Futurity Media

Customer support has always been a challenging task for companies, especially when customer volumes and product SKUs increase. As social media becomes increasingly pervasive, how can companies make their support systems more responsive?

Firms including Cisco and Zendesk have developed systems that integrate customer communications functions with social media such as Twitter. Zendesk has a support ticketing system that can turn Twitter posts into support tickets. This integration makes it relatively easy to respond to Twitter posts from customers complaining about a service, while also registering the whole incident in the support system.

Such developments are becoming increasingly relevant as customers choose social media channels to complain about bad experiences with companies. Support desks can no longer expect customers to come directly and privately to them any more, but must monitor Twitter and other social media for information about bad customer experiences.

The new generation of customer support systems feature innovations such as collaborative authoring, in which multiple parties can contribute to a help ticket, which then becomes a searchable part of a database. Support feedback mechanisms are becoming multichannel, and socially enabled, which allows content to be personalized more effectively.

Rather than simply being a means of solving an irritating problem, then, support is becoming a more integrated part of the customer experience. Customers should be able to leave support interactions more satisfied as a result, and this is a key deliverable. Support incidents are pivotal points in the customer relationship, in which individuals can come away from a company feeling looked after, and valued, by their supplier. These incidents are an opportunity to not only recover relationships, but also to enhance them, and perhaps even increase revenues by cross-selling.

This blog first appeared on Orange Business Live we contribute to regularly.

2011 looks set to be the year of the tablet. Is it time for your senior executives to get one? There are five main operating system to consider in the tablet world, each with their own strengths and weaknesses:

iOS

Apple’s operating system continues to outpace the rest of the market, and the forthcoming iPad 2 will only stimulate sales. The company’s recent announcement of a publishing model that forces publishers to sell their content through its iTunes store for a 30% cut hasn’t impressed content partners, and could lead to some of them abandoning its platform. Nevertheless, consumers continue to be wowed by the technology, and around 65% of Fortune 100 companies are said to be using the iPad.

Android

LG G-Slate

This is the operating system that is sparking most of the activity in the tablet market, particularly at Mobile World Congress where it was the star of the show. Until recently, Android focused exclusively on smartphones, and tablet vendors had to adapt the product to their own needs. With Version 3.0 Honeycomb, however, Google’s open source operating system focuses specifically on tablet devices, with user interface features designed to support that system. Motorola, Samsung, and others are readying more tablet devices supporting this system.

Windows

There are relatively few Windows tablets out there today. HP’s Slate 500 is aimed exclusively at the enterprise, while Dell is preparing a ten-inch Windows device. Microsoft doesn’t have a version of Windows 7 exclusively designed for the tablet (although the operating system does have features supporting tablet devices), so partners are forced to squeeze the operating system into the smaller format. On the plus side, Windows is a system that enterprises are familiar with, and may be more willing to support.

WebOS

HP recently launched its Touchpad tablet system, based around the WebOS operating system that it purchased along with Palm last year. The company is aiming these devices largely at consumers, but they’re functional and enjoyable enough to use that businesspeople may be wiling to deploy them. Two great features of the Touchpad hardware: wireless charging, and the ability to wirelessly transmit data directly to your HP Pre2 smartphone.

Blackberry QNX

Research In Motion is another company with its roots in the enterprise, and the business world is anticipating a suitable tablet tool in the BlackBerry Playbook. This 7-inch device will feature Blackberry QNX, a new operating system from RIM designed to talk directly to Blackberry phones, enabling the tablet to serve as a large screen for the Blackberry devices.

With so many tablet formats and operating systems to choose from, it is perhaps no surprise that just over half of all CIOs are planning to deploy tablets in the enterprise during 2011. This year, the tablet comes of age.

Australia’s recent flooding raises significant questions about business continuity – especially as the US Government Geological Survey predicts a superstorm of biblical proportions that could put the state of California under ten feet of water. How can companies protect against scenarios like these?

Remote replication involves backing up data between different sites, and there are various ways to accomplish it. Host-based replication replicates between individual servers, and can even focus on particular applications. There are both strengths and weaknesses to this approach. On the one hand, backing up individual servers within a large enterprise that has lots of servers can lead to unwanted complexity, and can easily lead to data duplication, which makes inefficient use of WAN bandwidth. On the other hand, it can be a useful way to prioritize individual servers that are mission-critical and need priority recovery times, rather than waiting in a queue while a whole storage infrastructure is restored.

Array-based replication partly solves the management problem, because it deals with whole storage arrays at once, making it easier to deal with a large ‘bucket’ of storage as a single entity. The downside is that array-based storage management products often need a storage array from the same vendor at either end of the link, which limits an IT department’s procurement choices.

Site-based replication using an appliance at the edge of the network provides the most flexibility when it comes to remote replication. These solutions are vendor-independent, and can cope with a cluster of arrays. They are also well suited to data de-duplication, because they ‘see’ data from the site’s entire storage infrastructure.

Some companies are offering cloud-based replication, where they copy a customer’s data into their own cloud infrastructure, using a site-based appliance at the customer’s premises. This can represent an attractive solution for customers hoping to minimize capital expenditure.

However a company chooses to do it, remote replication is a critical part of business continuity, and should be considered – especially as the possibility of floods and other extreme weather conditions increases.

This post first appeared on Orange Business Live

Has Internet advertising peaked? Not according to figures recently released by Morgan Stanley. In fact, far from being saturated, the online advertising market represents an unrealized opportunity.

Figures collected by Mary Meeker, managing director and leader of Morgan Stanley’s global technology research team, draw comparisons between the percentage of time spent by audiences perusing particular types of media, and the percentage of advertising spend devoted to those media. You can watch her presentation of these stats at the Web 2.0 Summit 2010 on YouTube.

One-eighth of the US audience’s time is spent reading print media, and yet a quarter of the advertising spent goes on ink. 31% of the audience’s time is spent watching TV, while 39% of advertising dollars are spent courting these viewers, representing yet another oversubscribed market. Conversely, 16% of media consumption time is spent listening to radio, while only 9% of advertising dollars are spent there, she said.

But internet advertising represents the biggest disparity: 28% of media consumption time is spent online, but only 13% of advertising dollars are spent there. According to Meeker, this equates to a $50bn global opportunity.

This post first appeared on Orange Business Live!

Here’s some interesting tips for companies engaging – or failing to engage properly – in social media. The advice is from researchers Firefly Millward Brown, who surveyed social media users (moderates and heavy users) in Australia, Brazil, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, India, South Africa, United Kingdom and the United States, about their attitudes to online brands and how they use social media.

Based on the consumer research, Millward Brown recommends 10 rules for engaging with social media:

1. Don’t recreate your homepage in social media — consumers want to see something new, fresh or different from brands – not a rehash of the same information they can get on the brand’s official Web site.
2. Listen first, then talk: create a dialogue — by far one of the biggest issues consumers have – or anticipate – with brands is that they will simply talk at them instead of talking with them. They want a conversation where brands listen to what they have to say.
3. Build trust by being open and honest — transparency is key for brands in social media and is the most critical factor in building trust. However, consumers perceive that brands would rather hide behind policies and procedures than admit to their failings or shortcomings.
4. Give your brand a face — brands often suffer in social media because they don’t have anyone that answers to the consumer, a face for the brand. This prevents many consumers from actively engaging with companies in social media.
5. Offer something of value — consumers are more likely to respond to brands that offer them something real and tangible, preferably without wanting something in return. While discounts and coupons are in vogue for brands in social media, they can create distrust. Worthwhile and exclusive content or deals or inside information on new products and services are valued by consumers.
6. Be relevant — consumers want to see content that relates to their life, their interest, their desires and their needs. Interestingly, several respondents commented on the lack of relevance for brands of ‘functional’ products like detergent, fabric softener and household cleaning products within the social media universe. In social media consumers are more critical about content that isn’t deemed relevant and feel that it’s invading their space.
7. Talk like a friend not a corporate entity — consumers want brands to communicate in simple, casual language that is conversational. They do not want technical or sales speak.
8. Give consumers some control — to operate effectively, brands must relinquish some of the control they have held for many years and be comfortable with the fact that they cannot solely dictate the message anymore. Brands that embrace consumer input and promote it will be more effective in managing the conversation.
9. Let consumers find you/come to you — another stark departure from traditional media campaigns, consumers do not want to feel that brands are ‘shouting’ messages at them. The perception is clearly that brands will use ‘intrusive’ and ‘interruptive’ advertising in social media.
10. Let consumers talk for you — brands achieve more kudos when consumers take the initiative and advocate them. The recent Toyota campaign, where real people talked about their stories on Facebook and were then selected to feature in a television ad, is a great example where the brand is not trying to overtly sell but is building relationships by encouraging customers to participate in conversations.

Some people go to great lengths to get away from it all, including climbing Everest. But now Swedish operator TeliaSonera and local player Ncell in Nepal have built a 3G base station at 5200 metres – well within altitude sickness territory. The goal is to serve climbers and residents of the Khumbu valley.

Here’s a vid of a climber talking about how useful 3G will be, compared to broadband satellite.

This does raise some issues though – with such thin atmosphere, will the signals travel for billions of miles? How do you get a steady power supply at that height? Will the snow impact performance? Will data roaming costs be sky high (ho ho), and most importantly, will excessive use of Foursquare and iPhone videoblogging from basecamp bring the network to a standstill? Answers please….

Britain lies in a lowly 20^th place in the European rankings of fibre to the home (FTTH), according to French analyst firm Idate and the Fibre to the Home Council Europe. And the picture is not improving – during 1H 2010, the UK ranked 26^th out of 36 countries for net additions to FTTH/FTTB, one place behind Andorra. Despite BT’s widespread publicity for its 21CN broadband transformation, it seems that Britain is still in a broadband backwater.

In Europe, Russia and France are the distinct market leaders in volume terms, with Lithuania forging ahead with 21% penetration.  In fact, it is the new member states (and Russia) who are making the quickest transformation, in part because of the poor standard of their copper networks which has not allowed DSL-based broadband to prosper as much as it has in Western Europe.

In absolute terms, the 36 EU countries have 3.2 million FTTH/FTTB subscribers, plus another 1.3 million in Russia, this is despite something like 25 million homes passed. (i.e the conversion rate from homes with fibre access to customers signing up is pretty feeble).

Europe does indeed appear to be in the slow lane when compared to 8.6 million FTTH subscribers in US and 43 million in Asia. However the conversion rate in Europe has improved. The homes passed increased by 6% in 1H 2010, but the subscriptions have improved by 51%.

Europe’s FTTH leader Lithuania is 5th in global ranking of penetration but pales in comparison to the 55% penetration in South Korea. Europe’s largest markets are doing very poorly in penetration terms. Italy and France are low, while Germany, UK and Spain don’t event make the Idate ranking.

BT has recently committed £2.5bn to fibre rollout, but compare this to the Australian government which is investing €30bn in its National Broadband Network. This equates to €1,428 per person.

What characterizes the deployment of FTTH in Europe so far is the number of players – Idate estimates that there are 260 FTTH projects, many of these driven by municipalities and utilities rather than incumbent telcos. Why? Incumbents have been resistant to investing heavily in national projects when faced with the threat of unbundling. But there is certainly an argument to suggest that widespread fibre deployment needs as many service providers as possible to share the load.

Why do we need more fibre in our broadband diet?

According to proponents, DSL and cable cannot deliver the speeds for game-changing broadband. Remote health care, intelligent power grid, high security network systems, personal TV, cloud apps are much more capable with pipes delivering 50mbps-1Gbps – and with this kind of bandwidth, we will be encouraged to work from home more. The FTTC Europe estimates that for 1 million fibre customers, you could save 1 million tones of CO2e emissions.

According to Ovum analyst Charlie Davies, there are demonstrable economic and cultural benefits to fibre broadband, as can be seen in this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/ceobroadband/ftth-conference-2009-ovum-fibre-socio-economic-benefits, particularly in rural areas where it is costly to provide education, healthcare and public services.

So why can we not achieve this utilizing the copper pair in the last mile? Firstly there is the long-standing distance problem: signals degrade rapidly over copper.

Even in urban locations, copper cannot deliver the synchronous speeds necessary to facilitate a broadband economy. According to Chris Holden, president of the FTTH Council Europe, we will soon be demanding the same upload speeds as downloads. As more people want to upload HD video (such as blogs shot on Flips and Zi8s) or use HD videoconferencing from home, the need for faster upload speeds will be apparent.

This may be an issue for a minority of users at present, but it will impact the rest of us somewhere down the line. If a new consumer gadget delivers the capability to do something, but the network cannot facilitate it, we love the gadget (e.g. iphone) and vilify the network (eg. AT&T)

I’m not sure I am 100% behind this sentiment, and I believe there is life left in copper, as Nokia Siemens Networks has demonstrated by pushing VDSL to 825Mbps with phantom circuits.

But investment in broadband infrastructure – whether pure fibre or a fibre/copper/mobile mix – is high on Europe’s political agenda. The EU2020 strategy document proposes that government targets 100% of households with access to 30Mbps broadband by 2020, and 50% of which should have access to 100Mbps synchronous speeds.

It has been said time and again that the column inches devoted to the iPhone are disproportionate to the actual number of owners. As a proportion of the world’s most common electronic device (yes, mobiles are even more common than toasters and tv’s), the iPhone accounts for about 2% of the global mobile device market.

Here’s is an excellent illustration of just where the iPhone stands in the sales rankings, produced by Billshrink.com