Telepocalypse

Two little thoughts...

Why can’t I right click an email in Outlook, and select “I’d like to talk to you about this…” — and have the system try to set up a call for us? Why do we assume emails must beget more emails?

Conversely, why do we assume the primary purpose of our mobile handsets is telephony? Why can’t the press-and-hold shortcuts be to text my nearest and dearest, rather than call them? There are some people I text far more than I call!

UPDATE: What I really mean is that I can be sat on a plane doing email, and then when I get into the office I can flip into “talk to people” mode, and my phone rings and I have conversations with people I need to talk to in some sensible order.

My eComm presentation

I couldn’t make it in person owing to Error 24: Insufficient Hours In Day, but I did crawl into the basement of BT’s HQ to ad lib a replacement talk in the telly studio. You can view the result here.

Those who know me will recognise the themes: re-thinking the business model for voice using 2-sided market principles. Usual disclaimer, it’s all my own thoughts, not policy of BT.

eComm -- last chance!

The eComm conference starts next week and looks set to be hot. Regular pricing stops today.

The promo code ‘telepocalypse09’ which when entered on the first page of registration will take 20% off. Or simply use this link with the discount code integrated.

I’ll be providing a 15 minute keynote - but reluctantly I can’t be there in person. Off to the TV studio tomorrow to record it!

Emerging Communications (eComm) is the world’s leading-edge telecom, Internet communications and mobile innovation event built to both showcase and accelerate innovation, as well as to explore radical new opportunities — together. Tremendous change is facing the multi-trillion dollar a year telecom industry.

Telecom is becoming software; telephony and SMS revenues are likely to dry up in the long term; telephones are becoming general purpose computers; search engines and computer manufactures are encroaching into the space; a steady march is underway to fundamentally change how wireless spectrum is allocated and utilized; and the telecom kingdom is fragmenting daily.

It means unprecedented opportunity for those ahead-of-the-curve.

It’s clear that the mammoth sized telecom industry - including cellular - is in the process of being re-written. As such you either stand on the side to be written into the past or instead join with the growing community to write the future.

Opportunities have never been so great to profit from the radical restructuring or in accelerating how humanity connects, communicates and collaborates. Opportunity Doesn’t Always Knock. Sometimes It Calls… Seize it by Registering Now at: http://eCommConf.com

Best Team

I’ve changed jobs.

Bonus braindump

There is a long braindump of my thoughts on the future of telecoms over at Lee Dryburgh’s eComm blog. Do take a look, hurry whilst stocks of pundit opinions last.

21 days remaining

Why do we need fibre? Check this one out:

I’m backing up our home PC to Amazon’s S3 cloud service. After all, what’s the point of a removable hard drive backup when it’ll get destroyed in the same house fire or stolen in the same burglary as the main PC?

It’s been going since early evening yesterday, so about 16 hours. 3% done, 21 days to go. I think I’ll be leaving the PC on for a long, long time.

Note that I don’t even have a video camera, it’s mostly just seven years of digital photos. Anyone with precious memories of their children growing up can’t easily upload and share them with their families.

You heard it here first

“Daddy, can you give me a real phone that can phone in real life. Then you will have to teach me how to use the buttons and do phoning.” - My older daughter, aged 5 years 4 months, today pops the question.

And to think I thought I had another two years to come up with a reason why she can’t have one…

eComm -- up and coming

The next installation of the superb and distinctly unmissable eComm conference is on its way. Super early bird registrations are available until 22 December, and if you use the code ‘Telepocalypse’ you’ll get 20% off, taking the price down to 952 buckaroos. (“Hurry, while the US dollar lasts…”) Buddy and organiser Lee Dryburgh assures me this is the lowest price it’ll ever be offered at, so time to whip out the credit card and run up some credit.

See you in San Francisco on 3-5 March!

Delivering on the promise

Two thoughts to highlight how far we still have to go with developing the voice and messaging offering of telcos.

First, I’m reading a bedtime story to my kids. Maybe I’d like to share that experience with other members of my circle of nearest and dearest. I could easily plonk my mobile in front of me and call them on speakerphone. But I don’t for fear of using up these valuable ‘minute’ things on a Sunday evening. Rationed scarcity, not abundance, driven by termination fees.

Second, instead of ‘Push to talk’, why not ‘Push to listen’. Let’s say that I’m happy to allow selected people to listen in (for up to 30 seconds, perhaps) on what’s going on in my house before calling. Then they can judge whether it’s in the middle of a behavioural meltdown among my offspring (“It’s MINE; no SHE TOOK IT OFF ME!”); or maybe it’s so quiet the younger one just must be asleep. Each such instance of listening in is notified to me, and furthermore the audio is recorded and sent to me so I know exactly what was heard. It’s presence, Jim, but not as we know it.

eComm -- call for speakers

The next eComm conference is scheduled for March 3-5, 2009 in San Francisco. If you represent or know of an innovative company or idea in the personal communications space, then this is the event to be at, and you can find details of the call for speakers here.

Lost packets

Have finally persuaded someone at a 3UK store to sell me a prepaid SIM card, topped up, and set up the self-care account. Speaking of which, why do you need to provision yourself a password via SMS, rather than just printing one on the SIM holder with your number? The whole process naturally involves putting the card into your phone, and taking it out because you didn’t realise they need the last 6 digits from the back of the SIM, and then putting it back in a phone, so you can take it out and put it into your modem. Then it’s just a small job to convert your talk’n’text balance into a 30 day data pack, and you’re in business. Easy!

So I’m now up and running with my splendid USB modem whizzing along on my train at speeds in excess of, well, half a French train’s speed, and eliminating the few remaining cells in my inner ear with some Aphex Twin.

But here’s the rub.

How come these modems have a splendid button to press on the screen labelled “Connect”, but never one that says “Connect and bloody well stay connected, as even my dial-up model could automatically reconnect when it lost contact with the cyberworld”?

HSDPA = Has Some Dropped Packet Annoyances

Still, it’s better than the National Express Wi-Fi that insists on randomly replacing the content of your browser tabs with the same annoying splash screen every 20 minutes (which is about how long it takes to load a page anyway).

Falling for fibre

I’m using the superb Jungledisk to back up my laptop (hat tip: Andy). Because I’ve shifted my Documents folder around on my laptop from one hard drive to the other I’m having to re-upload it all.

Time to complete: 1-2 days for 3Gb.

Or to put it another way, I’m going to have to wait a month with my DSL line working flat out 24×7 to backup my 30Gb of family photo photos online from my home server.

And they say there’s no demand for fibre? Well, I’m not alone in disagreeing.

Citibunk

I had the fun experience of having to call Citibank this evening to moan that I couldn’t set up an online payment. Their website was rejecting the sort code of the account I was trying to send a payment to, even though I have the recipient’s checkbook in front of me, and know it is correct.

Their splendid new IVR system allows you to do voice recognition.

You have no idea how much fun it is trying to navigate this system with two over-excited screamy kids in the background.

“For an account representative, say ‘representative’”

“Daddy, Daddy, she took it off me!”

“Thank you, please select a bill payee”

“Kids, BE QUIET! I’m on the telephone”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t recognise that payee, please try again”

Somehow, I don’t think this is a technology that’s quite reached the maturity level needed…

Anyhow, I’m about to write a report on the call centre of the future, so a few things of note.

Firstly, there was zero integration of the web and telephone experience. You get a popup saying “this sort code is not valid”, and that’s it. If you’ve got an objection to their exception, you have to start again via another channel, with all the 16 digit numbers and PINs and announcements about lost or stolen cards. It’s when things go wrong that customer loyalty is established — or destroyed.

The next thing was a more philosophical problem that seems to afflict contact centres, which is “the customer is always wrong”. Sadly, Citibank doesn’t seem capable of maintaining a list of valid UK sort codes. Empower your employees to correct these mistakes — for example by being able to override exceptions or wonky business rules. Otherwise, the customer gets mad. And you never get to find which business rules are bunk.

In telcoland, the fiendish complexity of tariffs, combined with the IT madness of bundling, guarantees a nightmare for customers. Combine that with disempowered care representatives, and an attitude of “the computer says ‘no’”, you’ve got a lot of churn. How come telcos can’t eat their own dogfood here? We sell voice, messaging, and web access — just don’t ask us to use them together… This contrasts with my experience last night with emusic.com, where I could quickly have an IM session with customer support.

I can imagine how the web browser could be re-engineered to support a two-sided market here. Would Citibank be willing to pay Google (yeah, I’m hooked on Chrome) to set up a voice call to my landline/nearest phone, and to share what’s on my screen in a highly secure manner? Possibly, yes. Sadly, few people think about how their communications products can be re-engineered to facilitate B2C interactions. Check out a few of my old ideas on Skype to see where I think they screwed up here.

Another example of how silly business rules lose customers: I phoned T-Mobile to ask if they’d do me a good deal on a voice plan with mobile broadband. Apparently as I’m a SIM-only postpaid user, who merely sends them about £50 (US$90) every month, and never has asked for a subsidised handset, I don’t qualify. No problem, 3UK were more than happy to accept my business. What if, instead, the rep was empowered to judge my customer lifetime value, and place his bets accordingly? A year later, his bonus would be based on my profitability as a customer given the deal he offered me.

This all reminds me of the battles between cost accounting and throughput accounting, which underpins lean production ideology. Cost accounting focuses on all kinds of intermediate stuff, with various made-up and backwards-looking numbers. Throughput accounting discards most of the numbers managers typically rely on, and only cares about what really matters — which is value to the end customer. Any contact centre that measures things like “time per call” is immersed in this cost accounting madness.

So today I got angry when the agent at the other end followed the script and told me to contact the other bank to check the sort code was valid. Those who know me can tell you that it takes a lot to turn everyday placid Martin into mad Martin. Indeed, I’m sorry to have to report that — for the first time ever — I lost my cool with some poor lady in an Indian call centre. If she was incentivised to retain my custom, I suspect the word ‘sorry’ might have entered her head. Instead, she stuck to the script.

So as a simple money transfer is beyond Citibank’s capability, my closing words of “no, I’ll take my banking business elsewhere” will be turned into action. I’m terrible at choosing banks — my business bank, The Co-operative Bank, is utterly hopeless. So if anyone can recommend a solvent, competent UK retail bank (assuming such an entity exists) do let me know!

UPDATE: Ooh! A nice, apologetic man from Citibank has given me a call. You know, all you have to do is treat the customer as a human, and not a moron. The sort code problem is not theirs (or mine — blame Nationwide Building Society), but the customer care problem is.

Not the cheese shop sketch

Man walks into a mobile phone store.

Ouch!

No, let’s do that again. This time without the faintest hint of a joke.

Man walks into a 3UK retail store on Princes Street in Edinburgh.

“I’d like to buy a prepaid mobile broadband SIM card please”.

“I’m sorry, but we don’t sell those.”

How do they stay in business? I want to know the secret to making money without sales! Just don’t expect me to blog it when I find out…

We hate our customers

I know I haven’t been posting in ages, but I just couldn’t resist putting up this one in honour of the return of The One to the blogosphere.

Footnote 67 from T-Mobile UK’s business pricing brochure [PDF] on their roaming charges (no, please don’t ask why I’m spending Sunday evening reading this stuff):

Any undelivered text messages will be charged at 30p.

Says it all really, doesn’t it, about the telecoms industry’s attitude to the people who pay the bills.