Programming Blog

By Chris Bucholtz

I’ve written about this in the past, but it bears repeating: All the CRM technology, process refinement, customer intelligence and sales efficiency in the world is worthless unless your company is truly customer-focused, and never more so than when a customer has a service issue. One bad service experience can turn all the relationship-building a company does into nothing more than hollow promises and unmet expectations. It’s like a friendship: It’s easy to pal around when things are going well, but your real friends are there in tough times. And the companies that understand this have the opportunity to turn tough times into long-term loyalty.

In service-intensive industries – cable television, telecommunications, utilities – you’d think that providers would have seized on these opportunities a long time ago. Their customer relationships start with a service call, and any future service calls are likely to be urgent, since these industries represent technologies we’ve grow to take for granted. But even in churn-intensive areas like telecommunications, service has taken a back seat.

Why? “So many businesses are focused on creating the next big thing, the next great product, and fail to see the value of putting the focus on service,” says Yuval Brisker, CEO of TOA. “As a result, a lot of intensely creative people are focused on innovation in products, but very few are given the opportunity to innovate around supporting the customer.”

Brisker’s company works at solving one obvious area with room for improvement – customer appointment management. The goal is to move away from the old model – “Our technician will be there between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.” – and move to a new one where customers are kept informed, the service window is narrowed – and providers end up saving money, too. For example, in cases where a customer must leave during that window, there should be a system in which the customer can call and let the provider know this data, and which allows the data to be routed to service personnel. Without it, a technician may visit an empty house, delaying the customer’s service and necessitating another visit. Each visit can cost between $400 and $1000 – so making sure that every visit goes to a ready customer is important.

“You want a chain of communication to the customer,” said Brisker, “so they know they can make that call and it’ll be heard and acted upon, and so they know when service will arrive.” TOA delivers that in a SaaS solution, with a self-learning capability that updates the system’s reactions based on past customer patterns.

Those are the basics of what TOA is providing, but Brisker sees the opportunity to be much larger. He sees these industries in need of harnessing some of the intelligence they collect about their users and expanding their loyalty-building efforts from service calls to other areas. “For example, we all see the offers made to new customers, but what about the customers who stay with providers?” he said. “How can we make them feel we care for them and the $70 or $80 a month they spend for services? That constituency needs to be taken care of, and there’s a need to acknowledge loyalty in the long term.”

But that again goes to the idea that innovators don’t get directed to customer service, Brisker said. “Service has been relegated to the backwater,” he said. “You just can’t provide a great product and then have creativity stop there.”

Google might be making it easier to adopt Google Voice by letting users bring an existing number.

Getting started with Google Voice could be easier if you could bring an existing phone number.

(Credit: Google)

Techcrunch reports that Google plans to bring the concept of number portability to its Google Voice product, allowing you to use an existing cell phone number as your Google Voice number. At the moment, those who sign up for Google Voice are given a brand-new phone number that others can call to a reach a user at home, work, or on the mobile.

The trouble is that when you call somebody back who called your Google Voice number, the number that appears in their caller ID window is the number of the device that you’re using, forcing them to store several different numbers in their phone anyway to know who’s calling them and causing confusion over just which number to use. As an addition to the number portability efforts, Google is supposedly working on software that will let you broadcast your Google Voice number from your assorted handsets.

Google isn’t going to be your wireless carrier just yet; you’ll still have to have some sort of account with a carrier to deliver your calls, texts, and e-mails. Google Voice also lets users access voice mail transcriptions from their e-mail in-boxes and set up conference calling, among other things.

Google Voice is still in limited use; you have to have been a customer of GrandCentral, acquired by Google in 2007, to use the service. In March, Google said it would open up the service to everyone in “a number of weeks,” which gives it a pretty large window.

On-demand streaming music service Spotify just announced the addition of more than 90,000 releases to its catalogue. The announcement came on the heels of their recent deal with CD baby, and users will be pleased. The company published two lists sorted by artists and labels early this morning.

While Spotify is not yet available to North American audiences, legal streaming music services have certainly proved their demand with competitors like Grooveshark, Lala and Tunerec seeing steady growth.

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In addition to allowing users to listen to music and share files and playlists, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek continues to forge partnerships in his “commitment to developing the world’s biggest music catalogue.” Given that Lala claims that it also offers “over 6 million songs for free”, this is no easy feat.

Launched in 2006 the service is available in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Spain, France and Finland. The service is already so popular that crafty audiophiles outside of the service areas have been accessing it via proxy server. Spotify is invite-only and currently offers streaming music via Mac, Windows and Linux, and device integration on the Android, iPhone and Nokia S60 series is well on its way. The service also allows users to scrobble to Last.fm and keep track of their listening through the popular music recommendation site.

On a related note, Silicon Alley Insider and Reuters reported that Virgin Media is about to launch an MP3 music download subscription service in partnership with Universal. Virgin media broadband customers will listen to streaming music and pay for tracks from Universal’s catalogue. Virgin is looking to form new partnerships with UK-based labels and create a comprehensive catalogue upon launch. This play by a major media company may have dire effects on Spotify and its competitors. At this time, Spotify also offers links to downloadable tracks and a huge selection of tracks, but it will be interesting to see who consumers choose to deliver their tunes.

Discuss