Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: consumer

Using your customers to build a world beating business
Listening to your customers is a business truism, it’s so obvious that it really shouldn’t have to be said. Unfortunately all of us have to be reminded of this sometimes.

The amazing thing is today’s business has the tools not just to listen to our customers, but also to react quickly.

At Microsoft’s Asia Pacific Entrepreneur summit this week, we had the opportunity to hear from some of leading voices of the Australian startup and investment community.

One of the things that really leapt out from the array of founders, investors and entrepreneurs is how successful businesses thrive from listening to their customers.

Michelle Deaker spoke of her experience in founding giftcards.com in 1997. At that time there was no experience in running an online gift card business and the only way to figure out what worked was to listen to customers. Eventually Michelle sold out of the business and today talks from the investment side of building enterprises as the CEO of OneVentures.

Viocorp founder Ian Gardiner described how their video streaming business not only has to adapt to customers’ needs but also to a market that has dramatically changed over the last decade.

Moving quickly to respond to those market changes is something Sebastien Eskersley-Maslin of Blue Chilli touched upon in his presentation where startups in their Venture Technology program are encouraged to get a built product out of the door in three months.

“You can’t build quickly enough” says Sebastien.

Sebastian also has a three customer view – there’s the customer that you build the product for, the bulk customer such as a corporation and the “strategic customer” who is the potential buyer for your business.

Considering the business buyer as being the ultimate customer fits into the Silicon Valley model of “flipping” business which isn’t applicable for many ventures although it illustrates that we need to consider customers through the prism of our own business objectives.

That we often don’t listen to customers is unforgivable in an always on, connected world. We have the communications tools like social media and the business intelligence tools to monitor visits to our websites and sales through our stores.

In a world where we’re lionizing technology startups on the basis of the number of users – note “users” are not the same as “customers” – or the amount of money a large corporate will pay for a small development team, it’s important we don’t lose touch with the basis of all businesses.

Ultimately it’s the customers who matter – if we don’t solve a problem, fill a need or provide value then our businesses are ultimately worthless.

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July 11, 2012
Managing your digital estate
Everyone who goes online leaves “digital footprints“, a trail of the things we’ve done on the web. When you pass away, what happens to those status updates, comments and documents you’ve left on the Internet?

Dealing with the passing of a loved one is always difficult but today we have an added complexity of dealing with the online problems of social media sites suggesting people still “like” the deceased or valuable documents locked into cloud computing services.

With more of us storing information into cloud computing services, having important data locked away becomes a real risk and how online storage or software companies deal with deceased estates becomes important.

Online services don’t have a standard way of dealing with the data of someone who has passed away, here’s a quick sampler of some of the different policies.

Facebook

The social media giant has the easiest way to manage a deceased’s profile, simply fill in a form and swear you’re telling the truth. Facebook will then “memorialize” the account.

“Memorializing” is an interesting way of dealing with user’s passing. Rather than deleting the account, Facebook will lock out everyone but friends who are still able to post to the deceased’s wall. In some aspects, this is quite an elegant solution.

LinkedIn

One of the features of LinkedIn is that it gives upfront suggestions of who should be in your network. If you’re a heavy user of the service, you’ve almost certainly encountered a suggested contact that is either inappropriate or distressing so the stakes for LinkedIn in keeping their contacts up to date is high.

LinkedIn’s process of dealing with a deceased’s passing is an email to customerservice@linkedin.com with the word “deceased” in the subject line. You need to give some details on the user’s passing and their account.

Google

With Google offering both social and cloud computing services, they are probably the most important service of all. Google’s requirements for handing over account details are rightly stringent.

Google’s procedure for deceased accounts involves the person first reporting the user’s passing to identify themselves first. Interestingly this has to be done by post.

Twitter

Like Google, Twitter requires anyone reporting a user’s death to mail proof of identity along with a death certificate. Once they are satisfied the user has passed away, they will deactivate the account.

PayPal

“When contacted in regards to a deceased estate we move quickly and with respect to close the customer account. Our policy and process is similar to many large financial institutions including banks When PayPal is notified that an account holder is deceased immediate steps are taken to suspend the account to prevent any unauthorised transfers from the account.

To close the account of someone who has died, PayPal needs to be sent paperwork including; details of the Executor of the Estate and a copy of the death certificate for the account holder. The documentation is reviewed and, once authenticated, the account is closed. If there are funds in the PayPal account, then these will be issued to the Executor of the Estate.

With bankrupt estates we refer this directly to our legal team who deal with them on a case-by-case basis and take action according to the instruction provided by the person or company handling the bankruptcy.”

Apple

No specific policy, the company recommends “customers needing guidance in relation to a deceased estate contact iTunes support at http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/contact/“.

Amazon

No clear policy. The company has been approached for comment.

Digital estate management services

There’s a number of services which help manage digital identities after someone passes away. Mashable reviews a number of these.

Sharing passwords

One simple solution is to share passwords with your next of kin, but that is a horrible security risk which isn’t recommended.

A slightly different solution is to split passwords in two and give half to different people, that still has risks and can get complex.

Probably the biggest problem with passwords is they change. Even if you write the password in your will or share it with trusted loved ones there’s a good chance it may have changed in the meantime.

Central email accounts

Probably the easiest, albeit still risky solution, is to have all online services pointing to one email address. almost every service has a “recover my password” feature which an executor or loved one with access to the central address will be able to recover most account login details.

Should everything else fail there are the courts and every major online service will obey a properly executed legal order although anything involving lawyers invariably ends up messy, difficult and expensive so that course should be the last resort.

As with everything online, balancing security, convenience and privacy is a difficult task for both individuals and companies. It’s not made better by the distress and grief when someone passes away.

Ideally we’d all plan these things and it would be easy on our loved ones although things often don’t turn out that way. It’s as true online as in any other aspect of life.

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June 20, 2012
Delivering products
Once upon a time the local plumber got to work by bicycle, then he got a jalopy and now he shows up in a van or a hotted up ute. The plumber and his customers don’t care about the way his services are delivered.

A hundred years ago the retail industry was dominated by corner stores that customers could walk to, they received their deliveries by horse drawn carts and made deliveries on bicycles.

Then along came the motor car, which changed shopping habits and delivery methods.

Fifty years later the corner stores were a dying breed as they were replaced by supermarkets which customers could drive to and they took their deliveries by truck.

Today the retail industry is changing again, as the Internet changes shopping habits and society in ways similar to the motor car.

A similar pattern of change happened in the media sector; the evening paper died as commuters switched to cars and reading the Tribune on the tram or train home became less relevant.

Morning papers survived as people took deliveries to read over breakfast before driving to work.

At the same time radio and television became the dominant way most people got their news.

Even more the retail, the web has dramatically changed news distribution methods.

As the effects of Fairfax’s restructure sinks in, there are a group of people who don’t seem to want to accept reality – newsagents.

Mark Fletcher’s initial post about Fairfax’s restructure on his Australian Newsagency Blog attracted some harsh comments;

“Whilst the print media is arguably in decline I consider this post to be scare mongering……Fairfax will be here in print for years to come and to say or suggest that some days of the week will be or may be cut is pure conjecture at this point.”

” I am in semirural metropolitan Sydney. We have just added another 100 customers to our delivery run. Majority dont like reading their news online – old habits die hard. I hope that Fairfax dont abandon them. They like getting their newspapers in print.”

“Hi i will not pay to read online why it is all free, but will buy paper”

Focusing on print condemns those newsagents to the fate of the corner shop.

What is missed in the discussions about the future of the media is that medium is not message – people want relevant content delivered in the most convenient way.

This is true in every business. What we do is not really related to how we deliver the product, if we’re tied to one way of getting our services to a customer then we’re in trouble.

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June 19, 2012
Feeling the currents
Internet and marketing everyman Seth Godin makes an interesting point on his blog post Silencing The Bell Doesn’t Put Out The Fire.

Seth’s point is that satisfying vocal complainers doesn’t address underlying problems in the business and cites the Dell Hell saga of Jeff Jarvis as an example of where load complaints were a symptom of a much deeper issue within the business.

For Dell, this had been the choice to focus on the low value, high volume market segments. To compete there it meant cheap components and selling to comparatively uneducated, price sensitive consumers.

Compounding that decision was Dell’s decision to partly address the inevitable cost pressures they had put themselves under by outsourcing their support lines to truly dire, lowest price providers.

As a consequence of abandoning its service culture, Dell rapidly gained a reputation as being unreliable and unhelpful. One only has to look at the Dell Hell comments on Jeff’s original posts to see how damaged Dell’s name was.

I encountered Dell’s shocking support during that period first hand in PC Rescue, one customer asked me to troubleshoot her Dell PDA after their support line had reduced her to tears.

Very quickly I discovered why, the installation software supplied by Dell didn’t work properly – testing was obviously another victim of budget cuts – and the tech support people were working with an early version.

We managed to fix the problem without the “help” of Dell’s helpdesk and the client swore never again to buy Dell. She’s now a happy Apple customer who is a happy to pay a slightly higher sticker price for a better product and service.

The real concern was that during this period Dell’s management were oblivious to the problems they were suffering in the marketplace, they were meeting their KPIs and appeared to be growing sales while the business itself was about to go over a cliff.

Dell’s management could have recognised this had they chosen to, the company had plenty of market intelligence, customers surveys and their support logs to tell them they had a problem. It wasn’t in their interests to do so.

Today every business has those tools to monitor what customers are saying about them. Google Alerts, Facebook and – if you’re in hospitality – Tripadvisor, Yelp or Eatability.

With social media it’s easy for the bad message to get out; it’s also easy for management or owners to watch out for problems.

Dell only survived the Dell Hell experience because they were big and well capitalised, no smaller business could have survived similar damage done to their reputation.

Smaller businesses don’t have the luxury of ignoring their customers until the screams become too loud.

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June 11, 2012
Disrupting the markets
Generally it’s not a good idea to have nearly a hundred slides in a presentation, but Mary Meeker’s overviews of the tech industry are so rich in data it’s impossible not to spend a weekend looking over the entire sldieshow.

Last week Mary gave her presentation at the All Things Digital conference and as usual she identified a range of trends and issues in the technology industries.

Smartphone upsides

Still the early days of smartphone adoption, with 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide but only 954 million smartphones activated.

This adoption is driving mobile revenues with income growing at 153% per year. Although as she shows later, this is not necessarily good news for everybody.

Print media’s continued decline

A constant in Mary’s presentations over recent years the key slide in has been ad spend versus usage across various mediums.

In this year’s version we still print still vastly over represented with 25% of US advertising while TV remains static, although Henry Blodget at Business Insider thinks the tipping point might be arriving for broadcasters.

Online’s thin returns

One of the things that really jumps out is how thin onlie revenues really are. In annual terms services like Pandora and Zynga are making between 6 and 25 dollars per active user over a year.

These tiny revenues indicate the problem content creators have in making money on the web, after the gatekeepers like Pandora or Spotify have taken their cut, there isn’t much left to go around.

Facebook and Google are also encountering problems as users move to mobile where revenues are even smaller than those from desktop users. This is constraining both services’ earnings growth.

Disrupting markets and governments

Mary’s presentation goes on to look at the disruption web and mobile technologies are bringing to various markets – it’s a good overview of whats changing right now and the products driving the changes.

It’s not just markets that are being disrupted with Mary also looking the US’s budget position and entitlement culture. This in itself is a massive driver of change which will have a deep effect on our lives regardless of where we live.

Are we in a bubble?

Mary finishes up with a look at whether we’re in a tech bubble or not.

Her view is that we are and we aren’t – there are silly valuations of companies in the private market however the poor performance of tech stocks on the stock market indicate the public aren’t being fooled.

One telling statistic is the only 2% of companies have accounted for nearly all the wealth creation of the 1,720 US tech IPOs between 1980 and 2002. There’s little to indicate much has changed in the decade since.

The optimism in funding new businesses is based in the disruption they are bringing to markets and industries – you only need one eBay or Google in your portfolio and you’re a legend, if not filthy rich.

Both the economic and technological changes are disrupting our own businesses and this is why its worth reading and understanding Mary Meeker’s presentations if only to be prepared for the inevitable changes.

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June 4, 2012