Decoding the new economy

Customer service is no longer a department

Customer service needs to pervasive through modern organisations says Salesforce’s Alex Bard

When it comes to customer service businesses, Alex Bard calls himself a ‘career entrepreneur’, having founded four startups in the field since the mid 1990s.

In 2011 he sold his most recent business, Assist.ly, to Salesforce and became the company’s Vice President for Service Cloud and the Desk.com customer service offerings.

Bard tolds Decoding the New Economy last week how social media and Big Data are radically changing how organisations respond to the needs of their clients.

“I’ve been in the industry for twenty years and I’ve never been excited as I am now,” Bard says. “The real transformational things that’s happening now are these revolutions – the social revolution, the mobile revolution, the connected revolution.”

The philosophy of customer service

“What they’re really driving is this idea that customer service is no longer a department, it’s a philosophy.”

“It’s a philosophy that has to permeate throughout the organisation. Everybody in the company has a role in support. It’s not just about a call centre or a contact centre or even an engagement center which is what these things are called today.”

“I really don’t like the word ‘centre’ because I really fundamentally believe that everbody in that company has to interact with customers, has to engage and has to the information – no matter they are – about that customer to provide context.”

Abolishing the service visit

With the Internet of Things, Bard sees GE’s social media connected jet engine as illustrating the future of customer service where smart machines improve customer service.

“They’re going to capture more data in one year than in their entire 96 year history prior,” says Bard. “With that data they’ll be able to analyse and do things on behalf of that product or service that’ll reduce the number of issues.”

“Because the best service of all is one that doesn’t have to happen.”

In this respect, Bard is endorsing the views of his college Peter Coffee who told Decoding the New Economy last year that the internet of machines may well abolish the service visit.

“Connecting devices is an extraordinary thing,” says Coffee. “It takes things that we used to think we understood and turns them inside out.”

“If you are working with connected products you can identify behaviours across the entire population of those products long before they become gross enough to bother the customer.”

For Alex Bard, the customer service evolution has followed his own entrepreneurial career having evolved from being personal computer based in the 1990s to today’s industry that relies on cloud computing, big data and social media technologies.

As these technologies roll out across industry, businesses who adopt the customer service philosophy Bard describes are much more likely to adapt to the disruptions we’re seeing across the economy. Changing corporate cultures is one of the great tasks ahead for modern executives.

Kickstarting the smarthome revolution

The latest Decoding the New Economy video interviews Daniel Friedman of Sydney startup Ninja Blocks.

The latest Decoding the New Economy clip is up with an interview with Daniel Friedman of Sydney startup Ninja Blocks.

Ninja Blocks focuses on controlling smarthomes with basic “if, then” rules where house holders can set basic instructions like “if the garage door opens after 5pm then turn on the kettle.”

It’s an interesting interview that covers Ninja Blocks’ vision along with the challenges of selling electronic devices globally and how to run a successful Kickstarter campaign for a hardware startup.

Microsoft struggles with in car technologies

Microsoft Windows faces further challenges as it loses market share and revenue in the automotive market

As Microsoft prepare for a major launch at this week’s Mobile World Congress, the news isn’t good for the company’s flagship Windows operating system.

Two Bloomberg reports illustrate the problems; the major story is the company is planning to drop licensing fees for Windows 8.1 while the other, still serious, news is that Ford will be dropping Windows as its in-car operating systems.

Automotive systems are one of the key markets for Microsoft as the company tries to move into markets beyond the stagnating personal computer sector and should the reports be true that Ford is looking at moving to the rival Blackberry owned QNX system then Windows Embedded has taken an embarrassing blow in a key market.

More serious though is Bloomberg’s report that Microsoft plans to cut its licensing fees for Windows installed on cheaper devices.

While not unexpected, this will damage the company’s earnings given the Windows division made up 22% of Microsoft’s earnings last year.

It’s clear that the free Android system is beginning to hurt Microsoft both in the smartphone and personal computer markets.

For Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella, dealing with Windows’ place in the new Microsoft is going to be one of his most pressing challenges and will almost certainly define his first year in the role.

As the Internet of Things and Machine to Machine markets grow, Microsoft is going to have quickly decide if the company wants to compete in the market.

Could the Internet of Things grow by fifty times?

Cisco Systems’ Visual Networking Index forecasts M2M data traffic will grow fifty fold in the next four years.

One of the annual events in the tech world is Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, the company’s survey of internet traffic trends.

The numbers, as always, are staggering and this year Cisco are forecasting that global internet traffic will grow by a factor of eleven over the next four years to 190 exabytes – that’s 190,000,000,000,000Mb or the equivalent of 19o billion hard drives.

What’s particularly fascinating about this year’s index Cisco forecast that by 2018 there will be more mobile devices on the planet than people.

Many of those devices will be the sensors and equipment that makes up the Internet of Things (IoT), or Machine to Machine (M2M) technologies and Cisco expects the internet traffic in this area to surge fifty-fold over the next four years.

This is remarkable as most of the M2M devices don’t use much data as the vast majority only need to send out the odd short signal – as opposed to smartphones that download megabytes of information each day.Cisco’s predictions underscore just how pervasive this technology is going to become in the next few years, the challenge for us is to understand how to use and protect the masses of data these systems are going to generate.

The evolution of the Internet of Things

Cooking Hacks shows how the internet of things evolved out of other technologies

One of the notable things about modern technology is that few of the developments are actually new, the Internet of Things is a good example of this.

Most of the tech we talk about is a collection of existing technologies that have been cobbled together — cloud computing, 3D printing and the Internet of things are all good examples of this.

Libelium’s Cooking Hacks community page has a good infographic on how the makers’ movement, crowd funding and miniaturization have driven the development of the Internet of Things, 3D printing and wearable technologies.

The diagram, shown at the bottom of the post, is a good illustration of how technologies are evolving and the businesses that are being spawned from the developments.

Cooking Hack’s infographic show why it’s an exciting time to be in business.

Network neutrality and the internet of things

Yesterday’s US Supreme Court decision ruling against network neutrality is a mixed bag for the Internet of Things industry.

Yesterday’s US Supreme Court decision ruling against the Federal Communication Commission’s regulations on network neutrality is a mixed bag for the Internet of Things industry.

Network neutrality is the principle that all internet traffic is treated the same, regardless of its nature or destination.

The FCC rules meant US based Internet Service Providers weren’t allowed to discriminate between different types of services, for instance blocking Netflicks or allowing faster downloads from Amazon.

In the United States network neutrality has been a bone of contention between consumer groups, government regulators and ISPs for over a decade, although it hasn’t been much of an issue outside North America.

For Machine to Machine (M2M) or Internet of Things (IoT) vendors and services there is some attraction in Telcos being able to offer prioritised traffic for mission critical systems.

In applications like supply chain management and public safety, reliability of the connection is essential and something the ‘best effort’ services offered by ISPs are not well suited to.

When networks are overcapacity, say at sporting events or during disasters, being able to shed non critical traffic may be important for emergency services and the devices they may depend upon.

So for IoT and M2M services, network neutrality is not necessarily a good thing.

However there is a downside should network neutrality be overturned, the risk of vendor lock in is high and it’s quite possible to see as situation where, for instance, AT&T enter into an agreement with Google to provide the public network capabilities for Nest home automation devices.

This could see Nest customers suffering a substandard service if they choose another provider.

Internationally the attitude towards network neutrality has been that competition will sort things out, however the IT and telco industries do have a habit of trying to enforce their own monopolies on customers – something we’re currently seeing in the Apple-Google battles over smartphones and connected vehicles.

So it isn’t clear whether network neutrality isn’t a good thing for the M2M sector, however it’s something that’s going to play out as these technologies become more ubiquitous across the economy.

Who pays for the internet of things?

Our assumptions about where the money will be made from the internet of things may turn out not be so.

“If there’s one number I’d like you to remember, it’s 19 trillion.” Cisco CEO John Chambers told the 2014 International CES during his keynote speech earlier this week.

Chambers was referring to the economic value of the Internet of Things or machine to machine technologies as they get rolled out across society, but who pays for the connectivity?

In the case of the smart home, office, factory or farm the data costs go onto the existing internet bill, but once you get out of the office or on the road then the bills start mounting up as systems start connecting to a cellular or satellite network.

Certainly the telcos see the opportunity with Ovum Research predicting telco’s M2M revenues will grow to reach US$44.8bn over the next five years.

While for logistics companies and similar businesses this will be just another cost of doing business, for many consumers being stuck with an expensive mobile data plan with their smart car might not be attractive.

As car manufacturers start to push their vehicles as being more like smartphones, suddenly the choice of network provider, compatibility with apps and operating systems starts to become a valid concern.

In that world, choosing a car on the basis of which telco it connects to is a sensible idea.

Of course it may be that consumers may not own cars by the end of the decade. The vision of companies like Zip Car and Uber is that we just call for a towncar or pick up a share car when we need one.

Certainly that vision makes sense from an economic perspective and the trends right now show that millennials are nowhere near as interested in cars as their parents and grandparents were.

As with every technological change, it’s not always obvious in the early days how things will pan out. In 1977 the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation Ken Olsen said, “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Within 15 years he was proved very wrong.

The motor car drove western society during the Twentieth Century and to assume we’ll continue to use it the same way in the 21st is as flawed as believing a hundred years ago that we’d continue to use horse carriages the same way as previously.

So the assumptions about where money is to be made with the Internet of Things may turn out to surprise us all.

Category: Internet of Things

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