If the phrase “perfectly informed customer” is new to you, or you are wondering how the web has been critical to this development, then look no further than Farecast for a classic example. It’s a new company that predicts whether airfares are about to go up or down, but at the moment only works in the USA.
There’s more here…
(Thanks to Boing Boing).
With the advent of new parking meters in my home city, one of the last bastions of cash has gone. I can now pay for parking by using my credit card or by text message. The slow but inescapable death of cash has been coming for a while, especially in New Zealand where debit card payments – even for the smallest transactions – has been common place for at least 15 years.
I can remember walking into a local burger bar in the early 90’s and getting some chips (or fries) and $20 cash. About the same time I started to go to bank branches less and less.
At the other end of the spectrum mortgage brokers are now the preferred contact point for larger transactions, and people would rather spend time getting impartial advice from them and not their customer banking service rep.
These two trends would be worrying for any business on their own, but couple that with the internet creating perfectly informed customers – who, if they like, can find out just competitive their bank isn’t – and banks have a real problem.
Traditionally they have relied on branches as the touchpoint where their staff could press the flesh of their customers, not to mention feel the width of their wallets. But now they have to be very clever with how they deal with their customers, especially online and on the phone.
In New Zealand at my bank I’m told I’m a valued customer, and that comes complete with a personal banking contact and a special customer service number. It also means I get monthly printed ‘personalised updates’ from ‘the desk of my manager’ which aren’t worth their weight in recycling. The underwhelming effect of these initiatives makes me wonder what the ‘normal’ customer experience is like. Also, bear in mind that my bank is consistently voted as having the best service and best offerings in New Zealand.
Some organisations around the world have risen to the challenge. Zopa in the UK and Washington Mutual in the States are two examples that spring to mind. However in general ‘banking’ and ‘innovation’ are usually found in the same sentences with the frequency of the words ‘chocolate’ and ‘teapot’ appearing side by side.
I’d love to be proved wrong.
Following on from the HBS article (see this post) which makes the point that for crowdsourcing to really work, the cost of development must be in reach of a single user, comes this example from Japan.
In Japan there’s an interesting trend in bookstores which give away from book jackets from colourful display stands. The catch – if you can call it a catch – is that the jackets are heavily branded. The idea is that when you are reading a book, the cover is open and therefore on display for the world to see. The benefit for the reader is that the cover protects the book. So where did this idea come from?
The jackets are the brainchild of the advertising company Setup Inc. “We noticed that on the trains, many women were reading books covered by jackets they had made themselves, so we thought that if we could make covers that were nice to look at and easy to use, then they might serve as a good advertising medium,” says Setup.
Get the full story from Web Japan here
From the consistently thought provoking blog Putting People First comes this gob-smacking statistic :
“63% of mobile devices returned [for repair] are in perfect working order”
While not reknowned for being an innovator, Vodafone has certainly started to address this when it introduced ‘simple’ handsets. Although aimed at older users (read : Silver Surfers) it’s a fairly safe guess that they would have found a market which extends beyond that.
After all, it’s a classic rule of technology products that 80% of your users will only use 20% of your product’s features.