When I look at how peo­ple use their mobile phone I always end up with the very same conclusion.20080401education.jpg

We tend to look at things with our eyes and not really with the eyes of your cus­tomers. Hav­ing a quick look at who is sit­ting near to me I find a bunch of tech savvy, mar­ket­ing minded, well edu­cated peo­ple. This is not the typ­i­cal envi­ron­ment we will find out there.

Going back to cus­tomers I can see that when they use their mobile phone they feel very con­fi­dent about some typ­i­cal usage.

They know how to make a voice call. They know how it works on their hand­set, they know how much it costs and they know what to expect. At lit­tle bit less degree of con­fi­dence comes the video call. The same hap­pens with text mes­sag­ing and, again, with pic­ture mes­sag­ing and e-​mail.

Most of them know how to buy a ringtone.

A smaller num­ber of them know how to browse the web using their mobile.

Oper­a­tors on the other side are try­ing to push new and inno­v­a­tive ser­vices, most of them on the data side. We see Skype com­ing to hand­sets, MSN Mes­sen­ger, Yahoo Go!, just to say some of the most com­mon appli­ca­tions. Every oper­a­tors on the other side is launch­ing pro­pri­etary ser­vices to increase revenues.

At the end of the mar­ket chain we have the mobile phone man­u­fac­turer pre-​installing appli­ca­tions on their devices.

I think this is the place where the indus­try is not doing very well.

Just a quick example.

Today I am using a phone which is still not in the mar­ket. I am div­ing deep in the menu struc­ture of the device and I stop to the RSS Reader application.

The first con­sid­er­a­tion is: how many cus­tomers do really know what is an RSS feed? How many of them can tell how much they will spend using the application?

The sec­ond con­sid­er­a­tion is: how do we expect the cus­tomers to find the RSS Reader appli­ca­tion when it’d hid­den deep in the menu struc­ture of the mobile phone?

Let’s see what Wikipedia says about RSS:

RSS (Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion) is a fam­ily of Web feed for­mats used to pub­lish fre­quently updated con­tent includ­ing, but not lim­ited to, blog entries, news head­lines, and pod­cast. An RSS doc­u­ment (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “chan­nel”) con­tains either a sum­mary of con­tent from an asso­ci­ated web site or the full text. RSS makes it pos­si­ble for peo­ple to keep up with web sites in an auto­mated man­ner that can be piped into spe­cial pro­grams or fil­tered displays.

RSS con­tent can be read using soft­ware called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggre­ga­tor”. The user sub­scribes to a feed by enter­ing the feed’s link into the reader or by click­ing an RSS icon in a browser that ini­ti­ates the sub­scrip­tion process. The reader checks the user’s sub­scribed feeds reg­u­larly for new con­tent, down­load­ing any updates that it finds.

Well, it does not help to spread the word to non tech savvy customers.

Why don’t we try a dif­fer­ent approach?

Let’s say that we want to offer a ser­vice which deliv­ers news to our customers.

What hap­pens in real life for the aver­age cus­tomer? He will stop by his pre­ferred news­stand, he will hand over a coin to the ven­dor and he will pick up his pre­ferred news­pa­per. At a later stage he will start read­ing his news­pa­per. The day after the very same thing will happen.

If we look at this from an oper­a­tor point of view we should think some­thing like this:

  • We want to deliver news to the cus­tomer on a timely basis charg­ing him for the ser­vice just like it hap­pens in real life.
  • From a tech­ni­cal point of view there is no bet­ter way to imple­ment this as a list of RSS feeds from the main news­pa­pers and news site and install an RSS Reader on the mobile phone to let the cus­tomer access the service.
  • On the mobile phone do not use the words “RSS Reader” for the appli­ca­tion but some­thing like “News!” and change the icon from the stan­dard RSS icon to a more friendly news­pa­per icon.
  • Put the appli­ca­tion at the very first level of the User Inter­face or even in the idle screen.
  • Ask the user how often he wants to stop at the news­stand. (Hourly, daily, etc. etc.)
  • Charge the user as you prefer.

We have used the very same tech­nol­ogy I can find in the phone I am using but we have deliv­ered it to the cus­tomer in a way he can eas­ily under­stand, and, hope­fully, use.

The very same approach can be used for other infor­ma­tions com­ing from RSS Feed. For each bunch of infor­ma­tion sim­ply user a dif­fer­ent metaphor. Change the icon and the word­ing for the title of the appli­ca­tion. It will still be the same appli­ca­tion but it will be much more usable from the cus­tomer and, at least, he will understand.

Related posts:

  1. links for 2006-​11-​27
  2. Twit­ter and the mobil­ity dilemma
  3. My fat mobile phone
  4. Tech­nol­ogy is there
  5. Let The Cus­tomer Choose

You Need To Educate Your Customers If You Want To Be Successful

4 Comments

  • 1 Simon wrote:

    I do my day job in the insur­ance indus­try and that is all we seem to do by edu­cat­ing our cus­tomers. Trou­ble is the edu­ca­tion is always what they can do and what they can’t, spose abit like tech­nol­ogy :)

    April 11, 2008 at 5:16 pm Permalink

  • 2 Gregg Kail wrote:

    What is your opin­ion of Microsoft’s ini­tia­tive of Sur­face tech­nol­ogy that is a touch-​based dis­play being imple­mented in selected AT&T Mobil­ity stores in the USA. The touch-​screen table enables the cus­tomer to inter­act with live demon­stra­tions and cus­tomize hand­sets by “dropping” in fea­tures. AT&T has a prod­uct line of hand­sets cov­er­ing five oper­at­ing sys­tems besides Win­dows Mobile. AT&T is attempt­ing to increase fea­ture sales and reduce ser­vice costs. The ques­tion is whether the cus­tomer acquires any edu­ca­tional value and enhances their mobile lifestyle. AT&T is com­pet­ing with Ver­i­zon Wire­less for demon­stra­tion stores with AT&T call­ing their design as Expe­ri­ence Stores and Ver­i­zon as Evo­lu­tion Stores. The issue for the US mar­ket is that almost 80% of wire­less dis­tri­b­u­tion is agent-​managed stores instead of operator-​owned loca­tions. For exam­ple, AT&T has only 1,800 operator-​owned stores but over 20,000 points of dis­tri­b­u­tion. The agent stores are operator-​branded, but tend to be sales-​focused rather than sup­port and ser­vice the cus­tomer. The iPhone was a dis­tri­b­u­tion test in that it was only launched in the 1,800 AT&T operator-​owned stores and 120 Apple stores in the US mar­ket. Because of the rev­enue shar­ing with Apple, AT&T did not want to reduce the mar­gin by pay­ing agent stores to sell the iPhone. Apple’s brand had the power to cre­ate demand for the iPhone that ean­bled the lim­ited dis­tri­b­u­tion to be highly suc­cess­ful. And the large vol­ume of online order­ing reduced the need for phys­i­cal store sites, but cre­ated the unlock­ing prob­lem and over 20% lost acti­va­tions to AT&T. And an addi­tional ques­tion is about Microsoft’s inter­est in open­ing retail stores. Does Microsoft gain trac­tion for its Win­dows Mobile with the pres­ence of Sur­face tech­nol­ogy in mobile stores?

    April 28, 2008 at 6:17 am Permalink
  • AG" class="avatar-link">

    3 AG wrote:

    Hi Gregg,

    Thankyou for your comment!

    I per­son­ally think that the Sur­face tech­nol­ogy may def­i­nitely help cus­tomers to get their phone fully cus­tomized accord­ing to their taste. One of the major issues we face as oper­a­tors is mak­ing peo­ple happy with their mobile phone. Unfor­tu­nately the lim­ited size of the screen and the lim­ited inter­ac­tion you can design on a mobile device makes cus­tomiza­tion a real pain for customers.

    More­over they are much more con­fi­dent with a PC like device like Microsoft Sur­face than with a mobile device. It is, again, a mat­ter of edu­ca­tion. Maybe they already use a com­puter at home and they feel con­fi­dent with it. A mobile phone is a dif­fer­ent story. Every sin­gle ven­dor has its own par­a­digm regard­ing User Inter­face and User Inter­ac­tion and some­times it is really hard to fig­ure out how things works on a mobile device.

    On the other hand I think that Microsoft Sur­face may help oper­a­tors to lower costs on their stores even if they may find that a human inter­ac­tion is always pre­ferred by peo­ple. I do not know if this hap­pens in the US but here in Italy peo­ple wants to be reas­sured about what they buy and I think this can be done only by a human being.

    AT&T go to mar­ket strat­egy is a lit­tle bit too con­ser­v­a­tive, accord­ing to my opin­ion. The iPhone has proven to be a prod­uct that sells by itself. So they may want to loosen the con­ser­v­a­tive strat­egy a lit­tle bit in the future let­ting their dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nel sell the prod­uct as well. They will prob­a­bly loose some mar­gin but they will have a cap­il­lar­ity on the ter­ri­tory that they do not have today. (Even if it is true that peo­ple is keen to drive 150 miles to get an iPhone)

    I think that it is a good idea for Microsoft to open retail stores and use their own tech­nol­ogy to power the stores. I hap­pened to be in San Fran­cisco a while ago and I vis­ited the Apple Store where I bought my Mac­Book Pro. I had a great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and I found the store to be one the most beau­ti­ful place where a cus­tomer can shop.

    This is the approach the Microsoft should take when think­ing about open­ing retail stores. If you think about what Apple does with his cus­tomer it is noth­ing else that edu­ca­tion. Their Genius Bar is there to help cus­tomers with prob­lems while they run train­ing classes on their prod­ucts on a reg­u­lar basis and for free.

    That is the way to go.

    We should learn some­thing there.

    April 29, 2008 at 8:51 am Permalink

  • 4 West Coast Vinyl wrote:

    Edu­cat­ing the cus­tomer can be approached as friendly advices to make them appre­ci­ate what they have and what your busi­ness offer. Obvi­ously, this all goes back to “whats in it for me”. If you’re upfront about it, then there shouldn’t be any mis­un­der­stand­ing of what the out­come is. That is to gain their business!

    June 17, 2009 at 4:58 pm Permalink

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