SensoryMetrics

There are very few companies on the web which can seamlessly switch between web self-serve and an inbound voice transaction. With most sites, if you’ve just added ten items to your online shopping basket but would like to talk to a live person before completing the order then you’ll most likely have a hard time finding a number to call on the website. If you do find a number to call, you’ll most likely have to start from the beginning. How nice it would be to have a customer service representative know what you’ve got in your basket and what other products you’ve been considering. For some customers, especially first time buyers, having the ability to talk to a real person is the difference between completing the order or going elsewhere. Our Transaction Center patent # 6,101,486 delivers context to the sales agent and makes the switch from self serve to voice seamless.

Amazon has been designed so that contacting a live person over the phone is not even an option. Somehow, somewhere along the line, it was deemed that customer support through email was far more efficient and cost effective than voice. Better yet, design the site so that it should never be necessary for a customer to call or email in the first place.
This is understandable position to take if you’re Amazon. They have an incredibly well designed website which is geared toward optimizing the self serve transaction. They leave the job of selling their products up to customer reviews. Their customers are knowledgeable and do their comparative shopping using the entire internet. Customers that aren’t comfortable with self-serve must go elsewhere.

Not all companies take this approach. Some sites such as bluenile.com or landsend.com for example, advertise their phone number clearly at the top of their website. They encourage their customers to call if they feel the need. Every year shopping online has grown steadily. This year Jupiter Research forecasts an 18 percent increase for online sales to reach $32 billion. However, there still are those that are hesitant to buy online and for good reason if they’re not able to talk to real person should they need to. First time buyers and purchasers of big ticket items often need the reasurrance provided by a real person.

A while back Nortel created a service named the ‘Voice Button’. The idea was to connect customers browsing a web site directly to customer service by simply clicking on a button on a company’s web site. It would prompt the customer to enter their phone number and their phone would ring seconds later with a customer service agent on the line or initiate a VoIP call. Unfortunately, this service was probably a little ahead of its time since high-speed always on internet was still catching on and VoIP was still pretty choppy. At any rate, to compliment this service, we devised a mechanism which would allow the customer service agent to be prompted on their terminal with a quick overview of where exactly the customer was on their website and what they’ve been up to. Providing this context to the service agent speeds up the transaction process and makes it easier for the agent to close the sale.

Popularity: 15%

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User Experience

As you might have guessed by now Jobe and I are “serial inventors” – always dreaming up new products and concepts. A great way to capture those ideas is through the patent process. It’s always great when one of your patent applications has been granted – this can usually take 3-4 years. Once granted other inventors build on your idea and refer back to your original patent – that’s also rewarding, meaning that your invention was significant.

One of my weekly routines – every Tuesday – is to check the US Patent Office database for new grantings – that’s when the DB is updated. For me the search task is easy – my last name is quite unique “Brisebois” is not a very common name, even in french Canada. That fact brings me to Johnson-Johnson… The results of my weekly USPTO search doesn’t just hit my patents but those of another “serial inventor” Henri Brisebois – a scientist working for J&J.

While I invent mostly telecom / usability solutions, my “long-lost” Brisebois cousin is one of the world’s leading innovators in the technology of feminine hygiene products.

Forgive me for looking bewildered when I think I’ve just invented the Highly absorbent and flexible cellulosic pulp fluff sheet …

UPDATE: For those of you intrigued by pulp fluff sheets – here’s a primer on Super Absorbant Polymers

Popularity: 15%

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User Experience

I’ve long been a fan of the quadrant as a navigation scheme: take all your “stuff” and divide it into four piles. Each quadrant can have a specific theme that allows the optimal organization of that stuff. Let’s take a standard contact (phone, email, IM etc) application – I might choose to assign all my work related contacts to one quadrant. I’ll then customize that quadrant to have certain behaviors – like organizing the information in a hierarchy similar to the corporate org chart. I could use a different quadrant to organize family contacts – organized in clusters – (or clans, depending on how your family sees itself…) The magic of quadrants is the use of screen real estate to help organize and access information. This approach lends itself especially well to products with small displays – mobile phones and PDAs. Another benefit is that the user doesn’t have to assign characteristics to every individual contact (or data element)… Simply by assigning a contact to a particular cluster, the communication events of that contact assumes the behavior of the overall quadrant. Hassle-free communication management!

This is an idea that Jobe and I investigated and prototyped a few years ago. Some of the details of the idea are buried in US Patent # 6,738,809 – Network presence indicator for communications management.

Unfortunately for the UI to be usable on a mobile device, it requires an apprropriate physical input mechanism – such as the Touc Strip described in an earlier post.

Popularity: 13%

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User Experience

In 2001 we were granted US patent #6,310,944 ‘Method for adding context to communications’ which describes a way for augmenting communications between called and calling parties with context information to help either or both parties decide whether and how to accept or initiate a communications event. This was one of those effortless patents – a simple and clear value proposition of a big idea.

This little patent sure has legs! Since its granting, it has been referred 15 times by companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Seimens and BellSouth. Today The US Patent Office granted Lucent patent #7,142,857 – which refers our context patent yet again. Lucent describes a method by which it can preserve call context in a mobile packet-based network.

This is a great indicator of the importance of context in communications especially with mobility. There are a few leaders with product in this arena: TrueContext with mobile data, and iotum with call relevance.

Popularity: 18%

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User Experience

So where are they???

If you Google “Vice president of imagination” you’ll get a dozen results. I was searching for innovation in the VoIP world – looking for anything that was even remotely new and enticing. Since many tech companies talk of the importance of innovation, I thought that there must be a growing number of executive positions held by creative leaders. Not so.

At Nortel, I worked for a VP named John Tyson – head of the Corporate Design Group. His unofficial title – printed on his business cards – was VP of Imagination. It made sense because it reflected the true value offered by CDG: Design leadership and innovation.

You might expect that giant multi-nationals wouldn’t have such playful executive titles… But what about the thousands of 2.0 start-ups out there?? Why build the SAME OLD management teams: CEO, CTO, VP Product Management, VP Marketing….???

If innovation is so strategic, why is it so widely ignored?

Popularity: 15%

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User Experience VP-of-imagination

Last May, at Ottawa’s BarCamp1, I spoke to Rich Loen, co-founder of InGenius about the re-emergence of telephony and how it seemed like VoIP startups were reinventing what we once thought were just ‘cool’ phone features. A lot of those features like the interactive services envisioned for the Vista 350 were dismal failures partly because of the growth of web-based commerce in the mid 90s. Many of the telecom-related innovations of the 90s were amazing technological feats yet were commercial flops or never saw daylight outside the lab walls. You might remember ‘follow-me’ presence functionality, the web-based voice button, internet call waiting, first generation integrated messaging. Or, you might not.

Looking back, it becomes clear that great technology does not ensure great products. Development and commercialization are two very distinct sciences. It makes intuitive sense that a successful high-tech product will have good technology. That does not always hold true. Sometimes products succeed despite poor technology. Sometimes products fail despite great technology. In the world of VoIP, there are many PSTN horror stories that should serve as valuable lessons for your Voice 2.0 product roadmap!

At the upcoming BarCamp Ottawa (December 2), I’ll be talking about three telecom products that taught me a few things. In part 1 of It’s Deja VoIP All Over Again! I’ll look at Proximity, Nortel’s fixed wireless telephone intended for third world rural villages. I was the design prime… so it’s partly my fault!

Back in 1995, there were still a lot of people on this small planet without telephone service. Traditional copper wire was too attractive for copper thieves so that wasn’t an option. 2G cell towers were too expensive and didn’t provide enough coverage for low-density rural villages. The technology solution was an old one! Microwave. Otherwise known as Point to multi-point. Or Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). The ‘microwave’ descriptor wasn’t popular in focus groups though. Consumers did not want to cook a chicken on their phone. The benefit of FWA was range 10-15 km. Also, it was reasonably cheap to deploy and configure. The business model was simple. One important catch it required that the terminals remained fixed and stayed put!!! To the network manager, the difference between wireless and mobility is pretty clear. To a rural shopkeeper in rural Mexico, Colombia, or Vietnam; it’s a synonym. It became such an issue that FWA telcos were telling their subscribers that the phone would explode if they moved it out of their house! For those not concerned with exploding phones, their main complaint, why does the phone have to be so heavy, it’s really hard to carry around (it weighed about 15 pounds)? In Asian villages, some hired servants just to carry their ‘mobile’ phone around!

Sort of makes you wonder about those big-footprint VoIP clients!

Come hear more funny FWA stories at BarCamp! (Well they’re funny now!)

Popularity: 25%

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User Experience Fixed-Wireless, voip

I’d love to see Google implement this feature. The ability to blackball my search results. It seems I often search the web for similar stuff. For instance, if I’m in the middle of learning some new programming language, I might search for help on it. Inevitably, there are a handful of very useful sites and a handful of completely useless sites which are only a waste of time. I wish I could just blacklist those useless sites so that I never have to deal with them again and white-list those sites which are most useful to me. I’d want this feature to be customized to me so it could be a local javascript cookie feature. Whether or not Google decides to use people’s blacklist / white-list ratings to further rank sites is completely up to them. As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

I’m really disappointed with Google’s bookmarking feature. Their bookmarking web service is just a run of the mill traditional browser implementation. To me the biggest headache with bookmarks is the extremely archaic filing system which we’re forced to use. With most browsers and with Google’s bookmark feature, we’re limited to creating labelled directories to store our bookmarks in. So I find myself creating these rather broad categories such as ‘news’, ‘blogs’, ’shopping’, ‘banking’, ‘AJAX’. What I’d much rather see is the ability to add multiple tags to each bookmark and the ability to browse my bookmarks by means of multiple keywords. So I could for instance filter my bookmark browsing with ‘Photo’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Updated this week’. Furthermore, why not begin by pulling keywords from the website itself? Instead of requiring the person bookmarking the site to start from scratch, let the web author offer a handful of keywords or else use the original search words used to locate the site in the first place. In addition, then let me add my own keywords to the bookmark if I feel the need or add a rating just like I can to my MP3 songs. I’m sure you get the idea. How hard could this be to create Google? Well, who knows, perhaps the next version of Safari will work this way. While you’re at it, let’s make it easy to search sites based not just on their tags, but also on how recent they’ve posted, how big they are, and how popular they are (or unpopular). Furthermore, throw in a recommendation engine so that when I go to bookmark a given site, it shows me a list of similar sites others have bookmarked but which haven’t necessarily popped up in my current search results.

Popularity: 24%

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User Experience blackball, Google, site-tagging, sitemarks

Now that’s WOW! Peter Childs is working on video-linking the Ottawa BarCamp with the concurrent Bangalore BarCamp http://barcampbangalore.org/. What a great idea! He’s looking for help to make it happen, so if you’ve got the technology, give him a call!There’s a lot of interesting sessions proposed for BarCampBangalore… Open Source Virtualization; The Open Phone Mobile Architecture; Behavior management for information security; Evolution of cooperation; and How innovators connect – among others!

Popularity: 17%

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Events

Ok… so I’m happy to be on a Mac because that two button mouse just isn’t paw-friendly.

Yesterday I took Martin Geddes’ Telco 2.0 survey It became clear to me that the 2.0 camp was overconfident. But I’m just a dog… what do I know? In Canada, Rogers is largest wireless provider and biggest innovator of data services. The future is bright for innovative network operators. The future is also bright for innovative service providers. My take – don’t underestimate the established industry!

What do you think? Telcos as we know them – Alive? Limping? Dead?

Popularity: 18%

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Bones

This morning I offered a presentation to Peter Childs for BarCamp… an informal kitchen talk about products I had worked on that failed miserably – despite great technology! Well – now I find myself in the terrific bitHeads auditorium… so much for the kitchen!

I’ll be talking about three Nortel telecom products that had amazing potential – but unfortunately sunk in shame! Since the voice 2.0 wave is reinventing telecom – I thought this would be relevant in terms of lessons learned. It’s Deja VoIP all over again! I still have prototypes of the “products you’ve never seen” So come on down!

Popularity: 26%

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Events barcamp, Ottawa