Tag archives: trends

Video Killed the Call Center

Posted by lramella on Monday, 26 January 2009

A quick short post: At a recent conference on Social Media and Technology, I engaged in an interesting discussion on the power and promise of video – not just the YouTube kind where thousands of people are downloading the latest gag video (and I don’t intend that sentence as a slight on YouTube’s business premise – I understand it’s magnitude and promise).  We talked about how video can become an important element of customer service, a key element of any successful business and an area that is often neglected, and how video is now a cost effective tool that few companies have only just begun to use.

As everyone knows, many U.S. companies opened customer service call centers abroad, particularly in India, in order to cut costs as well as to actively respond to an increased volume of customer service calls that required larger call centers.  However, a backlash soon ensued from U.S. consumers, and whether service actually declined due to foreign call centers or whether it was simply an “ideological” protest from consumers who did not like their matters handled by foreign customer service reps is unclear.  What was and is clear is that U.S. companies still have not resolved call center problems.  I’m sure many of you reading this post will agree – interactions with call centers, no matter the location, are painful and very rarely resolve a problem.  The issue I find is never identifying the problem – it’s communicating how to resolve the problem, particularly in issues around technology customer service issues (computer/DVR/mobile devices etc.).  What is a possible solution to this call center wasteland?  It’s obviously not to move call centers back to the U.S. – for many companies the costs are prohibitive and most customer service issues remain no matter the location of the call center.

One company, Hewlett Packard, is devising a novel approach to the call center/customer service inquiry question.  A while back, HP started HP Uncut (http://h30400.www3.hp.com/), a website where HP employees recorded videos of their favorite “tricks” with HP technology.  It has become an unofficial “How to” guide for many HP customers, and HP has now begun tracking which videos are most popular.  HP Uncut offers videos on everything from “Connecting a PC to your TV” to “How to Print a DVD label in your HP Printer” (admit it, how many of you have just scribbled on your DVDs with a Sharpie because it’s too complicated to figure out how to print one of those round labels?).  The videos are also hilarious, and offer a refreshing way to handle customer service.  As HP tracks which videos are most popular with customers, it is now building a video library that call center operators will use to respond to customer service inquiries, in effect shortening potential call times and eliminating customer frustration.  The move by HP is brilliant, cost effective, and represents what I love best about companies that are actively responding to their customers with new technology.  The applications for other companies are obvious, and I look forward to hearing about more companies that use this novel video customer service approach. – Leah

Posted in: Product as a Service | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments

Daylife is steadily winning fans with a new way to explore news

Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Tuesday, 8 July 2008

Being excited about charts, is not for everyone. But this deserves a mention. Maybe Upe will share the secret of their success, but they have achieved enviable, steady climb in usage for what was meant to be a technology showcase! As Upe points out, they didn’t do any marketing! One thing is certain, Upe somehow saw this many years ago and has been relentlessly making this into reality, along with a very talented team.

News consumption is a strange thing, as newspapers are finding out. Its one of the most popular online habits. As with all habits, it can change and as more activities move online, they are fundamentally changed through search and community participation. Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine provides the blow by blow and a view into the future news architecture.

Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | No Comments

Online Analytics for the Physical World

Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Sunday, 29 June 2008

Knowing what people say and knowing what they do, can be a powerful combination. Online marketing has capitalized on this via rich analytics to look at what people are saying or searching for and ultimately what they are buying. Web analytics is letting online marketers sort through the differences between what people say they do and what they actually do.

This is the core of online marketing’s advantage over traditional media. But what is happening where most of us still live? i.e the physical world.

Well, we have various profiling tools, such as affinity cards. So we can figure out how people are spending. But how did we land up in the store that day? A coupon code perhaps? We cant really be sure. We know things like 12m people are supposed to have visited this location.  But then we don’t really know where they went or where they came from (we think perhaps 25% are international based on surveys, for example).

But this is starting to change. Mutopo is working with one client to track in store movement, using signals from cell phones. The approach lets us show a location owner how people move around the space, not unlike what I might see from online analytics – navigation paths, entrance and exit points, time spent at certain locations etc. And so now, I can make changes in reality and measure the responses, not just changes in sales.

While we are working on a very local scale, we were excited to learn about Prof Tony Jebara’s new project, Sense Networks. Tony and his team are harvesting a variety of data sets to understand what people are doing – they are, in effect bringing online analytics into the real world.

Things like the most searched items on Google Trends might have realwold analogs such as the most visited restaurants. Or conversion reports might now be possible from outdoor campaigns, as you can get a real sense of the number of people who might have walked past a specific location.

The image on the left shows an example application to show the “hotspots” in San Francisco. These are literally the places you want to be if you are asking the question: where is everyone going tonight? Yes, its realtime. You can learn more about this app at Citysense.

It might be possible to know for sure how many more people in New York City have chosen to bike to work. I can start to see if more people are going to the new Ikea in Brooklyn instead of alternatives in New York City, such as Bed Bath and Beyond or the Container Store. Where I might have used Google Analytics to benchmark my site, now I can do the same for my store.

And we can now play what-if, in the real world. What if we:

  • change the layout of the store?
  • place new promotional signage at the hallway?
  • invest in signage alongside the highway?
  • purchase the locaton on 26th and 5th?
  • notice that more people are starting to cycle in NYC?
  • see more people dining out in a new area of town?
  • see more people going to Trader Joe’s than Wholefoods?

Its feels like we are on the verge of a significant change in how data from cell phones, GPS devices and the like can be analyzed in new and interesting ways. Good luck to Tony and the team at Sense Networks. We cant wait to see what people are going to do with your analysis.

Posted in: Quant | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

WordPress vs Typepad – Game Over

Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Monday, 16 June 2008

Google trends, WordPress in the red trunks. Typepad in the blue.

Alexa, WordPress is the top line, this time in the blue.

So, why did it take me so long to make the switch? Well, I had realized that I might be missing out. Certainly if I took the time to play with WordPress, more could be done. But I have tried desperately not to tinker of late and free up some time to focus on other things. And I have likely become a little dumber, technically, in the process, I suspect. But wordpress.com seemed like it might be worth a look.

But what pushed me over the edge this weekend, was quite simple. I had a CSS problem. Seemed obvious- was pointing to the wrong place, but it wasnt clear how it was changed or in fact how to fix. Help was helpless. Contacts failed to provide a number. I really am cheap to support- I try to figure stuff out first. In fact, I am often embarrassed to call. But I needed to call, to avoid the embarrassment of a non-functioning site.

When help did come, over e-mail. I was told, politely, that there was no problem. Ok. Contrast this with todays response from folks at WordPress.com (thanks Nick). When I mistakenly mapped my domain twice and paid twice, I sent a note asking for one of the mappings to be removed and credited – Shazzam! Quick response, all fixed.

I’ve never felt happier about a change.

I’ll be adding WordPress.com to my research about why great products and services dont need advertising. I would be interested in understanding from the Six Apart folks what they are doing to respond.

Disclosure: we have absolutely no relationship with either WordPress or Typepad. Just trying to keep the blog up to date and make a few changes here and there. And avoid some embarrassment (we always manage without technical difficulty, to achieve this on our own).

Posted in: Product Development | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment