Michael Maoz

All I wanted was to order a replacement cartridge for my ink-swilling HP OfficeJet 5610, standard issue. I went to the site where our company has a corporate account. Nice search feature. But I wonder how much this cartridge costs versus a competitor? Now THAT would be interesting. But 692 reviews of a product that has been on the market for years and years? And not one that says, “Don’t buy it here, it is cheaper at ACMEPrint.com!”

I’ve been saying that an element of social networking is the working out of the logic of Marshall McLuhan’s “Medium is the Message” – we cannot help but interact with media. It isn’t the content. Content is the accelerant. We must look at email, SMS, Feeds, Tweets, Facebook, Salon, The Huffington Post. Resistance is futile.

I’m looking forward to a rigorous study that compares the amount of dead ending rat hole social threads, group-think, least common denominator and plain drivel on the one side with the true measurable value of the resulting ‘insight’ on the other.  Or is it going to take another million posts to discover people want to plug the hole in their coffee cups? Now there’s value.

Can anyone suggest who the best companies are at really extracting the value of networks? We have over 200 examples collected today, but they are still a small sample. And do you know of good software that helps analyze massive amounts of posts about a company that helps to detect emerging business patterns? Let me know!

Yesterday I had the honor and pleasure of interviewing a surpassingly fine USAF lieutenant. Though I can’t say much about the conversation itself, I do wish I could capture the dignity and devotion to her mission that poured through her words and gestures. She was surprised to hear I was once in the military, but hid it well except to relax a bit more into the details of what the Air Force is doing to improve the lives of service personnel.

As the conversation rolled on, there was something I could not put my finger on, something about demeanor and attitude. I started to think of the many executives I have spoken with and why this conversation seemed to soar above the rest. It was the lack of guile, the simple statements of fact and the avoidance of any talk about hierarchies and chains of command, ownership, promotion of the ‘me’ and utter absence of jargon. Instead it was a search for facts, a hope to capture the challenges faced and a desire to explore the various options for solving the challenges. There was teamwork and joint effort and common ground.

There are many moments when you just know that a project is going to succeed, and they usually are struck through, these moments, with a sense of good fortune in the right people with the right motivation. Yesterday was such a day, and were I able to bottle that devotion, I am sure we could run many more IT initiatives to good ends.

Disclaimer: The following will not escape the impression of self serving. Cynics should move on, but, you know, fools rush in….

For the past six days I have been locked in an ever-more-involving review of my research by my peers.  This is a piece of work that involved an assessment of software. My position was challenged because it seemed inconsistent with other research I had already published.  Another and another and another analyst entered the fray.

We examined my data, and created spreadsheets testing the inputs. We looked at the assumptions I had made.  It turned out that the research was on target, but the perception that it would create could potentially be  incorrectly applied by our clients. We debated different approaches until finally we found a way to depict the assessment in the way that lent itself best to practical application by our clients. 

The point is: it was not debate-for-the-sake-of-debate: it was a critical assessment that went beyond just getting the facts right and into how our clients could make informed decisions. And it was exciting, fact-based, rigorous and collegial and opened up new avenues of research. It was analysts taking on the role of advocates for our clients. It is a passion you see in all great companies, and one I see around here at Gartner every day.

I often am asked if I really experience the customer service stories that I talk about during conferences. I answer the question with a question: “Haven’t you got a story that is equally improbable but true about a service experience?”

That usually wins me another great anecdote to tell at another time. My most recent was five minutes ago booking a rental car. I opened my corporate policy statement on rental cars, got the Corporate Account Number to give the agent, and then called the call center. I had just rented a car to travel on client calls to New York and Boston the week before, booking with the same company. They had no record of my reservation and no information on my billing information, name, address, or preferences. The local pickup spot is closed in the evening. I live in a rough neighborhood. The agent quoted me rates that did not match my corporate policy, and terms and conditions that had nothing to do with those I’d received the time before and the time before that.

It will all be OK. I’ve learned that this company has good reason to keep no information about the customer in the hands of agents. They don’t have a proper contact center with security policies and privacy measures, and they don’t have a CRM system or analytics to figure out a pattern (like: oh! did you move from the spot you have been picking up cars the past 12 years?).

The last thing they would want is to show customers that they care, or that they recognize their economic value, or to engage proactively. Better to flood the media with advertisements, and get into search engines and sponsor events. Keep filling the marketing funnel and the let the leaky sales and retention bottom of the funnel fend for itself.

What was I saying? Anyway, I often am asked if I really experience the customer service stories that I talk about during conferences. Did I already tell you that one? Oh. Sorry, let me start again……

I am still on the fence about Twittering. I’m even becoming more reluctant to post a blog. First off: for every point of view I might proffer, there may be a logical counter-point. Yet, there is something much darker out there in the blabbersphere: a bit of the passive aggressive. The little voice, half informed, given an electronic pulpit for an always-on congregation.

Eventually we may work out these festering septics with some more elegant, effective antiseptics, but until then, let’s watch each other’s backs. And give each other the benefit of a doubt. When in doubt, don’t spout.

Enough for an alliterative and Onomonopoetical Friday. Here is to kindness.

I was in an endless loop of telephone branching logic last week, uncertain whether to Press 2 for this, 3 for that, 4 or 5 or…. Then I forgot what Press 2 was for and got into another branch of logic and dead ends. I finally did what I often do: I tried #0, then *0 – and got a live person who tried to connect me with the proper department. She couldn’t explain what my correct choice should have been, but did transfer me and wait until the call was picked up.

This got me to thinking about the same company’s web presence and “Social Media” efforts. They are spending a lot of time, and tying up a lot of resources, setting up communities. Communities are all the rage. One simply must set one up! Listen to the voice of the customer! For most companies it is more about following the crowd, and the crowd wants you to know that you can natter away 24/7 on their site.

Meanwhile, in the voice response, and call distribution, and email response part of the customer service experience, organizations are unable to provide that experience of immediacy. Wait, search, try, fail, repeat, try, fail, repeat.

How long before your customers catch on that your social networking effort is bogus? Until they figure out that weaknesses in your customer service experience point to your true colors?

Here is a great exercise for your social networking / community sites: have someone suggest that they set up a map of your phone system so frustrated customers can navigate your phone system. Think about it: why enlist highly-paid personnel, or use sophisticated software to unravel the roots of your telephone routing issues when you can use the power of the community to map your system, rate the system, comment on what, exactly, is wrong from their perspective, and then rate you for your efforts? The fact is, when you enlist them in the effort, you acknowledge that it is not simple and you empower them to make a difference. And you can rate your effort from your customers’ eyes.

Social networks can have some real power even without solving a problem: the act of opening up to customers and acknowledging areas of challenge is important. Sometimes the best way to earn trust is to show your flaws.

One of the first discussions parents used to have with their children as they emerged into teenagers might have been dating, jobs, savings, and responsibility. But it wasn’t mine with my oldest daughters. It was not about the person they are, but about the persona they want to be known by on the internet.  As their fingers raced them across new social sites like Facebook and MySpace, together with IM and Skype and Flickr, it creeped me out that they were leaving notes, thoughts, and snapshots behind.

Instead of the birds and bees it was the wolves and the sociopaths, and future university recruiters and corporations reviewing their resumes. The basic discussion was: “What’s better, a picture of a garden hose in your mouth with beer pouring down a funnel, or you tending a garden in Guatemala in an impoverished village with a sweet comment about how you are tutoring for free during the mosquito-infested summer?”

“But dad, I’ve never been to Guatemala!”

“So what? Are you going to put it on your college application or resume? No. But it creates a great impression!”

And so they embarked on viewing their profiles as ways of shaping how they would want an anonymous lurker (employer, recruiter…) to perceive them.

OK, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. It is pretty basic that we are fools to think that the musings, personal data paths, postings, transactions and connections that we perform as a part of any activity passing through a social network will be captured, aggragated, and shared with people and organizations we don’t want to share with. And as business owners and government officials and university officers, we’d better think about this.

And yet there are so many Pollyannas who don’t believe data is shared without our permission. Welcome to the world of the HTTP referrer header, ladies and gentleman. And just wait until your customers and non-customers ask for your internet Bill of Rights (First discussed, I think – but correct me please - in 2007 by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington). What might be in it?
 We, the customer, control the elements in our profile, and no one else. • We get to delete any and all of our social and personal data. • We decide if you can track our movements. • We get to decide who has access to them.

That’s just the beginning. Until then, we’d all better get to thinking about where we expect the issue of surreptitious data gathering to go. Your customers are watching.

I’ve gotten nine automated calls from Sallie Mae. I don’t know Sallie. My name is not Erica (that is who they are looking for. I’ve never taken out a student loan from Sallie Mae. I’m in the guise of a modern day Mephistopheles – having helped companies move their processes to self service, the devil is now come to collect dues. I am trying to get out of the system, so I wrote down the telephone number to contact to fix ‘my’ loan problem. You had to guess I couldn’t use the Sallie Mae system unless I also gave the last four digits of ‘my’ social security number, but as I am not the person they want, I can’t get a human.

Yes, after listening to all seven interactive voice responses (IVR, or Inverted Version of Reality), I tried the one that sounded like it might not lead further into a rat hole of sub-menu. The choice yielded a pleasant voice that told me unusually long wait times of 12-16 minutes were to be expected, but I could enter my number and they would call me back.

It all worked out, and I won’t bore you, and the eventual human was terrific and polite. But let’s focus on the customer point of view and not just our own. In this case it was a simple change of number from a Sallie Mae client. It cannot be the most isolated or rare an occurence, but the system is designed from the inside out, and not from the outside in. It might even reduce queue times. Even the best of companies can learn from the voice of the customer, but we need better ways to ‘listen.’ Did you listen to this, Sallie Mae? I’m trying to do right by the both of us.

Ours is a family of five. We have family members in Graduate School, university, elementary grade, and two full time workers. Medical insurance, dental insurance (and life, homeowners, auto and property) insurance. There is separate insurance for ophthalmology. Every organization requires documents proving the same things: birth, social security, marriage, divorce, adoption, student status. Some allow document scanning (but don’t go crazy and submit anything over 10Mb!!! WHAT? A color birth certificate from Bonn is over that? Sorry: fax or mail it!!! Fax it? Yes, but not on weekends because we don’t accept them then.). Maybe as an alternative we could enter the data in one place ONCE and let all of the companies access it?

Brand drugs and off-brand drugs prescribed and accepted or not accepted, but the patient never understanding upfront why, payments and co-payments and partial payments and rejections of coverage because of improper ‘coding’ from physicians. Physicians who have given up and accept no insurance. Adverse drug interactions because no one is keeping score. Photocopies, letters, faxes, emails, trips to the Bursar, phone calls, over and over and over again. Could someone have invented the bizarre tangle of disconnected forms and processes and procedures that is the healthcare system?

And they call this the United States? Not of healthcare. In healthcare it doesn’t deserve credit as a Confederacy either. Could be why folks are shouting in Town Meetings.

The day my wireless connection dropped on vacation turned out not to be the end of the world. I didn’t know if we’d get a table for dinner, or map the direction to everything in the world from cinema to fish market to town hall. I couldn’t search, couldn’t post, and walked out into the woods along the salt marsh, and it was good.

But the idea of SaaS and the market for SaaS-built applications keeps going through my mind. Who has been wildly successful? How many sales force automation companies have gone public and succeeded? One? How many in the Customer Service area? One? How about in the ERP/CRM area? One?  Most have not succeeded, and even the few that have may have enriched the holders of the original founder shares, but that’s about it. Yes there is an exception, and it likely proves the rule.

And what about end users? Has SaaS from SaaS-only vendors revolutionized their business? Has it helped them avoid shelfware? There is not much data out there that can be independently verified by an external auditor that can say one way of the other. That is good in that people need advice on how to get the SaaS purchase decision right. But it isn’t good if you are trying to build a five year applications strategy and you are a large enterprise.

Guess this means I’m back from vacation. That was fun and this is fun, and done right, hopefully your software decisions will be too.