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Customer experience in the latest Tech Quarterly (spring '07)
Apr 9, 2007
The latest Technology Quarterly from The Economist, as always, exposes some of the trends and buzzwords being discussed in the technology industry. Notably in this TQ, customer experience has some direct bearing on about half of the articles, so I thought I'd give a quick tour. (Some links may require registration.)
• The article Watching the web grow up describes the skepticism that Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, has about the incessant hype about "Web 2.0." (On the other hand, The Economist is happy to add that the Web 2.0 trend "is making many traditional media companies tremble.")
Berners-Lee states that user-generated content "was the whole idea and was there from the start." Then why the recent interest in the Web 2.0 trend? The article puts it well: "as the web took off in the late 1990s, publishing tools failed to keep up with web browsers in ease of use, and it is only with the rise of blogs and wikis that the balance has been redressed." Web 2.0 was fueled by an improved customer experience.
• The article Working the crowd covers Silicon Valley's attempts to bring "crowdsourcing" and "long tail" ideas to the market. The company I found most compelling was Threadless (a past Copernican Award finalist), which solicits, and then sells, T-shirt designs from its raving-fan customer base. I think "crowdsourcing" can fill some genuine niche opportunities (like young hipsters who enjoy voting online for T-shirt designs), but otherwise it's susceptible to hype.
• The article Call and response talks about "chat bots" on IVRs, or automated telephone customer-service systems. So when you call a 1-800 number, instead of pressing touch tones to navigate a phone tree, the "chat bot" will ask you to speak your request. If you hate phone-based menus, you're really going to find this irritating. Why not just hire well-trained humans to answer the phone? As one IBM researcher (selling the software) says, "There's a balance between cost and customer experience." Hmm.
One other thought: If technology is the problem, then more technology isn't necessarily the answer. I like the insurance-and-investment company USAA, a Copernican Award finalist this year, which staffs its (US-based) call center with well-trained employees.
Two other articles of note:
• The article Go with the flow offers a data point on my prediction of more information visualization software in Chapter 13 of my new book, Bit Literacy.
• The article How touching talks about new haptic interfaces (which give tactical feedback), and Let's get physical reports on the new "exergaming" trend, recently made popular by Nintendo's Wii Sports (covered in several past posts here).
