Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: customer service

  • Connecting people to spaces

    Connecting people to spaces

    Beacon technologies are one of the hottest items in the Internet of Things with retailers, sports stadiums and hotels looking at how they  can use these devices to improve their operations and customer experiences.

    At Dreamforce 2014 Proximity Insight’s Steve Orell spoke on the event’s wearable panel about how their service plugs into beacon technology and customer service.

    Proximity Insight was born out of the 2013 Dreamforce Hackathon where Orell and his team were finalists. From that, the company set up operations in New York with a focus on customer relationship management in the retail industry.

    Retail isn’t the only the field that Orell sees for Proximity Insight with the hotel and casino industries as being other targets.

    “With the hotel, why check-in? Why not walk in and let your smartphone do it for you?” Orell asks.

    “It’s all about making live so much more seamless and slick,” Orell adds. “There’s opportunities in every sector.”

    For businesses looking at rolling out beacon technologies the key is to be adding value to enhance the customer experience, Orell believes.

    “You have to be delivering something to the customer beyond tracking them, it’s about making the whole retail or hospitality experience better. It has to benefit the customer.”

    With beacon technologies now becoming common and the supporting hardware being built into all smartphones, we can expect to see more applications coming onto the market. It’s worth considering how your business can use them to enhance the customer experience.

    Paul travelled to Dreamforce 2014 as a guest of Salesforce

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  • Tipping and mobile payments

    Tipping and mobile payments

    This post is the second in a series of four sponsored stories brought to you by Nuffnang.

    During the recent switch over to chip and pin payments, many in the restaurant industry feared that tips would fall and waitstaff would lose jobs, the reality is somewhat different claims PayPal.

    Last week I had the opportunity to tour the PayPal Innovation Centre in San Jose where they showed off the work they are doing in the retail and hospitality industries to change payment systems.

    One of the products they showed was their Pay At Table app that integrates into a café or restaurant’s point of sale system and allows customers to pay their bills immediately.

    The immediate reaction to this has been resistance from restaurant managers who were worried customers to skip without paying. For waitstaff, the worry was they could be replaced by an app.

    It turns out the technology has had a different effect, the productivity of floor staff in the establishments where the app has been trialled has improved substantially.

    “In a typical café it takes around ten minutes to get the check,” says the lead demonstrator of the Innovation Center, Michael Chaplin. “We find that freeing waitstaff up to help customers and letting them pay their bills faster means everybody is happier.”

    With that ten minute per table improvement, management have found customers’ satisfaction has improved and the waitstaff have seen tips improve – partly because diners are happy and also because the tipping is integrated into the payment, calculating an appropriate gratuity is always a hassle in the United States.

    That ease of payment from mobile phone and table apps is rolling across industries, it’s not just limited to the hospitality sector. Increasingly these technologies are being used by tradespeople, retailers and across the service industries

    Increased productivity is more than just saving money and reducing staff numbers, it’s about giving the customer a more seamless and easy experience.

    All business need to think carefully about how they can use technology to improve their service and increase revenues.

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  • Zen and the art of stockmarket listing

    Zen and the art of stockmarket listing

    Cloud helpdesk service provider Zendesk today debuted on the New York Stock Exchange with the stocks seeing a 49% surge on their IPO price, taking its value to just under a billion dollars.

    Last year Decoding the New Economy had the opportunity to talk to Mikkel Svane, the founder of Zendesk about his company.

    Svane is an enthusiastic, open guy and clearly passionate about customer service – a field that’s the ugly stepsister of modern business. As Svane himself says, “no-one ever gets the girls by working on the helpdesk.”

    ‘Beautiful and elegant’ is a phrase Svane uses to describe his software and it’s notable how many other founders of cloud services use those words about their products – Xero’s Rod Drury even uses it as the company’s slogan.

    Like many cloud services, both Xero and Zendesk are still not making a profit and a big fat stage for a stockmarket listing is always a worrying sign that an IPO might have been undervalued.

    At the moment though, the initial stockmarket success of Zendesk is a win for some nice guys.

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  • Customer service is no longer a department

    Customer service is no longer a department

    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.

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  • It’s tough in YouTube land

    It’s tough in YouTube land

    For owners of YouTube channels life has been tough in the last few months as Google plays with the service and its features.

    The first irritant for YouTube administrators was the integration of Google Plus into the comments that now requires commenters to have an account on Google’s social platform.

    Google’s reasoning for this is some transparency in YouTube’s comments will improve the services standards of conversation and there’s no doubt that YouTube comments truly are the sewer of the internet with offensive and downright deranged posters adding their obnoxious views to many clips.

    Unfortunately the objective of improving YouTube’s comment stream doesn’t seem to have worked which casts the effectiveness of Google’s identity obsession into doubt, but it has had the happy – and no doubt totally unintended – effect of boosting user numbers for the struggling Google Plus service.

    The latest blow for YouTubers has been Google’s copyright crackdown where the service is removing posts it claims are in breach of owners rights. Many channels, particularly game review services, are being badly hit.

    Of course the Soviet attitude to customer service that Google shares with many other Silicon Valley giants doesn’t give these folk many options of getting their problems resolved.

    All of which illustrates the risks of being dependent on one social media service which the poor YouTubers are finding this the hard way.

    Watching this play out, it’s hard not wonder how vulnerable services like YouTube are to disruption, while they have the network effect of being the leader it’s not hard to see how alienating the people who create the platform’s content opens up opportunities for new players.

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