What is the story?

  • Tuesday, 13 January, 2009
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One of the problems with IT development is that it is tactical and piecemeal in its approach. Functionality is added in response to competitor or broader market activity. Expect to see an increasing number of brands doing something ‘social’ (and tactical) on the web, but don’t expect these new initiatives to be (strategic) seamlessly integrated into the existing digital channel offering.

This piecemeal approach extends to larger initiatives as well. In refreshing the website or developing new digital channels such as mobile and TV, IT will typically build out features and functionality prioritised upon their perceived individual business value regardless of what the sum value of the proposed release is. (Focusing all your effort of building functionality that delivers to your bottom line will seldom be as successful as you predict if it is not supported by features that meet the customers needs).

So when it comes to thinking about new features and functionality, where’s the best place to start? I’d suggest collaboratively, thinking around the customer. Collaboration is important to ensure that everyone starts with the same vision. It needs to be shared it with the broader audience, the product teams, IT; anyone whose day to life life will be touched by the project when it starts. I’d argue that you cannot start this soon enough. You don’t need to spend time doing analysis, interviewing all stakeholders individually, coming up with a document that is circulated and reviewed and re-written (with all the delays and waste that such a process incurs). Start the process getting all those stakeholders off-site for an afternoon and get the thoughts out on the table.

Commence with a presentation that introduces thinking in terms of customers and customer journeys. The below SlideShare presentation does this for the airline industry, addressing a new customer experience across channels. I acknowledge that it is pretty simple and doesn’t touch on half the ideas that airline executives may have. That is the point, it is just enough to get people thinking about different customer types and their touchpoints without getting bogged down in detail. This is what we want the participants of the off-site to share.

[slideshare id=912224&doc=airline-deck1-1231817842408345-3&w=425]

Once we’ve been through the presentation we break out into small groups a, each taking an individual customer (or persona) and build up a story; a day in the life of… (It is important not to forget the internal users of the system). These breakouts last 15-20 minutes with ten minutes for the team to play back their findings. As they build out a richer picture of the customer interactions they are asked to sketch out what the user interfaces may look like. The process is rapid, intense and iterative, but always focussing upon the customer journey; how will the customer realise their goals. When the teams tell their stories an analyst captures the essence of the requirements on index cards. The final exercise is to lay all these cards on the table and ask the team to group them into similar areas then prioritise them according to their perceived importance. In an afternoon you will have achieved four things. Firstly, you will have captured a vision for the new product in less than a day, with all stakeholders understanding not only the vision itself, but also the process that developed it and the concerns and issues that different parts of the business have with it. Secondly you will have an initial prioritised roadmap for its development. This will change, but it is a good strawman to circulate. Thirdly you will have introduced all the stakeholders together – projects succeed or fail based upon the strength of relationships and getting people engaged from the start will go a long way to creating shared ownership. And finally you will have generated energy, engagement and traction; to do the business case and to get the project started, recognising that just one part of the business having a vision is not going to bring it to the life that they dream.

On doing business in Hong Kong…

  • Monday, 12 January, 2009
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…there are two things that are essential, the business card and the company chop. Every business meeting starts with the customary exchange of business cards, after a year in Hong Kong I have amassed a mountain of them that lined up end to end would get me a fair distance. And no official document is official without a company chop – ink stamp in any other language. Probably a remnant from British bureaucracy, a signature is not sufficient, no document is complete without a chop. The fact that you can get a chop made up at any stationers doesn’t seem to matter. In fact you’d probably get away with a potato print as a chop if you were that was your thing. The chop and the card are de rigueur, if there was something else I might add it would be the fax machine. It is not unusual to suggest correspondence via email to be told to send a fax instead.


Do not click Stop or Reload

  • Wednesday, 7 January, 2009
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On the Fedex Shipment web application, in fine-print at the bottom of the page:

Please note: Click the Ship button only once. Expect some delay due to transmission time. Do not click Stop or Reload; it may cause a duplicate shipment transaction to occur.

This is frankly inexcusable.  If the form doesn’t appear to work, the user will inevitably click on the button more than once.  The code should accommodate this behaviour, not weasel out of it with small print. In developing the form there was an important acceptance or test case left out, that for monkey behaviour.

Beginners guide to social networking

  • Tuesday, 6 January, 2009
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So Jeremiah Owyang is on Twitter Hiatus as he evaluates how he uses social technologies. One of the tools he points to is FriendFeed. FriendFeed certainly aggregates your on-line social activity, but I’m still not sure. One of the things I think that such a tool needs to be is in your face, front of wallet and FriendFeed just doesn’t do it for me. Give me time and I may change my mind.

Here’s a question, if you were starting afresh, or wanted to get on the Web 2.0 boat, where would you start? I know more than a handful of people who consider it to be little more than FaceBook and they want nothing to do with that.  They don’t want to dredge up old and lost friends and acquaintances from school and past lives, they are old and lost for a reason thank-you very much. But there is more to social networking than Facebook. Here’s where I would start, not just with a bunch of tools, but also the reason why you should use them. (As I re-read this, it seems a bit noddy, very little is ‘new’ here, but not everyone knows this stuff and you have to start somewhere). I’d welcome comments, suggestions…

iGoogle

Ten years ago ‘portals’ were all the rage, in fact they’ve never really gone away. Trouble with them was they were always ‘walled gardens’ giving you a portal into what that website wanted to see, not what you wanted. iGoogle enables you to bring together in one place all the information that is relevant or important to you. OK, so this one is not social networking, but it is a useful tool that will start you on the road to being a Web 2.0 zealot.

Why: A homepage that is truly flexible, bringing together (‘mashing up’) information from multiple sources.

Alternative: netvibes or pageflakes and take a look at WidgetBox for widgets that you can mash into your new homepage.

Google reader

We’ll assume that content is interesting to you, you are not just using the web to transact. We will assume that timely content is also important. Rather than visiting individual websites to read content, you can take the content as a feed. When you start reading blogs, the number of sites you would visit will dramatically increase. So rather than all that clicking, an RSS reader enables you to aggregate all those feeds into one place. It also enables you to categorize and manage them. With iGoogle you can display your feeds on your homepage, and using google gears you can do this off-line as well.

Why: A single place to read articles (news, blogs etc)

Alternative: Is there one?

LinkedIn

Following the assumption that ‘fun’ social networking is out of scope (many would argue that there is more to FaceBook than Fun Wall, puerile quiz’s and sending friends garbage). LinkedIn is a professional networking site. The cynics would say it is all about ego, to see how many connections you can acquire, that may be true, but it can also be a useful tool for keeping abreast with your industry.

Why: Guy Kawasaki provides a number of compelling reasons, my top two would be that “By adding connections, you increase the likelihood that people will see your profile first when they’re searching for someone to hire or do business with” and “People with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five.” In the current economic climate that is a pretty good reason to be on LinkedIn.

Alternative: Plaxo does some of this, and also has some handy address book features, but I’m not convinced. Linkedin gets my money.

Twitter

Twitter was starting to get big in 2008, in 2009 it will be the next FaceBook. Your elderly relatives will have heard of it. Just because it it big does not mean you should use it though. firstly what is it. AKA ‘micro-blogging’ it enables you to publish your status in 140 characters or less. Your status can then be ‘consumed’ by people who subscribe to it, either on twitter itself, on the mobile phone, or as a feed, for example on iGoogle. If you use FaceBook you can synchronize your Twitter status to FaceBook.

Twitter enables you to keep you your colleagues/ contacts up to date on what you/ they are doing. “But I don’t care what they are doing / I don’t want everyone to know what I am up to”. That is one way of looking at it, but think about the times when you have been trying to get hold of a colleague, only to reach the answer phone or have no response to your emails. If she had updated her Twitter status – “Downtown at client meeting” you would know. Or maybe you subscribe to one of your customers, they tweet “Sending out RFP”, you know. Once you start using Twitter the value should become apparent. The challenge is filtering the noise, but of course there are tools out there to help you.

Why: Rather than sending emails (that lack context or won’t be read) on what you are doing, (e.g. I’m out of the office), publish your status on Twitter. People who follow you will be kept abreast of what you are doing. By following your colleagues and ‘luminaries’ you can prevent duplication of effort (because you know that someone else is doing it as per their ‘tweet’) or learn what the masters in the field are doing.

Alternative: Yammer. This is great for internal use within the enterprise, enabling you to microblog in a closed environment rather than to the world outside your company

Instant messenger

Let’s not forget IM as a social networking tool. Instant messenger applications enable you to ‘ping’ people you are connected to, sending and receiving messages. Which IM tool you use depends upon your social group and what they use, but it might be yahoo, messenger or Skype (which also has the advantage of being primarily a voice service as well). If you cannot access the aplication (for example at work) then you can use meebo as a web aggregator to access your IM accounts. With multiple accounts use Trillian or Adium to aggregate them into one place.

Why: Immediate bite-sized communication for when a phone call is not possible or required.

Delicious

What do you do when you find a website that you like? Chances are you bookmark it. Delicious addresses two issues with bookmarks, firstly that they are bowser specific. You use your browser on your machine to store them. This is not much use if you have more than one computer; you can’t access the bookmarks on your work computer when you are at home. The second issue is that bookmarks can only be saved within a file structure (if you are organising them at all). As you start to bookmark an increasing number of pages, managing the volume becomes harder. Delicious enables you to store your bookmarks ‘on the cloud’, meaning they are accessible on any machine. When you save a bookmark you can tag it – potentially with multiple tags to increase findability (delicious will also suggest tags based upon the page content or how other people have tagged the page). The Social part of delicious is in its ability to see who else has bookmarked that page. What use is that? It helps you find people who bookmark similar items, and by adding them to your network you will find more relevant information.

Why: Store and manage your bookmarks (the webpages you like) on the internet, not on your browser. Find similar pages from people with similar interests to yourself.

Alternative: Digg and Stumbleupon. These are more social in their outlook, when you visit a site that you think is ‘cool’ you can digg it. Visit the Digg website and you’ll find what’s popular out there. Assuming you are agnostic towards social networking, there’s definite utility in delicious that you may not find in Digg

Take a look at…

For our social neworking agnostic, that is probably enough to start with. They are the ‘must have an account withs’. There are a number of other networking sites that I’d say ‘take a look at’ but you don’t need to sign-up.

YouTube: The future of TV? (Alternative – Vimeo).

SlideShare: People sharing their powerpoint presentations. Chances are that you’ll find something that will enlighten and teach you something new.

Videojug: If Slideshare is about sharing ideas and learning through presentations, VideoJug does it through video.

Flickr: So you may not be quite ready to share your family snaps with the world, but there’s some pretty good photography out there. Alternatively Picassa, a google product that has a great application that manages your photos on your windows machine and enables you to share them on the web. Of course if you use FaceBook you may as well use that for sharing your photos.

Pandora: This is your radio, but if you can’t access Pandora there’s last.fm or imeem which is more social in their nature.

Behaviour, intentions, interactions and corner cases

  • Saturday, 3 January, 2009
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According to an article on eMarketer the method customers book travel depends upon their needs. Nothing revolutionary there; what is interesting is that fewer travelers are booking their trips online overall.

“This is not due to personal financial concerns—online travel bookers are an affluent demographic,” Mr. Grau [senior analyst at eMarketer] said. “Rather, it is caused by frustrations related to the planning and booking capabilities of OTAs (on-line travel agents). This, in turn, is spurring a renewed appreciation for the expertise and personalized services offered by traditional travel agents.”

“Online travel bookers are an affluent demographic” and yet we continue to let them down with poor customer experiences and an inability to let them do what they want to do. As an e-marketeer, your sales numbers may be satisfactory, but how much more traction could you get if your customer interactions were more realistically modeled around their behaviours and their intentions. You may point to your personalization engine, but that is probably doing little more than offering up pages and offers based upon information the customer has told you, or prior pages they have visited. It is not going to be a challenge to “the expertise and personalized services offered by traditional [insert domain here] agents“.

Customer frustrations with the web are more often than not due to usability and restrictive Web 1.0 interaction paradigms. It need not be like this. Interactivity can be more human. Some sites such as Kayak.com are introducing web 2.0 interactivity to introduce more fuzzy searching to find what you want. Forms can be more like their real-world brethren. Rather than the “command and control” approach of imperative programming that drives a sequential, rule driven flow, the declarative approach to programming enables greater flexibility and puts the user in control.

So we can do something about the technology to provide a better customer experience, but that won’t be enough. The perfect customer experience will not fit in business rules your IT analysts have determined. In the real world, corner cases and ‘exceptions to the rule’ are abound. In the real world sales people, customer service reps (or their supervisors) have ‘management discretion’. They can listen to the customer, understand their story, recognise them as a loyal customer who made a mistake, and override the business rules to satisfy/ delight the customer in a way the cold logic of the business rules never considered. True personalization will focus upon the corner-case long-tail.

The next generation of eCommerce will be declarative, forgiving and understanding. Rather than being based upon a paradigm that is the result of the technical constraints of the channels early days, it will be something that more closely mirrors the real world. Getting there however will be difficult. As a first step Marketing departments need to address the shortcomings of their existing digital channel before their IT organisation embarks on new channels such as mobile and TV.

Day trip to Shenzhen

  • Wednesday, 31 December, 2008
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Day trip to Shenzhen from Hong Kong. Most nationalities can now get visas at the border (why do us Brits get screwed with such expensive visas?), but be warned, you have to pay for them in RMB. Once you’ve cleared immigration Hong Kong side there is no ATM, so if you’ve got no Chinese money, you are at the mercy of the folk in no-mans land. There’s a counter by the visa office that will change money, but the rate is truly lousy.

Words are slippery things

  • Tuesday, 30 December, 2008
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Want to prove it? Take a sheet of paper. Tear it in half (under the table so I can’t see).  Now show the two halves.  You tore it in half side-ways didn’t you.  I tore it length-ways.  Same instruction, same materials, completely different result.

Where’s the call to action?

  • Sunday, 28 December, 2008
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On logging in to your HSBC Hong Kong personal bank account the customer gets a brochureware spashpage promoting HSBC products (why no account summary?).  To access their accounts (the reason the customer has gone to the trouble of logging in) the primary call to action is in a box on the right hand side of the screen.  It’s the <Show> button next to gray-on-gray text “My Accounts”.   The strongest call to action is to the ‘new trading site’ Stock Xpress.  It’s a small point, but a call to action as important as account access should more prominent and be the focal point, not an easily missed button.

A pat on the back

  • Monday, 8 December, 2008
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Listening to your customers is not just about understanding how you can improve, it should also be about recognising when you do good. Especially if you are a people business, do you have a mechanism for enabling your customers to thank a member of your staff for outstanding service?

In your IVR do you have an option at the end of the call to let the customer give positive feedback on the representative who handled the call?

How about on your website? Do you have a form like British Airways does to enable a customer to simply “thank a staff member“? And if you do, do you have the process to ensure that the staff member will learn of the feedback, that it will feature in their review process and will be recognised for being what your brand should be all about, delighting your customers?

Some one forgot to ask the critical question…

  • Friday, 28 November, 2008
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Some one forgot to ask the critical question,

What is the likely traffic that will hit our site during the offer and will our system be able to handle it?

Dr. Pepper said that they’d give a free Soda to all Americans if Guns’n’Roses released their new album this year. They did and the drinks company held up their promise, setting up a website offering a free coupon for 24 hours (if you signed up). They turned a throw away comment to their advantage and this could have been great PR. Only they didn’t predict the volumes that would hit the site, it couldn’t handle the traffic and went down for most of the day. Cue panic extension of the offer, unhappy customers, unhappy Axel Rose, PR disaster and lawyers on the prowl. If only they’d remembered to think about NFRs.

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