Pre-Customer Service

It’s one thing to take care of a customer. It’s a very different thing to take care of someone who might become one.  It makes me wonder if this might be a potential growth area for many businesses, when it comes to customer acquisition.

[There is a significant disclosure made at the bottom of this post, FYI]

Recently, I made a mistake that is unique to our era – I left my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S2) in a cab, accidentally.  To make matters worse, I don’t know which cab company is responsible for the cab I left it in, despite swearing up and down to six different representatives that I was SURE it was their fleet.

This presented a couple of problems for me. One: I was less than a week away from the end of my previous job, which meant I was less than a week away from the end of my corporate cell plan – I was also up in the air about what my options were going to be in the near future, and was kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place; it’s difficult to be a digital strategist, let alone an urbanite in his late 20s, without a mobile.

I did what I usually do, when I’m running out of options… I asked the internet, by which I mean Twitter.

There were a few people who I was hoping to come to my rescue, but I definitely wasn’t expecting @RogersMelanie to reach out, for a couple of reasons. For one, I wasn’t a Rogers customer – my cell provider at the time was Bell. For another reason, I wasn’t even using any of the other services provided by Rogers – my internet access is via 3web, I prefer Netflix over cable, and I don’t have a home phone.

But Melanie reached out, and we exchanged a few DMs.  When she realized I was still looking at my options for mobile providers, she asked me if I’d be interested in trying out a Rogers LTE device, and seeing if the service was what I was looking for. There was no hard sell, no expectation of any kind in return, and without extracting any kind of promise that I would sign up.

To be blunt, this is the kind of customer service that got me raving about how great being an Apple customer was; with the crucial difference that I hadn’t spent an extra $300 on a warranty.

I completely understand that it’s beneficial to reach out to influencers (and I hesitate to label myself one), but this wasn’t part of any outreach campaign that I’m aware of. This was an attempt to build a connection by helping me out when I really needed the assist. 

And while I know there are probably a lot of people in my life who’ve given Rogers a hard time at one point or another regarding their Mobile business, I’ve been impressed by the experience. If someone were to ask me which provider they should go with at this exact moment, I’d ask them a dozen questions about what device they want, what their needs are regarding their plan, and what offers they’ve gotten via phone, and in person, through representatives.

But then I’d tell them that I’d recently had a great customer service experience with Rogers, without being a customer. 

[DISCLOSURE: At the time this occurred, I had no connection to Rogers whatsoever. However, earlier this week, I found out that my new employer counts Rogers as a client, and I will likely be doing at least some work on some of their initiatives in the future. I can guarantee that neither myself, nor the Rogers representatives I spoke to, were aware of this when any of the events above occurred, but to avoid any impropriety, I wanted to call this out explicitly.]

Location Based Websites.

Location based applications are great.  I’m a huge fan.  The idea of connecting physical action to online communication speaks to me both as someone whose personal life is immersed in digital, and as a marketer who spends a significant chunk of every day looking for new and innovative ways to facilitate connecting with people through digital technologies.

[This may be why my job title is ‘Digital Facilitator’.  Alternately, it could have nothing to do with it.]

I’ve been thinking about the Nintendo DS launch, lately.  Not the slim sexy version of a few years back, or the DSi with cameras built in, or the upcoming 3DS (aka virtual boy 2.0), but the initial silver, oversized, somewhat awkward DS.  I bought one the first week it was available, because I 1) trusted nintendo to do something interesting, and 2) was excited about the potential of a touch screen as an input / control device.

It should not be surprising I own an iPhone and an iPad.

When the DS launched initially, Nintendo took advantage of it’s WiFi capabilities, creating demo games that could be downloaded only through specific locations (usually kiosks at gaming retailers, or on the convention floor).  This is a different kind of location based messaging, essentially incentivizing one specific locale, rather than incentivizing the action of checking in at a location at all (i.e., the Foursquare model).

Why not build a mobile website that exists solely on a location specific WiFi hotspot? Create content relevant to the location, information that is most valuable there, and offers that are tailored to the geography, and audience.

And then leave it locked to that one wireless network.

I’d leave the network open to access other sites, after stopping at the key location based content, just because encouraging people to stay around a hotspot, and providing utility, doesn’t really have a downside.

But for all the talk of driving traffic in-store, LBM (in my mind) focuses on a different goal - adding a branded and interactive layer to existing behaviour.  An LBW gives you a reason to visit, to stay, and to explore - as well as taking content to another level of specialization, and interaction.

Most importantly, it gives you something to talk about, an experience that requires more than loading an application to create.  If the content, and the design, are effective enough, this is an experience worth introducing other people to.

Creating artificial scarcity is a meaningful way of creating experiential value.  If you don’t believe me, research the diamond cartels.

On the Baffling Durability of Notifications.

Facebook recently updated its iPhone application, and the most disruptive feature, in my estimation, is the inclusion of push notifications as an option.  Up until this point, I’ve received certain Facebook notifications via email, to be sure I didn’t miss important information, invitations, or messages from personal and business contacts.

The thing is, notifications are just that - a notice.  And via email, especially for gmail users like myself, the fact that they exist after reading is somewhat counter intuitive.

Push notifications are perfect for this.  My phone vibrates, and more or less says ‘if you care, check this area of your Facebook account’ at which point I have the option of viewing the content on my phone, or ignoring the message.

This has me reconsidering the point of notification emails.  Email is used not because it fits the job, but because it is constant: nearly everyone has an email address, and they will check it more regularly than they will other messaging platforms.  Where text notifications wouldn’t provide enough utility (for me) a push notification sends home a very clear message - this information should not be durable, and in fact, shouldn’t be sent in a durable medium.

I’ve turned off all of my Facebook email notifications, to see if there is actually a downside for receiving these messages to my phone in a non-durable fashion.  But off the top of my head, this is a simple way to eliminate a lot of the inbox clutter I (and probably you) face on a day to day basis.  Push notifications to a mobile application, from all of my social platforms, would probably cut my email by about 25%.

Crack Pricing and iPhone Apps.

I had an excellent conversation this week, discussing pricing and the iTunes App Store.  The recent shift to allow for free applications to charge for in-app services or features, has created an ecosystem that is conducive to crack pricing - that is, the stereotypical ‘the first one’s free’ pricing scheme associated to the sales of addictive drugs.

The example in question was Boxcar, an extremely useful application that lets an iPhone user receive Push notifications twitter messages (@replies and Direct Messages).  While this may not seem beneficial, for people who use Twitter as a major communications tool, receiving a notification that someone is trying to speak with you directly is a massive boon to their (my) continuous partial attention abilities.

Boxcar’s pricing is free.  However, if you’d like to use the same service for anything beyond Twitter, including push notifications for twitter search queries, email, second twitter accounts, or facebook, the application begins charging you.  While I don’t feel the need for any of these services, I can see how many users would - I already have trouble imagining using Twitter without Boxcar, it’s that good of a service.

Similar crack pricing models should be applied to applications for news services.  Charging for the Globe and Mail application on the whole wouldn’t go over well, despite the excellent job that Spreed Inc did putting it together.  But charging $.99 a month, for full sections that aren’t included in the general app, might hold enough value to make money.

You could argue that I’m talking about the old concept of micropayments.  I often say I’m against micropayments as a model, because they have never worked, and most proponents misunderstand the issue: it’s not about charging people an amount below the threshold of notice - it’s about charging people in a method that is below the threshold of notice.

Apple has that system, in the iTunes music and app stores.  I have yet to encounter another ecommerce system that is less work, especially on a mobile platform.  Letting users pay for expansions within the application makes it even simpler, as the purchase process becomes indistinguishable from the use process.

I say the amount is less important than the process due to (admittedly) anecdotal evidence.  Everyone I know who has purchased at least one album or app on an iPhone, continues to do so.  Most of them happily report that spending three dollars isn’t much more of a barrier than spending one.  It’s equally easy, and the instant gratification of downloading directly to the device helps.

Micropayments as a solution for news are worrisome, because the newsmedia are unlikely to develop a platform that allows charging in a manner below the threshold of notice.  For the moment, iTunes offers one.

Any statements related to the creation of an ‘iTunes for news’ are missing the point entirely.  iTunes is already there.  Get to it.