How do we minimize the negative publicity, maximize our margins and potentially even create some free marketing from happy evangelizing customers?

Recently I purchased a couple of complex product/service combos online. Having just moved, I ordered cable from Comcast for my new apartment. Additionally, to have a phone that could make calls and see the full web, I switched to an Android phone from Verizon Wireless. In both of these cases I had a pretty good online experience and a fulfillment process that worked out reasonably well. Though, had I been a different kind of customer, I can see where there are some friction points in each company’s end-to-end eCommerce processes that could create trouble for them.

Comcast

Comcast.com starts off seemingly organized. The main navigation provides for quick access to specific content around the primary categories of interest for either a prospective customer or returning customer: Learn, Shop, Programming, Customers, About. Everything else around this navigation is trying to sell you, which is what it should be doing. It’s trying to get me to convert to their service by enticing me with insight into all the great programming they have and incredible deals that are presented in such a way that not only provide the traditional call to action, but also create a sense of urgency. The rub is when I go into the next level of detail.

“Learn” does its job by providing me basic details on what they’re offering, so I’ll skip over it and speak to “Programming” for a moment as that was my next place to investigate as a prospective customer. Having experienced AT&T’s U-Verse for a year, I became accustom to having every television channel known to man. Having also decided that I wanted to spend less on TV in the new apartment, I wanted to dive into the programming packages to see which ones on the cheaper side still included specific channels that both me and my fiancée watched regularly. Armed with knowing what channels I wanted to make sure I had, I clicked “Programming” then “Channel Lineup”. Now, I understand that this might change depending on my region, and that Comcast wants to begin capturing insight about me as a customer, but I do get annoyed having to provide my address so early on. Following this was where I about lost it. The list that is displayed, with a drop down filter menu, was unmanageable and terrible at allowing me to compare different packages to see what channels I would get. I had to open multiple windows and Alt-Tab back and forth to see what was in each and then keep track of the specific channels I was looking for on a notepad. This small trivial issue is where not getting it right opens you up to the publicity/marketing challenges. During this visit a customer may tweet about this sloppy experience or tell their friends on Facebook how difficult it is, at which point someone may respond directing them to explore the competitor. If this happens, then that one day where everyone (employees responsible for the site) was in a meeting and gave no attention to this page or just assigned it out to someone to build without thinking of the user flow, the revenue already began to erode.

Once I decided I was going with Comcast and what package I would order, I switched to the “Shop” menu and dived into the bundles knowing that I wanted Internet as well as TV service. This was a clean experience that gave a good summary of each “package”. The missing elements were being able to compare packages and find other critical details such as whether HD was included or if I would get a DVR. Not finding this information (again a spot for a marketing issue), I decided to start the buying process making the assumption that it would come eventually. At this point, the whole process fell apart. Not only was it unclear whether or not I needed to add these extra items, but I ultimately had to start a chat session to complete the transaction. No, really, my “eCommerce” experience was finished with a person. The real irony was that when I was having trouble getting my questions answered and getting through some network issues, I tried calling in and the call center person I talked to said they couldn’t help me with online orders, and if I ordered from them they wouldn’t be able to offer me the same discounts. Really?! Ok, so now I’m forced into an online purchase process that interacts with a human (higher cost) and I’m only allowed to chat with them?! This was where I almost decided to go with DirecTV (if they had a better Internet offering I would have).

After it was all said and done, I had a technician installation scheduled with a set-top box on order and service provisioning kicked off. Great, now I can setup my online bill pay and be done with it, right? I go to email…nothing. There aren’t any emails summarizing what I did (think $$$ if I call back in for help), and it took me almost an hour to navigate around the site and figure out how to get to my account details, learn what my login was (took me calling customer service) and setup my bill pay. It was a terrible finish. Oh, but they probably covered the costs of this experience by charging me that technician install rate and a start-up fee. And cable companies wonder why we give them a hard time.

Verizon Wireless

Verizon wireless, as with any telephone company selling online, has a complex eCommerce challenge as they not only have to try and explain their overly confusing service plans they invent to try and increase ARPU, but also have to get you to pick a phone and then provision a number of systems in their back-end to allow that phone to have the right phone number, be able to make calls, receive voice mail, SMS, access the internet, etc. It’s not easy. That said, you’d think they’d be the experts on end-to-end process thinking as they have so much to get right. For the most part, they did pretty well. Verizon’s site explains their plans well, allows you to compare service plans and phones and ultimately add things to your cart in such a way that you are really clear on what you’re buying and what you may be missing [they do a great job of showing you all the little add-on features (think up-sell)]. The piece they missed? Well, for one they didn’t summarize my order in the email or give a link back to the store to see the details, but best of all they didn’t think through the shipping delay for my new Android phone and had a pretty empty status of, “Your order has been processed and will be shipped based on inventory availability and shipping method. You will receive shipment notification and tracking details via email.” The other missing piece was lack of instruction on how to create my online account. It was fairly easy to figure it out online, but having that be part of the order summary (or better yet, in the order flow), would have made it easier and Verizon would likely increase the percentage of customers that a.) setup automatic bill-pay and b.) become more of a self-serve customer.

Most eCommerce sites focus on the conversion and order check-out process. Only the best consider the end-to-end customer experience. So, get the process flow diagrams going or pin up the butcher paper and map out your customer processes!

Transcript of My Portion (slides above)

Almost two years ago now, I joined a small enterprise software company that has a product for the Property & Casualty Insurance market that supports selling, administering, billing and supporting insurance products such as automobile, homeowners, and commercial liability. This software system, as with many, requires setup and customization to enable it to support each individual insurance companies products and operating model, for example where they might use captive versus independent agents, or centralized billing and claims departments versus field or branch offices supporting customers. Ultimately, each new customer requires an implementation team to setup the system to support their business lifecycle from sales (agents) to billing to customer service when an insured reports a claim. When I joined, I inherited a number of challenges affecting the professional services organizations ability to understand what work was in flight, it’s progress, and whether or not it was even approved work whereby its costs could be recovered from the customer. There were monthly write-offs due to confusion between project teams and customers paying the bills and a dedicated resource responsible for running around and asking folks what they were working on. Having come from a fairly well organized consulting company that had explicitly defined processes around contract management, staffing, billing, etc., I knew that I needed to put in all the basics.

A few years prior I had led a software selection project for a large company that wanted to take advantage of an enterprise project management tool. During this project I became aware of many offerings on the market and had seen the idea of “Professional Services Automation” begin to be championed by several vendors. This lead me to dream big as I expected there would be great solutions to how I wanted to run this business. Services Resource Planning (SRP) really is about supporting the end-to-end business process. Fortunately, I was able to step back and think about how to put the pieces together. Specifically, at ISCS, I have new customers that need a project team to setup our product for them and have existing customers with ongoing service requests and product issues. Ultimately, I needed real-time visibility into all of this work, but more specifically need to be able to answer these questions:

• What new service opportunities exist (i.e., projects)?
• What issues are my customers having?
• What are people working on?
• Who’s available?
• Are they working on the right things?
• Are we billing for their work? How much?
• Did we bill for the work?
• What are the margins of my projects?
• What are the margins of my maintenance agreements?
• What are my margins by customer, by the whole department?

To support this vision I needed a multitude of capabilities that if not yet found in one system, needed to integrate with others to provide end-to-end business process support. In a smaller company with staff focused on customers, I didn’t want to have a large IT investment in either software, hardware or administration. Similar to how my company enables our customers to run our system in the cloud with my team working in the background to make sure everything works behind the scenes, I wanted tools that were also managed by someone else so that I could focus on running my business rather than keeping operational applications running. I choose OpenAir as the heart of my Professional Services Automation vision and Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds to enable a SRP style operating model, and we already had QuickBooks, which is used by most small businesses. OpenAir supported my SRP vision Day 1 with pre-built connectors to Salesforce.com and QuickBooks. Beyond just opportunity management, project delivery, and financials, I also wanted human capital management, as Mike defined it, supported as well to give me a complete picture of the Services Supply Chain. Having capabilities such as resource booking, skill tracking, availability are key components to streamlining and creating an efficient process for allocating the right resources at the right time to deliver customer value. Specifically, the tools needed to support project work and customer support, both with unique yet similar operating processes. Let me begin by walking through how I’ve leveraged these tools to meet my vision in supporting project work.

Every project begins as an Opportunity, creating visibility into current and future demand just like a factory manager would have to plan for the manufacturing of its widgets. Managing services opportunities in the same sales system as our product sales, all of us on the management team have greater visibility into all potential revenue without waiting for financial reports that are after the fact. Sold and lost project opportunities are tracked not only by title and forecasted revenue, the focus of most CRM tools, but also by resource costs whether it be time or expenses as each become a Project in OpenAir. The Project is the heart of the operation. All resources track time to a project, whether it be internal facing or customer facing inclusive of expenses. If the project opportunity is lost, then business development costs are captured to reflect true profitability. If the project opportunity is won, then the project kicks off! The great thing about OpenAir is its ability to marry actual work efforts, captured in individual timesheets, to the original plan. The really exciting capability we use is something I call “Democratized Estimates”. As resources keep track of time spent on a task, they are also asked to provide feedback as to how much effort they believe is remaining on that task. This is then aggregated and gives a more accurate picture of how a project is progressing. Both our employees and our customers have access to this information. I also use OpenAir’s resource bookings module to match up active and potential projects with current staff to allow me to better plan for when I need to increase capacity whether it be by recruiting more FTE’s or leveraging partner resources to deliver the work. And of course all this service needs to be billed and fees collected from our customer. Again, the project is the heart. Opportunities have a corresponding contract that defines the fees and planned effort. We capture this data in the Salesforce Opportunity record as I have illustrated. This data is then passed to the project, which tracks it as budget in dollars and hours, two existing OpenAir fields. Following the billing rules defined by the contract or Statement of Work, OpenAir’s billing function then processes time spent and its associated fee rules (e.g., rate card based, task based, or fixed fee) to calculate the billing amount, which maps to the invoice. These charges are gathered and processed monthly, rolled up and packaged into an Invoice that is passed along to QuickBooks, our financial accounting system of record along with expenses reported. Customers now have a complete view from what was expected per the original contract to what is invoiced, which provide task level detail and charges that map directly to the project plan. This provides exceptional visibility into the profitability of project work, but for those of us that are responsible for additional support activities, that may be managed in a traditional case management system, one needs data from the cost of that effort as well to see true profitability across a customer on the whole services operation.

Our customer support team uses Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud to track and manage customer issues along with small service requests. These cases are visible to our customers through an online customer portal and are managed by the same lifecycle of project work. Each maintenance agreement sold with our product is expected to provide budget for continued support to our customers following a successful implementation of our product AND of course this revenue drives R&D, sales and marketing, and of course provide profits. The main question is, “are we charging enough for these maintenance contracts to enable further product innovation, allow us to grow the business AND support the customer?” Or alternatively, “Are we charging too much?” To answer these questions requires time and expense accounting to support each customer. We begin again with an Opportunity in Salesforce representing a year of the contract, which then gets a corresponding project in OpenAir, which creates a container for us to track our time against. Cases are pushed into OpenAir as tasks within the “maintenance” project to allow for this accounting. This approach also allows us to combine billable work requests as they come accross as cases with a type that is recognized by OpenAir’s billing rules as something that needs to be charged for. You may be wondering why we’d break up the maintenance contract as separate opportunities given they’re typically a multi-year deal. Well, we found that if we were going to keep adding cases as tasks within that project that over time it would become too unmanageable, so we decided to close it out at the end of the year and create a new one representing the subsequent years value. Having costs tracked against cases and rolled up against the project, which contains the budget allocation from the maintenance agreement, we can then produce management reports illustrating the profitability of each contract. This data is not only available to us in OpenAir’s reporting, but is also pushed back to some extent into Salesforce so that we can leverage it’s powerful Analytics capabilities and aggregate with forecasted sales data. As with project work, any charges and time spent on support cases can be pushed into the invoice for increased transparency showing some work with $0 and other effort having charges, which will have the Case ID allowing the customer to review back in the customer portal. Hopefully, my team made sure to get the customers approval before doing the work, something I haven’t figured out how to automate yet. ;)

We had all of this live in a couple of months and immediately received feedback from customers that they felt more comfortable with what we were working on even though our billings went up on account of better tracking of billable work. From their perspective they had better insight on the status of their requests and in real-time, everyone knew who was working on what, and we nearly eliminated the monthly dance of explaining the invoice and negotiating write-offs. The new operating model and tools have enabled us to reduce overhead on project staffing, project setup and the billing process. But most importantly, leveraging the decision sciences of ERP we are able to make more insightful business decisions on real operational data.

Recently, I joined a small, but quickly growing software company with a policy automation solution for property and casualty insurance carriers and large agencies. My immediate challenge was to increase the number of new customers that could be implemented annually. The company has had success from having a highly relevant product that has a tremendous amount of industry insight built in. However, the challenge was that the company had a limited capacity to implement new customers. Partnering with one or more system integrators or consultancies was a quick way of immediately gaining access to capacity while minimizing financial risks to the company as these resources could be more flexibly ramped up and down as project requirements demanded. This is one of the most financially valuable components of partnering with a system integrator. By minimizing the total headcount in the services organization, there is also a natural organization psychology that maintains the focus on the product rather than on services. Additionally, often times there is a symbiotic relationship that can be created as the system integrators are looking for new technologies to bring to their existing clients and you as the software company can introduce them to new customers.

I have only bought personal lines products thus far in my life, and have made decisions on fire dwelling, condo, auto, motorcycle, and umbrella policies. Here’s where my heads at, these products are not sexy. I don’t care what carrier I’m insured with. It’s not like buying a new car, or clothes or a fancy handbag. Differentiation is not the goal. I want to know I’m meeting legal requirements, covered for the types of risks I could be exposed to, and will have a great customer experience should I actually have a claim. Ultimately, trust is the most important buyer value, but price can lead the decision. Seems contradictory I know, but think about what insurance is. As a younger buyer, one is going to have their parents feedback in their head as to what they “should do”, but is also going to try to get the cheapest rate. I know this because I recently reevaluated all of my policies with my boss, who I consider to be an expert on most lines, and he joked with me, “you probably haven’t evaluated your coverage’s since college, huh?!” Yep! I was just looking for the lowest monthly cost on my automobile insurance not even realizing I didn’t have enough coverage to handle the cost of repairing most of the nicer cars on the road where I live. Whoops.

So, how should an insurance carrier sell to the gen x & y crowd?

Take advantage of social networking and tried and true ecommerce. Here are some key items essential to building trust in the brand and inspiring the herd buying concept:

1. Potential Insured should be able to see who their friends are buying from


2. Claims handling and overall customer service needs to be broadcast


3. Incentives for bringing a friend

See who their friends are buying from…

It would be great if I could see who my friends have bought their insurance from, particularly when I’m about to purchase a new product that I’m not familiar with. For example, when I needed to insure a wedding ring recently, I would have loved to see who most of my friends insured with. This could be done using Facebook where a fan page or custom application could be built to promote the insurance carrier and illustrate to potential buyers which of their friends already have policies.

Overall customer service needs to be broadcast…

Lately I am making a lot of buying decisions following crowd sourced input from folks on Yelp. It started with entertainment venues and restaurant reviews, but has since grown wildly popular to yelp on how good a plumber is or moving company. Almost any local business or service has feedback on Yelp, and if they don’t, then they’re suspect! Here’s where I would use some gorilla marketing tactics to get my insureds to start broadcasting their experience with me the insurance company. (This of course assumes you have good customer service.) For example, after a call with an insured, I might ask them to go yelp about their experience, or even have the follow up email skip the lame customer survey and directly ask them to go yelp about their experience or comment on the fan page. I’d have the claims adjusters be my primary marketing team. They should be trained to inspire each customer that recently had a claim to broadcast their experience (hopefully positive). I would have them give the customer a note and verbally ask them to tweat on the spot about how awesome they’re getting taken care of in a time of disaster in their life. Imagine the impact on a buyers decision to switch carriers if they see a twitter feed on one companies fan page that shows customer after customer tweeting about how awesome their claims adjuster was!

Incentives for bringing a friend…

Incentives are tricky and often lead to insignificant results. I don’t think I ever earned anything from pitching my family on ING Direct when they first came out, but the $50 or whatever it was got me to try. In this world, cash isn’t always king though. Other incentives might be recognition on fan pages as having some kind of wisdom, special ability, cooler icon next to their name, etc. Often a call out that creates a sense of celebrity can be more powerful than a gift card.

Direct Sales

But all this marketing will only take you so far. You have to change the buying experience. My recent example of the wedding ring is one that almost made me search for another rental insurance carrier. Between the multiple phone calls required, days of waiting for quotes, limited access to view the details (e.g., was it for replacement value at the same manufacturer or would they just give me another ring of similar qualities – horror stories online), I wanted to work with someone else. Oh, and don’t even get me started on why my fiancée had to go to their office to sign an application and actually show the ring.

To really motivate the next generation of insureds, the buying experience needs to be fast and painless. So, when you get them online all excited about your amazing claims adjusters and they see that even though they have never heard of you, but many of their friends are customers, get them a quote online fast and let them complete the purchase seamlessly. Now, you may be thinking, “well that’s easy for auto insurance, but what about homeowners policies that are more complicated or a small business that doesn’t understand liability coverage?”. Well, this is where I go back to the “seamless” statement. First of all, drop the insurance lingo. Find a way using wizard type questionnaire or laymen’s terms to infer what they need, then present it to them rather than asking them to choose from a menu of insurance products that looks like it’s in another language. Assuming you can get past that part, then I’d say, use the agents! Here’s where agents can continue to play a role with the next generation of insureds. When I’m in the quoting process and get to something that either concerns me or I can’t figure out, you should have an easy “get help” process that connects me with an expert that can guide me through the buying decisions.

Now, remember, this needs to be seamless. If I am stuck and I see something that says “chat with an agent” or “have an agent call you”, and I choose that path, I better not have to give them my info again. They should be able to pull my quote right up and begin the conversation with, “I see you’re looking to add a wedding ring to your rental insurance. It all looks right to me, what can I help you with.” I then say, “Well, I was reading online that sometimes the coverage doesn’t give replacement money, but instead makes you go buy the ring from one of the insurance companies jewelers. I have a specific ring from a specific retailer and would need to replace it with the same.” The agent would then say, “No problem, the option you selected, which we call an endorsement, covers you for just that situation, but don’t take my word for it, pull up the site. See where it has a link that says “how a claim would be handled? Click on it and you can read what will be in the policy itself.” “Great!” I say and close out the call buying online. But you know what, when I get the policy in the mail it has that agents name on it and a special note saying, “I’ll always be available for any other future questions and keep me in the loop if you ever have a claim so I can make sure you get taken care of.”

Key Points:

• Insurance products are not sexy so differentiation is on brand trust and customer experience
• Use social networking to get groups of people to buy together
• Automate the process to seamlessly take care of the insured in their world…online

If an insurance carrier gets this all right, my guess is they could stop focusing on the price and start charging a premium.

There has been significant research on automated diagnosis, but limited practical application and integration of systems. The idea, well represented in Magnus Stensmo’s Ph.D thesis, Adaptive Automated Diagnosis, clearly paints the picture of how powerful and needed such an approach is.

Bias in today’s computer assisted diagnosis

An Automated Medical Diagnosis System

These results would then be presented back to the doctor along with a probability rating indicating which ones are likely most relevant or accurate. Each diagnosis could also then be presented with additional direction to the doctor to further explore for additional symptoms and/or order an additional test. These additional observations and/or test results would again then be fed into the system where it could reevaluate the probable diagnoses canceling out some while raising the probability of others.

In addition to immediate interactions with the software, Intensive Care Unit’s machine observation data (e.g., oxygen levels, heart monitors) could be constantly fed into the system to allow the software to be looking for patterns that match other known diagnosis that would never be able to be caught by a human as it would take too much time to evaluate the data. Nurse’s notes could also be used in a similar manner.

The most challenging data for the automated medical diagnosis software to interrupt would be results of imaging systems. However, current advances in face recognition technology can and have been applied to reviewing images such as x-rays. This is important as “image interpretation is an error prone task. The number of lawsuits filed against medical imaging professionals that are related to the miss of a diagnosis is close to 70% (Berlin, 1995). The most common errors are perceptual errors that lead to diagnoses misses, representing about 60% of the cases (Renfrew et al., 1992).” - Application on Reinforcement Learning for Diagnosis Based on Medical Image . With a software solution, images could be reviewed against known patterns and then presented to a Doctor for a final review. Similarly, following a codification process, a standard could be defined to notate what one sees in an image that would be relevant to a medical diagnosis, which could then be understood by the software.

The database of potential diagnoses should be an online service that all medical institutions interact with in a real-time basis. This would allow for two key additional benefits. The first would be to connect Doctors in real time with their peers at other facilities with patients experiencing a similar condition. This would allow for immediate collaboration that could lead to a faster treatment. And second, by having the system online, you ensure that every doctor has access to the latest scientific diagnoses.

The system should then be designed to become increasingly more intelligent with time from increased information about each disease and ailment as well as feedback as to the accuracy of its results. Specifically, after each diagnosis, the Doctor would be responsible for submitting feedback as to whether or not the chosen diagnosis and subsequent treatment successfully resolved the patient’s problem. These responses could then go through an automated peer review with the results updating the probability factors to each disease and associated symptoms, test results, etc. Additionally, the software would record the other data learned from each patient in consideration of relevance to future cases. Results could be rated in accuracy based on how they are determined. For example, the results obtained from a biopsy or autopsy may be weighted as being more accurate than simply an observation from the Doctor that the patient recovers.

Available today

• http://www.icutracker.net/
• http://www.rals.com/

The machine data required for the software has been developed such that it could be fed into such a system. There are many systems available today that would likely only require some standards to be developed for the resulting data. Some examples:

• Life support systems


• Positive patient ID


• Meds tracking


• Lab work tracking


• (see http://www.handheld.com/lp/healthcare.htm)

Conclusion

This article is dedicated to Grace Allen, a beloved mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, friend, cousin, partner and overall amazing woman. Had this system been in existence today, we would have had some more wonderful years with her.

References

• Stensmo, M & Sejnowski, T. J (1996) Automated Medical Diagnosis based on Decision Theory and Learning from Cases, World Congress on Neural Networks pp. 1227-1231
• Stensmo, Magnus (1995). Adaptive Automated Diagnosis. PhD thesis, KungligaTekniska Hogskolan (Royal Institute of Technology), Stockholm, Sweden.
• Stelmo Magalhaes Barros Netto, Vanessa Rodrigues Coelho Leite, Aristofanes Correa Silva, Anselmo Cardoso de Paiva and Areolino de Almeida Neto (2008). Reinforcement Learning ISBN 978-3-902613-14-1. Application on Reinforcement Learning for Diagnosis Based on Medical Image.
• Point of Care Testing
• http://www.pointofcare.net/
• http://www.meditech.com

Today, I use LinkedIn to keep track of my professional network. I’ve found it to be a powerful tool to keep abreast of where people are working and what they’ve done in their career. It’s also great for uncovering relationships you may not be aware of. Yet, it still misses some of the key items I think are essential to becoming a truly useful tool to support the memory.

1.) Ability to link to folks you don’t want to
2.) Relationship mapping
3.) Notes

Ability to link to folks you don’t want to…

While I have a lot of people linked to me, I am very diligent about protecting the integrity of my network. Myspace became a disaster in my mind when everyone started collecting friends as a hobby versus really showing their network. Facebook has been better about not becoming the same, but eventually when the purpose is to be cool and popular, people start collecting. My goals with LinkedIn have been to only include people I feel I know well and would be comfortable acting as a reference. This however leaves a number of folks off my list, and thus LinkedIn becomes only part of the story, and my contacts list remains the master. It’s not that I know that many people I don’t like, but there are always folks that you are more of an acquaintance to and would not feel comfortable asking them to be a character reference to you and vice a versa. So, having the ability to keep track of these folks on your list, but differentiate them as not being “linked”, would be great.

Relationship mapping

With this more limited link, I’d want to keep track of what my relationship is with them. In sales and consulting, it’s important to be able to quickly understand a social network in a company. There are many formal methodologies for mapping these networks to identify whom the influencers are and whom they influence. With these you can identify who you need to focus your relationship building. Having this feature would be great to keep track of your whole network, but imagine if it was all exposed. I think LinkedIn could setup a continuum in their linking that better illustrates the relationship. Part of this exists when you say whether or not they were a colleague, friend or college friend for example, but wouldn’t it be great if you could also just indicate that they were an acquaintance or someone that you “know well”. I think this would also inspire us to focus more on our network and improving the relationships we have, as there would be an incentive to improving our relationship map with others.

Notes

And finally, I want to keep track of the little details that help me remember why I’m linked to this person in the first place. Recently in my job searching, I found that there was a person in my network that had a lot of connections at a company I’d like to work at, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out who this lady was. She was in my network, so I must know her well enough to trust her, but nothing was coming to mind. Worse yet, when I searched my contacts and my whole computer I had no mention of this person’s name. Finally, after going through her whole network to look for a pattern of how I may know her it dawned on me that she changed her name with marriage! If only I had the note field and could have just read my note entered when we met. The good news is that LinkedIn has added this feature in the “Address Book” functionality that is in beta. This should be made more accessible though and brought to the front. Or, even better would be to have Plaxo like functionality that could import and sync all my contacts notes.

In my current job hunting efforts I have found ones network to be the only successful way of getting the interviews at the places you truly want to be a part of. People like to hire people they know or that are recommended by people they trust. That’s human nature. LinkedIn does a great job of facilitating this, but with some additional key features, could become even more powerful to all of us. It may even improve how we all nurture our network.

Standing twenty feet in front of Alexandria Café, and next to a sidewalk billboard, I couldn’t get it to pull up on any of the map based applications. As I sat down to have my breakfast I decided to add it to Yelp and comment on the place. I first went to the Yelp application, but was surprised that it was nothing more than a one way data stream. They haven’t yet included the ability for people to comment on the go. Seems odd given that’s the point of Yelp.

After the café, I walked home. About midway I decided to test the experience again. This time I attempted the use case of someone wanting to find a good lunch restaurant near them. I figured this would work better. I first opened Where, which aggregates a few of these services. But, Where was difficult to use as I couldn’t zoom in on the map and it wasn’t finding me very quickly. I then tried Limbo, one that I think is organized well with it’s fast search of restaurants, bars and shopping places near you. Yet, when I clicked on Restaurants, of the thousands it said it found, all were “1/4 mile” away and none were places that I could visually read their storefront sign. Yelp? No, missed most of the places. Everything wanted to drag me through a long list and was slow to really understanding where I was.

I understand that many of these applications are trying to quickly position themselves with consumers to gain a “first mover” advantage. I think this is the wrong approach. If someone doesn’t like the application, they’re going to delete it and not be inclined to use it again. If you wait, till you really have a good offering, you’re still going to be able to gain share of users as the product will speak for itself and through viral marketing everyone will switch when yours is available.

Where, Loopt, Yelp, Whrrl, Limbo, etc. (iPhone applications) are all far from where they need to be in order to real excite people and provide the service we’ve been dreaming about. These applications need to do a better job of loading the location information (too many times it pulls up where I was yesterday) and need to tailor the content. This isn’t the web on my PC where I will forgive long lists of non-tailored businesses because I can more easily sort and filter them away. This is my mobile phone, I’m hungry and I’m on a sidewalk!

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m really disappointed with the current restaurant and entertainment guides out there. They just haven’t evolved from a basic database of items with attributes. To really make a great Yahoo! Local or better Citysearch, you have to move away from what fields go in the database tables and start thinking about the user experience first.

Here’s an example use case that illustrates the struggle one has with existing guides (try to go online and solve this riddle quickly):
You have a friend that just called you up and said they’re in town for business and would like to get together for dinner. They’re a close friend and someone you’d like to entertain and show a good time in your city, of which they’ve never been to and are really excited to see. Oh, and they’ve only got a couple of days and one evening with you.

Now, let’s say you want to pick out a restaurant that highlights something unique about your city or has some form of entertainment. How do you find that in a list of cuisines or restaurants by neighborhood?!

Bring on the wizards! The design needs to include a wizard type questionnaire, something that guides you through options and then returns a succinct list of places that match your criteria. Oh, and it should be accessible from your computer or mobile phone. It could start out with basic options (like the Limbo iPhone app): Dining, Event, Shopping, Outdoor Activity, and Indoor Activity. From here, you’d drill down into more specificity that would ultimately bring back the short list of places.

Returning to the use case, we’d start by selecting Dining. From there, it might offer the next options such as: Intimate, Lively, Entertaining, Quick, and Culinary Delight. Let’s say you want to have it be entertaining. The next menu may ask: Live Music, Dancing, Theatre, and Participatory. From here, if you choose participatory it may include a place that has belly dancing, or a restaurant with a comedy show where you become part of the act. Ultimately restaurants could be listed under multiple options if appropriate.

Now, you have some great options, but which one do you go with? At this point, if it’s done right you’ve made it pretty easy, but I’d take it a step further. Let’s integrate with OpenTable and have location based service utilized. Meaning, tell me what has a table for when I can make it and is closest to my friend’s hotel!

To take it just a bit further, let’s say you chose Intimate. The next screen would then ask: black tie, sport coat, nice shirt, outerwear, T-shirt, no shirt. I’m sure your imagination can plug in different restaurants that fit the different attire. Speaking of attire, what a great way to start if the person doesn’t have anything in mind!

I’d include a “no idea” start button that skipped the first menu of Dining, Shopping, Events, etc. and just ask a simple question. What will you be wearing? Then offer the same menu. An example break down for T-shirt might bring up bowling. It would also need to specify when at the end to determine whether to include items with advance purchase requirements.

If anyone wants to give me the budget to put this together, I’d love to!

My favorite merchandise promotion is McDonald’s Monopoly game. Since I was a kid I loved collecting the game pieces and hoping that I’d win one of the big prizes. I never did though, but still enjoyed it each year. Now that I have much cooler toys that use the Internet, I’d like to see a virtual version of the game where each game piece could be registered online or via SMS. This way, I wouldn’t have to keep track of the pieces.

The possibilities are endless and the customer connection is intimate. Provided you were exceptional about how you used and protected your customer’s mobile phone number, I think a lot of people would participate. The trick with all of this will be integrity. You need to state your rules right up front (like how many times you’ll contact the person if they give up their number and send a message to you). After that, you have a two way dialogue you’d never have had.

The idea would be to have integration with a number of different restaurants that provided take-out lunches. The system would then have one person choose the location for the day and then allow a group of colleagues to go to the site and pick their order. They would then be able to pay for their portion via PayPal or something easy for the pick-up person to be able to pay the bill (or have it automatically paid) and get the food.

The simplest way to integrate this service with restaurants would be to have online orders simply faxed to the destination, aggregate the funds from each colleague and transfer them to the person doing the pick-up. More fancy integrations could include automatic payment to the restaurant and automatic insertion of the order to their systems. With an open platform, this could be really awesome.

For now, we’ll all continue to collect cash in the office.

Author's Note: As part of all my blog entries I try to provide a lot of links to relevant reference material related to the entry. I typically do this research after I've written the entry. In this case, I was impressed to find Lunch Prodigy. Now they just need to add billing capabilities!

I’d like to see a simple application that is location aware and keeps a profile of me and my interests. Imagine being in a park and the Cupid app pings you to let you know someone else is in the park that has similar interests and is interested in meeting new people. You could immediately connect these two people, allow them to have some anonymous flirting on their mobile phone using SMS or some kind of chat app, then connect them up if they’re interested.

Imagine the possibilities, you could do a “missed connection” feature where Cupid pings you, but you didn’t take the ping because you were busy or not interested at the time. You could follow up later and ping the person with a “missed connection” that would tell them you were both at X location on Y date and time, your profiles matched, but it was a missed connection.

You could share profiles with each other before flirting, during or after. You could even monetize this by charging for the connection. It would need a great online application to complement the mobile app, filling all the traditional features of match.com, etc.

eHarmony has spent a lot of money trying to figure out the algorithm of love. I wonder if what we do and where we go would be a better indicator than a survey. This app could keep track of these things along with our Yelp ratings, Netflix favorites and even our Amazon recommendations.

I’m sure it’s in development or coming soon… Let me know if you’ve seen anything like this.

Some interesting approaches:

• Playtxt


• Firt-o-Matic


• FunMobility


• Plutolife

When I got to the Apple Store there were about thirty people already in line. I had heard that the first person started out Wednesday evening. It was a fairly quiet group of mostly geeks and artists (inclusive of Apple developers). The ratio of boys to girls was unfortunately very high (come on girls get into tech!). I walked to the last place and just stood there. I had no idea what to do now that I was actually in line. Now, many people are thinking, "this guy is nuts waiting in line outside in a city to buy a phone." I even wondered to myself if I was maybe crossing some imaginary line between the already obsessed Apple enthusiasts and well, part of the cult of Apple. I figured it was going to be a great adventure to say the least, a first person experience of where society comes together for a single moment to celebrate innovation. To be honest, the first hour was pretty boring.

I think I was expecting some kind of secret hand shake to be passed down to me. Wasn't I now part of a new tribe? I sat down and took a nap. I couldn't sleep long though, there seemed to be a buzz building. There was no reason. Nothing had changed and only a few more people had joined the line behind me. It was now around 2am. There was a difference though. We had all been waiting there bored. Then it occurred to people that we were all a part of something bigger than ourselves or the individuals we may be standing in line with. Then, the mix. A guy came over with his laptop asking for a MG. He pinged a few of us in line, but none of us was who he was looking for. By the way I saw him glancing back at his computer, I assumed he had made a connection with someone in line, online. He had. A couple people up from me was MG. The two connected live and a whole group began to mix into conversation. The line was starting to interact. I'm sure the folks at the front had their moments already, but the tail was starting to wag. We were now a group. Occasionally, someone would need to run to the bathroom or grab coffee from the 24-hour Starbucks. When they went to go, they'd just turn to their neighbor and ask, "will you watch my stuff?" It was an instant nod and the bond of trust amongst the line increased. There were laptops, cell phones, music players, back-packs, blankets, tents, and even a dog. Everything was safe. Everyone was together.

I happened to be one person away from the guy "holding a place" for an editor from PC Magazine (he was paid $250) and one behind MG from VentureBeat. By 4am the line was now to the end of the block and creeping around the corner. A few folks kept joining the tribe every twenty minutes or so. At one point an SUV pulled up and a whole group got out, set up a giant tent and then went and parked the car. Amongst all the tech, the greatest was seeing the basics of passing time still included, such as reading a book and playing cards. The news crews starting showing up in the early morning, still before sunrise. They'd walk up and down the line interviewing the "die hards". Application developers were also there pitching their new applications on handbills or demoing them in some instances (Pandora cofounder was walking the line I believe - Pandora is awesome). The excitement kept growing. By 5am no one was even trying to sleep. We were all anxiously awaiting 8am. We were now a part of something. As the sun began to rise, more and more people showed up. We broke a hundred before dawn, but by the time it was day light the line stretched around the block, thicker, stronger and buzzing.

8:00:00 AM Pacific Standard Time

Security was at the doors, even the police had arrived. Everyone was up on their feet, stuff picked up, and all moved forward about twenty feet. We bunched up. We had been waiting for this moment. We all watched the clock intensely for about twenty five minutes prior. There were film crews from the news stations and photographers everywhere. The doors were opened and thirty people were invited in. First it was about a half of a dozen quickly allowed in, then as we all blinked and wondered if we had really seen anyone enter, the rest of the first group were allowed through the giant glass doors. It had begun. As I was 34th in line I was now at the front of the door lined up to be in the second group (we had all heard they were letting in 30 at a time as folks were still online with their laptops and iPhones reading about what the other experiences were from the East Coast onward. Nothing happened for a while. We could see the first group in line up the stairs. No one came out. We all calmed ourselves by reminding everyone that it was going to take about 15 minutes to get one person through the process. It was 8:06. It felt like it was 9. Finally, the guy that was first in line, came busting out the door all fired up. He was upset because nothing was working and he still didn't have an iPhone. He had been apparently told that he had to move his tent or the police were going to confiscate it, so he was allowed to come back outside. As he did he was mobbed by the media and went off on a tyrant. He was really peeved. The media ate it up. I was surrounded by cameras, journalists and #1. We just wanted our iPhone 3G. The guy next to me had an original iPhone with a bit of juice left. He said the stock was starting to really slip. I knew it was bad. We heard the servers had crashed and that everything had come to a grinding halt. I knew what happened. Too many transactions all happening at once on systems that weren't ready for this volume. I'd been in that situation before. I was very happy to not be in the call center fighting this time, but was hopeful that the IT folks would figure out a solution quick. After a while, the first iPhone activated walked out the door. He wasn't first in line, but his worked first. Slowly a few would come out at a time and eventually, the second group was allowed in the door.

My Turn

When I walked into the Apple store my group was greeted by tons of Apple employees in blue and orange t-shirts clapping and cheering as we ascended the stairs to the second floor. We felt like heros. It was amazing. All smiles....until you got to someone with mobile terminal to ring you up. It seemed like everyone was having problems. My experience was miserable. When it was my turn I debated quickly, "white, black, white, black, white, black, ... which one do I want". I choose black. As the employee started the transaction, it quickly failed. She couldn't get me setup. Nothing worked. She wasn't sure why either. I had heard from some others before me that there were problems with people that had corporate discounts, not corporate accounts mind you, but just discounted person accounts. As it turns out, Apple and AT&T didn't setup Apples point of sale system to handle customers that had a corporate discount. What?! That has to be most customers out there! I was distressed to say the least. I was tired, dirty and felt like a two year old having all their toys suddenly destroyed. I was really upset. I slept over night for this. I was a part of this. I was a part of the group. I couldn't walk out without an iPhone 3G. Multiple people tried to help. Everyone said it was impossible and that only AT&T could do my transaction. I refused to believe it. I was so upset. But, I knowing how these systems worked, I knew that if they didn't build it to support that transaction, there wasn't anything I could do. The only option they offered was to get a new phone number (I was an existing AT&T customer). That wasn't an option.

I left the store, head bowed, and quickly passed the media before I could get grabbed. About twenty paces toward home I remembered that the AT&T store was just a couple blocks away. "Maybe there aren't many people in line there," I thought to myself. I began heading toward their store. When I got there, there was of course a long line that had gone down the block and was three or four wide. And, right as I got there, I heard them say they were running out of phones (it was about 9:30am). I decided I'd try to pull the sympathy card and grabbed one of the guys outside that was helping to manage the line. I explained my story and told him that Apple had sent me over here. He was confused and pretty sure they should have been able to activate me. He took my number and went into the store. I waited about five or ten minutes before he came back out. He said everything with my account was fine and that I was eligible for the upgrade. He also was now very confident that Apple could do the transaction and had discussed this with the store manager. Unfortunately, the store manage made the decision that he or she couldn't let me get one there as I wasn't part of their line. The guy asked if I thought I could get back into the Apple store. I said yes and asked if he'd give me his phone number to have someone from Apple call when they got stuck with the transaction. He did and I ran off back to the Apple store.

I got into the store after explaining my story and the lady managing the door connected me with one of the managers in the store. I believe his name was Dilon. This guy was amazing. He told me very candidly that he was sure they couldn't do the transaction, but since I had this AT&T guys number he'd let me into the store and we'd try anyway. I wasn't sure who to believe at this point, but wanted to try again. Dilon called Cliff from the AT&T store (on a new iPhone 3G - white). They talked for a bit and then came to the conclusion that Apple in fact could not handle my account. But, while talking, one of them had the idea to dump my corporate discount and then try to do it. (Dilon had already tried to inspire Cliff to pull one aside for me at the AT&T store, but that didn't work). I nodded my head yes in agreement that I was fine having them take off the discount. I figured if it can come off, it can go back on later. Dilon put me on with Cliff as he worked to remove my corporate discount and I got to talk on a live, new, white iPhone 3G. My AT&T account was quickly updated and the first girl that tried to ring me up saw I was back in the store. I caught her up on the story and she went and grabbed someone with a point of sale device so that I could try it. (Apple folks were amazing - patient, empathetic, sincere, passionate) At this point I had a few Apple employees standing around me hoping it would go through. Everyone wanted it to work. We went through the steps...it prompted for me to pick a SMS package...it worked! High fives all around. I was so excited. I was the brand new owner of a WHITE (changed my mind after seeing Dilon's) iPhone 3G. Of course it wasn't activated. It was about 10:03am (asked the time) and I still had to "activate" the phone. This process was also supposedly taking a long time. The Apple store was sending most people home to do it, but had lined up all the laptops downstairs to activate phones for those that wanted to hang around and try. Dilon wanted me to try as he wanted to personally ensure that my phone was working. I was game for it too! We went downstairs and he connected me with one of the groups of employees helping people activate. Basically this was the process of connecting the iPhone to a computer with iTunes up and running, waiting for it to time out, unplugging it and then plugging it back in. I did this many times for almost an hour and finally was going to give up. On the last attempt, as I was asking what to expect when I got home so I was prepared, I pulled off the plug and it suddenly activated. SMS messages started coming through and I was live! This was exciting. I thanked everyone for helping me out and now walked out of the store, head held high, bag in hand and a big smile across my face. I felt famous. I was an iPhone owner. As I left the store a guy from CNET was there on his laptop keeping a live blog of what was happening. I briefly told him my story and how awesome the Apple employees were and took off. It was 10:48am.

My iPhone 3G review.