactive technologies such as speech recognition and biometric speaker verification.
Actually, that's not really too surprising when you consider that many people still have a shrink-wrapped set-in-stone cast-iron opinion that basic touch-tone IVR is the devil in disguise. IVR can be done "right", but it so often isn't that it's no wonder people view something that's an order of magnitude (or even two) more expensive as being a significant risk.
I look at numerous business cases where the projected financial return on investment shows little if any acknowledgement of the fact that user adoption may be anything less than monumental. Spectacular uptake and adoption; people will call the service just because its fun. Nonsense. People change their behavior very seldom, and when they're "forced to" it can be uncomfortable.
There will always be a bell-curve of user adoption, and a temporal scale that shows a change of user behaviour (and ideally acceptance) over time. It's not rocket science to understand, and it will "scare" some people who chose not to pull back the covers, but talking about the potential business gains of technology is just not enough.
Not only is it not enough, it's simply not representative of the real world that we live in. Until people start to experiment with the application of technology, on real users, and openly discuss their positive and negative experiences - well, we simply won't get anywhere fast.
There is a time and a place for technology. More, there's a personal time and a place for technology, and understanding how to personalise system behaviour to meet individual peoples expectations and aspirations for service is a key to unlocking the true business benefit.
That's why we think our Concept Lab is such a great idea!
Actually, that's not really too surprising when you consider that many people still have a shrink-wrapped set-in-stone cast-iron opinion that basic touch-tone IVR is the devil in disguise. IVR can be done "right", but it so often isn't that it's no wonder people view something that's an order of magnitude (or even two) more expensive as being a significant risk.
I look at numerous business cases where the projected financial return on investment shows little if any acknowledgement of the fact that user adoption may be anything less than monumental. Spectacular uptake and adoption; people will call the service just because its fun. Nonsense. People change their behavior very seldom, and when they're "forced to" it can be uncomfortable.
There will always be a bell-curve of user adoption, and a temporal scale that shows a change of user behaviour (and ideally acceptance) over time. It's not rocket science to understand, and it will "scare" some people who chose not to pull back the covers, but talking about the potential business gains of technology is just not enough.
Not only is it not enough, it's simply not representative of the real world that we live in. Until people start to experiment with the application of technology, on real users, and openly discuss their positive and negative experiences - well, we simply won't get anywhere fast.
There is a time and a place for technology. More, there's a personal time and a place for technology, and understanding how to personalise system behaviour to meet individual peoples expectations and aspirations for service is a key to unlocking the true business benefit.
That's why we think our Concept Lab is such a great idea!
Monday 18 August 2008
Pies
Hello and welcome to the first HTK Blog!
What you'll find here is a reasonably eclectic mix of comment, observation and analysis, and I hope that you'll find some of it interesting enough to reply to. For those of you who haven't yet stumbled across www.htk.co.uk, let me explain in very brief terms what it is that we do.
We have fingers in two major pies;
The first pie is helping organisations to interact with their customers more effectively and at a lower cost. We call that "customer interaction management" and it typically spans the business functions of marketing and customer care, but the benefits of automated communication can be applied in a much broader sense for "communication-enabled business process". Typically there's a cost-saving benefit to the organisation, but that's not a 100% rule.
Our second, some would say much bigger pie, is helping telecom service providers to generate new revenue through value-added services, and to do that with the minimum of time, cost and risk. As a "hosted service delivery platform" we trawl the world looking for new consumer and business services that we believe in, and when we find one we host it and make it available for telecom service providers to sell on a white-label revenue-share basis. Rapid time-to-revenue, low cost and therefore low risk. Et voila.
Occasionally we combine the two pies into a pie-mashup (how very droll of me) i.e. we enable "hosted network services for customer interaction management" that can be sold by a telecom service provider to their customers, especially small businesses, on-demand. We believe that the market for telecom Software-as-a-Service is set to explode (not in a bad way) and we want to be right at the front of that wave.
Anyway, welcome again to the HTK Blog and I hope to speak to you soon.
Best regards,
Marlon Bowser
Managing Director,
HTK (http://www.htk.co.uk/)
What you'll find here is a reasonably eclectic mix of comment, observation and analysis, and I hope that you'll find some of it interesting enough to reply to. For those of you who haven't yet stumbled across www.htk.co.uk, let me explain in very brief terms what it is that we do.
We have fingers in two major pies;
The first pie is helping organisations to interact with their customers more effectively and at a lower cost. We call that "customer interaction management" and it typically spans the business functions of marketing and customer care, but the benefits of automated communication can be applied in a much broader sense for "communication-enabled business process". Typically there's a cost-saving benefit to the organisation, but that's not a 100% rule.
Our second, some would say much bigger pie, is helping telecom service providers to generate new revenue through value-added services, and to do that with the minimum of time, cost and risk. As a "hosted service delivery platform" we trawl the world looking for new consumer and business services that we believe in, and when we find one we host it and make it available for telecom service providers to sell on a white-label revenue-share basis. Rapid time-to-revenue, low cost and therefore low risk. Et voila.
Occasionally we combine the two pies into a pie-mashup (how very droll of me) i.e. we enable "hosted network services for customer interaction management" that can be sold by a telecom service provider to their customers, especially small businesses, on-demand. We believe that the market for telecom Software-as-a-Service is set to explode (not in a bad way) and we want to be right at the front of that wave.
Anyway, welcome again to the HTK Blog and I hope to speak to you soon.
Best regards,
Marlon Bowser
Managing Director,
HTK (http://www.htk.co.uk/)
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