telecom elearning, telecom training, telecommunications | Telecom WebCentral

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.

Haha, 'push to listen' - interesting concept, it's like an audio presence, like a reverse twitter, or more like a reverse spinvox... maybe I should develop an android client that responds to sms: you could tweet or sms "ptl" to me and get audio back, or a transcript of the audio.

with push-to-talk, though, you first have to accept the 'talk'. But first accepting the 'listen' at push-to-listen kind of defies the concept....

You would pre-approve access to selected people.

Brilliant, as always.
Thanks again for the joke too, Martin.
(The diggers looking and finding nothing so they discovered the past tribes had wireless, as oppossed to those diggers who found copper)
Dan

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.

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).

Hey, if you use wvdial to control it under linux this doesn't have to be a problem.

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.

I understand the point that you want to make but in this case the online storage service should really be smart enough to check file hashes and understand that you are just moving files around and not deleting old files and uploading new files.

Even with fiber uploading 30GB is a pain.

Glad you like Jungle Disk...now don't you wish you had my wife's 50 meg symmetrical fiber connection.... :-)

She uses JungleDisk and the SureWest fiber access which costs $200 a month to upload her patients charts and her medical notes. Sure makes it easy when her husband is always buying her a new computer....she just got a Acer Aspire One and an Asus 901 XP as well as a few Linux EEE PC's for the office...her favorite is the Dialogue FlyBook V5...of course, it's also the priciest.

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 oldideas 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.

So much wrong, so much to do. :) How simple to just go "too much noise - go to DTMF"; your sort code issue just needed to know who you were at the end of the day, so we are back to your issue of deep authentication; aaaaand when something is going wrong with the process, stop, and go to a live agent. Oh and did I mention that you should be able to do all that with a pop up click-2-call, with the context of your forwarded as a "call whisper", i.e. the information gets forwarded to the call centre, from the screen session, so that you don't have to go all over that again. This stuff is here today, I know, our company does it. But there is so much more that can be done by thinking more about how online and offline will mesh together.

At least you don't live in Holland. Read this for a laugh, and a cry (too long to repost):
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.34.html#subj7