Human Touch

Elvis Costello could easily have been talking about customer experiences when he penned:

“I just want someone to talk to

And a little of that human touch.”

We’ve all had that frustrating experience of a customer support line interactive voice response (IVR) system (voice jail) that makes it very difficult to speak with a human.

So I was struck by the blog post: “How come no one CRM’s me?”.

I was struck because we are often asked: “So how are you different from a CRM system?” Quite simply:

1)      CRM systems are – at their core – a database.  They are used to capture, record, and retrieve data about customers.

2)      Prolifiq is – at its core – a communications platform. It is used to engage with customers, augmenting a human experience with digital content.

Every toolbox has multiple tools and each is used for a different purpose. One needs tools to talk about a customer; one needs tools to talk with customers. The task determines which tool is needed when.

I WAS the Remote

Co-worker Rock and I often laugh about growing up in the 1960’s during the heyday of television, talking about how we were the “remote controls” — having to get up out of a chair and change the channel for a parent/sibling.

Today, Avrim Pitch penned an article about 15 common technology items today’s infants will never use.

Several years ago, we provided my sons cell phones for us to stay in touch. My eldest asked me: “Dad, what kind of cell phone did you have when you were a kid?” I laughed so hard I almost snorted my coffee, telling him I was 26 when they were invented.

The technology march is incessant. I have witnessed: a) punch cards to tape; tape to floppies; floppies to hard disk; hard disk to solid state; now the cloud; b) vinyl to tape; tape to CD, CD to MP3; c) rotary dial to touch tone; analog to digital voice; wireline to cellular; d) mainframe to mini; mini to micro; micro to smartphone; smartphone to tablet; e) command-line to GUI; GUI to touch; touch to voice; voice to gesture. (See: “Wave goodbye to how we use computers”).

The pace of change is accelerating, causing product life cycles to shorten. A result — we can be easily seduced into chasing “the shiny new object.” However, it is important to remember that our business applications should provide productivity enhancements first, wow factor second. If you can do both, you have a winner.

Specificity

Over the last several weeks, we have had 7 conversations with prospective customers who asked: “Is it possible to replace our laptops with iPads?”

The short answer is: not yet. Let me explain.

In a recent WSJ article the challenges of wide-scale tablet deployment are discussed. Several case studies pointed out specific problems. One is that tablets are not a universal solution for all employees. Computing devices, as with any “tool” have specific things they are good at. The same goes for application software.

Another issue is file format compatibility. One case explored the variant differences between the Microsoft Office suite and the Apple office productivity suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote). In the short term, this is probably the greatest hindrance to iPads displacing PCs.

I do believe, in the not too distant future, that tablets will evolve to become laptop devices for specific occupations; and, the key to this evolution will be occupation specific applications that are tailored to device capabilities.

In the meantime, it is important for organizations to experiment and innovate – as long as this innovation has an eye towards the future where this evolution becomes a reality.

Create AND Curate

(This post is a follow-on to: “Now What?” and “What are we Waiting For?”  in which I explore ways to measurably increase employee productivity through the use of iPads and/or iPhones).

The iPad began life as a very effective media player or media consumption and presentation device. It is quite effective at playing music, interactive presentations, videos and retrieving email. This has led to its widespread adoption in mobile workforce communities (think sales forces) and has caused an explosion of creative development in the application and platform spaces – Prolifiq is one of these platform providers.

However, one of the questions we are often asked by customers looking at our platform for the first time is: “How are we ever going to be able to produce enough content to make this worthwhile?”

The simple answer is: Create and Curate.

Knowledge workers need to be knowledgeable – knowledgeable about their own company and products, their competition and their industries in general. Corporations spend a ton of money creating content for consumption by their own employees. The problem is they either: 1) publish it to a “portal” site hidden behind a VPN (virtual private network) connection that is cumbersome and unwieldy for remote employees, or 2) they “blast” it out to their employees via email, further burdening an already crowded communication channel. And, once delivered via email, it is really, really difficult to control what happens to this content (as evidenced by how many “confidential” internal memos end up in the hands of the press).

If one steps back and examines their organization, one realizes there is more than ample content to publish to mobile devices, and this content can be aggregated, syndicated, and controlled using appropriate standard operating procedures (SOPs), including approving who gets to see what. BusinessWeek has a great perspective on this.

Additionally, employees have the need to know what is going on around them. One way they do this is by surfing the web. Is it any wonder these activities have made Google larger than the entire US newspaper industry?

I repeat my question from my last entry: “What are we waiting for?” These converging trends represent a unique opportunity to repurpose created content, curate publicly available content, and then filter, manage and publish this content to appropriate employees. And, most importantly, know what content is being consumed by whom, when and what they are doing with it.

This can turn unproductive wait time into “knowledge-time” and you will likely never hear “nobody ever told me that.” And, that is a good, good thing.

Now What?

I am back from three weeks of customer meetings and trade show presentations/exhibitions. The Life Sciences industry breaks down into two distinct camps:

1)      Those who have iPads

2)      Those who will have iPads.

What’s most interesting – for Apple’s competitors – is the question no longer appears to be “should we deploy iPads?” but rather “when we deploy iPads what will we have them do?” This is indicative of the “iPhoria” I’ve witnessed.

In the case of companies who have deployed iPads (these are first-mover companies, often referred to as “innovators” on the product adoption curve), there are some common themes:

1)      They have often deployed a single use-case application that most often is not integrated with back-end databases or legacy applications

2)      Administrators state it is “too early” to report success or failure (from a purely analytical/quantitative perspective)

3)      There seems to be no limit to requests for additional capabilities

4)      Much to the chagrin of marketers, IT is getting involved.

As with any product adoption, the innovators have made it easier for the “fast followers” to adopt as there are learnings that help guide the way. But, as this unfolds, the competitive advantage the innovators realized is rapidly dissipating – they will no longer be the “only kids on the block” with iPads deployed in the field.

This begs the question: “Now what?”

Stay tuned; we have some thoughts and observations on the subject.