BeConnected

Google Maps Adds Browsers

By now you know Google provides some great customer intuition tools. In addition to all the cool things you can learn with Google Alerts and the ability to search sponsored links, Google has now announced additional browser support for it's useful and elegant mapping service. Google Maps now supports Opera and Apple's Safari.

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tags: Google | News Alerts | Google Maps | Safari

Why Email When You Can IM? Outlook Plug-in Makes it Easy

I've mentioned before about how AOL Instant Messanger AIM can be an excellent Customer Intuition Tool. Collecting AIM Screennames is an excellent way to discover the online habits of your customers and prospects. Being able to see when key contacts are online can give you great insight into when to press send on you email newsletter marketing efforts.

Beginning today (Monday 2/28/05) America Online is offering a free plug-in for Microsoft Outlook Users that will enable them to see which of their contacts are online and available to be contacted by IM.

This function will enhance communication with contacts. Email exchanges can more easily be converted into IM chats when online presence status is available within the email environment. While this will enable faster and perhaps more natural communication, environments that need a "paper" trail of communications will require a user to actively save chat logs when chatting with coworkers, prospects and customers.

Overall this is a great step forward for AOL in spreading the use of IM in the workplace.

Get the plug in here.

Read the USA Today article here.

tags: AOL | Instant Messenger | enewsletter | Outlook | life hack

Bank of America Loses A Million Customer Records

Cnet news.com reports:

A "small" number of backup tapes with records detailing the financial information of government employees were lost in shipment to a backup center, Bank of America said on Friday.

The tapes contained information on the customers and accounts of the U.S. government's SmartPay charge card program, which has more than 2.1 million members and annual transactions totaling more than $21 billion, according to the General Services Administration. Reports have pegged the number of cards affected at 1.2 million.

"Federal law enforcement officials were immediately engaged when the tapes were discovered missing, and subsequently conducted a thorough investigation into the matter, working closely with Bank of America," the bank said in a statement. "The investigation to date has found no evidence to suggest the tapes or their content have been accessed or misused, and the tapes are now presumed lost."

Now that's bad customer intuition. Loosing your customer data is a good prediction of future customer behavior. It's a good prediction that they will no longer be your customers.

Last week there was a rash of stories reporting data security problems at major consumer companies.

Are you taking care to safeguard your customer data? Do you have a plan or experience dealing with a customer data loss situation? Any advice you'd like to share? Leave a comment.

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tags: customer | bank | data loss | SmartPay

Sony Makes it Easy to Feed Your Fellow Gamers

Couldn't let this one get by. Sony has intuited that their video game customers might get hungry during multi-hour gaming sessions. Going beyond the in-game advertising that's all the rage these days. Sony provides a direct option where Everquest II players can simply type in "/pizza" while playing the game to bring up the Pizza Hut website were they can order a pizza online. Going further they want to build the option to have the cost of the pizza added to the monthly subscription fee paid by players. Just a cool little feature until you read that there are 330,000 active players. A win win situation to be sure.

Do you offer any products or services that could benefit from a synergistic partnership like this? Based on your own customer intuition could you build in a link to a truly useful product or service into your main offerings?

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tags: Sony | pizza | Pizza Hut | Everquest | video game

Automated Systems Serve Introverts Well

Michelle Miller over at Wonder Branding tells a story that is a valuable customer insight waiting to happen. She describes her introverted husband calling Merrill Lynch's automated update line for his weekly check. When the system alerts him that he's being transfered to a customer service representative he hangs up in disgust. Michelle makes the point that introverts like to use automated systems and are frustrated when they have to deal with people.

This is a valuable insight to people designing systems to interact with customers. The experience and frustration of trying to reach a "real live person" receives more press. Designing great systems that operate well without live person to person communication serves introverted customers well.

If you have some sort of automated phone system you might research the number of calls that terminate just as they are being transfered to a human operator. If your system logs caller ID information you should check to see if the same callers call right back to try again to find the right information from the automated system.

Even at a micro scale this is an important distinction to keep in mind. We all have customers, friends and coworkers who prefer asynchronous communication(e-mail, voicemail, etc.) versus face to face or live voice communication. Don't assume in these digital times that everyone prefers interacting with a human.

Polish Your Presentation Skills: Tell Me A Story

Presentation skills are more important than ever these days. Whether it's with customers, prospects or coworkers the quality of your presentation skills is important. Want to improve your sales? Improve your presentation skills. Be remarkably good. So good that customers will invite others to join them just to hear your presentation. Is that possible? Sure it is but it requires a common sense approach to the oft published wisdom surrounding presentations. A focus on the tools has caused us to lose perspective on what makes a good presentation. Presentations become a PowerPoint slide deck with narration.

Recently I've come across some real wisdom from a blogging presentation coach. From a recent post:

Audiences really want to like you as a speaker. It makes them feel better about being there in the first place and more forgiving of any stumbles you may make.

Help them like you by not talking at an audience. Have a conversation with them instead.

Your message comes across more effectively when you use words, rhythms and anecdotes that come authentically (or, at least, appear to come authentically) from you and your own experiences, not those of someone else.

Your tone of voice, your mannerisms, the very words you use can convey a sense that your audience is important to you and that you appreciate their time and effort to hear what you have to say.

I have been known to stop presenters who are simply reading their notes and slides to the audience. I simply ask the speaker to talk to us. Tell us in stories what it is they want us to remember. Most often this is the best route to communicating the information they are trying to convey. Save the charts and graphs for the data-hungry handout readers and tell us a story that explains what's happening.

I think you'd be well served by bookmarking/subscribing to Scott Rayburn's blog Presentation Coach

Hey, You! Time for A Backup

The BBC reports that a people feel they would lose friends if they lose their cellphones and or their address book data. Would you lose valuable customer contact data if you lost your cellphone or Blackberry?

Sure, the data is not irreplaceable but who has the time to reconstruct contact information from scratch.

Time to backup your cellphone, Blackberry, PDA or card file.

Opting-in at the Chicago Auto Show

This past weekend I went to the Chicago Auto Show. Over the years this show has become more and more interactive as car makers attempt to scale their customer intuition efforts. It used to be that sales people from area dealerships staffed displays. There's no selling at the show but reps could collect contact info and follow-up with prospects after the show. Now trade show renta-reps dressed all in black collect addresses to mail or email brochures to prospects. Carmakers are trying various tactics to get information and a conscious or unconscious opt-in from show attenders.

Some use attractive premiums like, no kidding, giant red stuffed animals to get people to register for a free drawing. Others use higher tech methods like offering "free" pictures that require visitors to visit and register at manufacturers websites to receive their "free" picture.

These real world practices are analogous to the online challenges of opt-in e-newsletter marketing. Some offer cool premiums that drive sign-ups but have little or nothing to add to a potential customer relationship. Some use bait-n-switch like tactics to offer something for free that comes at a hidden cost. Others engage people as people and offer a fair and reasonable exchange of value that begins a lasting relationship.

So where are you on the scale? Are you building a big list with a high churn as people opt-in for a premium and then opt-out just as quickly? Are your list building tactics bordering on deceptive? As people get savvier to the techniques of list building it becomes more and more important to market real ongoing value to opting-in.

Beyond links to privacy policies, no spam pledges and required opt-out or unsubscribe links it is important to be transparent in presenting the value of being open to hearing from you in the future. Are you just looking to send out brochures and promotional email or are you looking to build a lasting mutually beneficial relationship? How do your prospective list members know what you are doing?

Trendwatching to Learn How to Communicate With Customers

Educating clients and prospects is critical to collecting valuable customer intuition and behavior analysis that can boost sales and build business. When conceiving ways to educate customers it's important to understand your customers and the learning and information gathering systems and techniques they are most accustomed to and comfortable with. Knowing which communication tool to use and which not to use based on who you want to reach is becoming more complex as the options expand.

You need to be a bit of a cultural anthropologist to build a sense of what channels and techniques work with different target audiences. I try to do this wherever I go. I watch people on the train trying to understand how they use their commute time. I watch people in airports, malls, grocery stores, seminars, movie theaters, offices, cars, etc. to attempt to understand how people use technology to find information and communicate with others.

If you are targeting young business people and/or entrepreneurs you would do well to watch communication and learning trends in colleges and universities. Tools and techniques learned in school will translate directly to the business world as graduates move into the workplace.

Students are using cellphones in record numbers. So much so that schools are removing their expensive yet revenue producing land line systems from dorms.

SMS(text messaging) while huge in other parts of the world has been slow to catch on in America. Cultural phenomenon like interactive TV programs i.e. American Idol have driven adoption and now even universities are building systems to use SMS to aid professors-student communications. If somebody uses SMS for years in school they are certainly open to it when they graduate and become your potential client.

Time to crack that manual and learn how to send and receive text messages on your cell phone.

Google Tips

Everybody uses Google for a wide variety of things. Not everyone knows how to get the most out of it. Here's something useful that you can recommend to customers, friends and coworkers to help them polish their Google search skills. It's a tip sheet for Google. This would make a good content item for your next opt-in email newsletter.