I haven't seen the new Crime Mapping service on www.police.uk yet; it's overloaded with traffic. Not entirely surprising given the very entertaining interview with police minister Nick Herbert 20 minutes ago on the Today programme.
But in my experience (20+ years in IT, 10 years in police IT) this is the problem with websites like this; they're very much a reactive information resource. It sounds like the chaps at Rock Kitchen Harris and NPIA have done a good at designing and building a site that gives people access to local crime information, police contacts and crime reduction advice, but seriously how many people are going to look at it sufficiently frequently for it to make a difference to their lives?
Unfortunately it's a consequence of both human nature and our very busy lives, that unless this type of informmtion resource is kept front of mind, it is likely to simply get forgotten until either it is re-advertised in the media or something happens to an individual (eg a crime) that motivates them to go back to the site, kick themselves for not looking sooner, and go lock their shed or whatever.
It's also not very useful in the "digital divide" challenge; those most at risk of becoming victims of crime don't necessarily have easy access to the Internet. I'll try it on my iPhone and see what happens, but I'm lucky enough to have a phone and data tariff that are paid by my company. Until we get more transparent pricing and widespread 3G/4G bandwidth I doubt this site will see many mobile visitors.
Unless people can access (or be alerted to) local crime information BEFORE it affects them in their daily lives, I don't think we'll see a big change in people's behaviours. The infoamtion will be relevant (because it's about their street or local neighbourhood)but won't be timely enough to make it really engaging or actionable.
The great thing is that this is a step in absolutely the right direction, using 'Open Data' (re-purposing of government information) to provide a very transparent and *potentially* useful service to the public.
So let's look at how we can take this tool and couple it with some kind of proactive notification service that advises people of local crimes - perhaps using email on the whole but with options for SMS texting, Tweeting and other comms that might better suit the elderly and other groups.
In the police-public interface projects I've worked on at HTK over the past 10 years or so (the original www.police.uk website and services like Police Direct with Suffolk and Norfolk police), I've seen that timely delivery of relevant infomation really can change people's behaviours and perceptions of the police.
Good work so far, but now let's build on it to make sure it doesn't become a victim of human nature!
Tuesday 1 February 2011
Friday 17 July 2009
The end of the home-phone nightmare?
Hands-up who saw Dragons Den on BBC2 this week?
Whether you're in the telecoms industry or run a contact centre, the pitch that really caught your attention will have been the nuisance-call blocker, TrueCall.
The plug-in gadget sits between your phone handset and the wall-socket, intercepting calls as they come in with an automated reply, much like an answering machine. When the person has identified themself by leaving a message, your phone rings and announces the caller... who can be rejected at the touch of a button and placed on your personal "black list" of unwanted callers.
"Hang-up now and don't call here again!" says the polite TrueCall machine.
Hmm... I thought. Now there's an idea for a network service, if only BT and other service providers would open-up their networks to such innovation. Rather than pay a heady £80 for the device, the service could be provided at a few pounds extra per month.
It's a great example of a simple but value-added service that really hits the mark. Good luck to Steve Smith (the inventor) and come on BT - get your skates on!
Whether you're in the telecoms industry or run a contact centre, the pitch that really caught your attention will have been the nuisance-call blocker, TrueCall.
The plug-in gadget sits between your phone handset and the wall-socket, intercepting calls as they come in with an automated reply, much like an answering machine. When the person has identified themself by leaving a message, your phone rings and announces the caller... who can be rejected at the touch of a button and placed on your personal "black list" of unwanted callers.
"Hang-up now and don't call here again!" says the polite TrueCall machine.
Hmm... I thought. Now there's an idea for a network service, if only BT and other service providers would open-up their networks to such innovation. Rather than pay a heady £80 for the device, the service could be provided at a few pounds extra per month.
It's a great example of a simple but value-added service that really hits the mark. Good luck to Steve Smith (the inventor) and come on BT - get your skates on!
Telco-what-now-dot-com
I was recently invited to take part in a round-table discussion on the state of the telecom industry, and where it goes next.
The basic situation is that "bundling" of minutes and text-messages into contract deals has reached a point where profit margins simply can't be squeezed any more. Competing on price is no longer an option, so the obvious answer is "more innovation".
The equally obvious problem, though, is that ripping-out and replacing a decades-old telecom network with a new one - one that will enable the level of service innovation required - is a particularly expensive business. Consider that new services account for just five-percent of total revenue, and the business-case to invest in service innovation starts to look improbable.
I listened while the debate continued on the subject of how to increase the high-margin five-percent of services, to compensate for losses in core-business areas, and what the next "killer application" might be to drive-up revenues and increase profits. Think "Sinclair C5".
Then I suggested that, rather than concentrate on the five-percent, we should perhaps focus on the ninety-five percent of revenue that comes from the established, staple and proven services of voice and messaging.
Let's take the voice-call, and let's make it better...
By focussing on the things that truly matter to all of our customers, whether that be our core product or the way that we provide service, we can make a big impact with relatively minor changes. The need to compete on price alone will diminish, and customer loyalty will increase, creating a bedrock for sustainable business growth.
Innovation doesn't need to be complex, expensive or high-risk.
What Skype did right...
Like Amazon.com and other highly succesful companies in recent memory, Skype got two things right. Firstly, the value proposition was unquestionable, but secondly they made the service easy to use. Skype made the ubiquitous voice-call easier, and that actually counts for a lot.
Think about when you pick-up a traditional phone. You typically have absolutely no idea whether the person you're calling is home, and whether you realise it or not, that "unknown" creates a degree of anxiety. Then you have to remember and punch-in a pretty long string of digits.
Using Skype I can see whether the person I want to call is available even before I "pick up" the phone, and I don't even need to dial a number - I just click a button. Simple.
Bonus features like "broadband voice" and playful jingles don't add to much in isolation, but they value-add the overall experience and suddenly the "old" way of calling looks pretty mundane.
Skype took a simple voice-call, and they made it better.
What we can all do right...
Think about the experience your customers have when they phone you. If you have a busy contact centre then it's pretty likely that you'll have an IVR system to help route or queue inbound calls.
Now it may be effective from a bean-counting perspective, but what do your customers think? Is the experience adding value and making it easier for them to do business with you? Nine times out of ten, quite the opposite will be true.
"First the call was answered by a dumb IVR (why I have to go through that I have no idea, it's for their benefit and not mine) and then I had to sit in a queue for half an hour when they knew I would be calling. Finally, I play ping-poing through departments until I find out that - surprise surprise - Mark isn't in the office today. Time to switch supplier..."
Let's think about how we could simplify that process, and make it better.
"There was no IVR to go through, the phone just rang and I was connected to Mark. It may have been just luck that I was put straight through to Mark, or maybe they knew that Mark was looking after me? Either way, it was certainly a good experience - much better than the last company I used!"
If only all of our calls were like that!
By adding "intelligence" to the way that we route calls, by connecting the IVR to our CRM platform and using a combination of business-rules and customer opt-in preferences, caller frustration can largely be taken away.
In this day and age, it's a capability that telecom service providers can and should be providing to contact centres as a value-added network service, perhaps for an extra penny per minute. I call it 0800+ and it works because it "keeps it simple" for the end-customer.
Keep it simple, and do it.
The basic situation is that "bundling" of minutes and text-messages into contract deals has reached a point where profit margins simply can't be squeezed any more. Competing on price is no longer an option, so the obvious answer is "more innovation".
The equally obvious problem, though, is that ripping-out and replacing a decades-old telecom network with a new one - one that will enable the level of service innovation required - is a particularly expensive business. Consider that new services account for just five-percent of total revenue, and the business-case to invest in service innovation starts to look improbable.
I listened while the debate continued on the subject of how to increase the high-margin five-percent of services, to compensate for losses in core-business areas, and what the next "killer application" might be to drive-up revenues and increase profits. Think "Sinclair C5".
Then I suggested that, rather than concentrate on the five-percent, we should perhaps focus on the ninety-five percent of revenue that comes from the established, staple and proven services of voice and messaging.
Let's take the voice-call, and let's make it better...
By focussing on the things that truly matter to all of our customers, whether that be our core product or the way that we provide service, we can make a big impact with relatively minor changes. The need to compete on price alone will diminish, and customer loyalty will increase, creating a bedrock for sustainable business growth.
Innovation doesn't need to be complex, expensive or high-risk.
What Skype did right...
Like Amazon.com and other highly succesful companies in recent memory, Skype got two things right. Firstly, the value proposition was unquestionable, but secondly they made the service easy to use. Skype made the ubiquitous voice-call easier, and that actually counts for a lot.
Think about when you pick-up a traditional phone. You typically have absolutely no idea whether the person you're calling is home, and whether you realise it or not, that "unknown" creates a degree of anxiety. Then you have to remember and punch-in a pretty long string of digits.
Using Skype I can see whether the person I want to call is available even before I "pick up" the phone, and I don't even need to dial a number - I just click a button. Simple.
Bonus features like "broadband voice" and playful jingles don't add to much in isolation, but they value-add the overall experience and suddenly the "old" way of calling looks pretty mundane.
Skype took a simple voice-call, and they made it better.
What we can all do right...
Think about the experience your customers have when they phone you. If you have a busy contact centre then it's pretty likely that you'll have an IVR system to help route or queue inbound calls.
Now it may be effective from a bean-counting perspective, but what do your customers think? Is the experience adding value and making it easier for them to do business with you? Nine times out of ten, quite the opposite will be true.
"First the call was answered by a dumb IVR (why I have to go through that I have no idea, it's for their benefit and not mine) and then I had to sit in a queue for half an hour when they knew I would be calling. Finally, I play ping-poing through departments until I find out that - surprise surprise - Mark isn't in the office today. Time to switch supplier..."
Let's think about how we could simplify that process, and make it better.
"There was no IVR to go through, the phone just rang and I was connected to Mark. It may have been just luck that I was put straight through to Mark, or maybe they knew that Mark was looking after me? Either way, it was certainly a good experience - much better than the last company I used!"
If only all of our calls were like that!
By adding "intelligence" to the way that we route calls, by connecting the IVR to our CRM platform and using a combination of business-rules and customer opt-in preferences, caller frustration can largely be taken away.
In this day and age, it's a capability that telecom service providers can and should be providing to contact centres as a value-added network service, perhaps for an extra penny per minute. I call it 0800+ and it works because it "keeps it simple" for the end-customer.
Keep it simple, and do it.
Monday 13 October 2008
Run from the Bills
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!
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!
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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