ESPOO, Finland – Going through my links today I found a few that made me think of how companies need to always remember that their relationships with customers do not end once the customer has the product.
This is doubly important with services. If we, Nokia, ever hope to be a strong online services company, we will need to understand that services evolve almost in perpetuity, that we need to return, reassess, and revise our interactions and support for our customers.
Below I list four cases that made me think about this. Read them and let me know what they make you consider.
ESPOO, Finland – Going through my links today I found a few that made me think of how companies need to always remember that their relationships with customers do not end once the customer has the product.
This is doubly important with services. If we, Nokia, ever hope to be a strong online services company, we will need to understand that services evolve almost in perpetuity, that we need to return, reassess, and revise our interactions and support for our customers.
Below I list four cases that made me think about this. Read them and let me know what they make you consider.
Conglomerate or cohesion?
When we look at the larger online services companies, we see some like Yahoo!, which is more of a conglomerate of disparate properties, and some like Google, which tries hard to unify look and feel and back-end integration of all the services they release (yes, there are exceptions).
Saul Hansell of the New York Times posits that a conglomerate like Yahoo! needs to consider the overall portfolio, not just from a product level, but from the level of the content the portfolio offers the customer.
Thinking of the range of services that Nokia offers, things left to themselves would lead us to crumble from a loosely-joined conglomeration of services. Fortunately, we prefer the cohesion and synergies of multiple online services, hence the push for an Ovi-like, bringing it all together, mentality. We have folks pouring over the strategy and portfolio to bring cohesion. And part of my job is to constantly listen to what’s being discussed out there to ensure that what we believe inside is actually what we deliver and is what you want.
How are we doing?
Point apps into relationship app
During the US presidential election race this year, the Obama campaign came up with a nifty app that reveals information in your address book on your phone. This information was to encourage folks to be advocates on behalf of Obama, connecting to the right people you know in the right place.
Now that the election is over, the Obama team now has an app on a ton of supporters’ phones. Might this app be used in a two-way conversation with the Obama administration? I had mentioned this app in a post about advocacy and mobiles, but feel stupid that I never thought of how the Obama administration could use that app in a continuing relationship with his “customers” (but, thanks to my ExpandaBrain™, aka my tweeps on Twitter, the thought was planted in my local mentalization system).
Do you have any thoughts on this?
Out of box experience
For as long as I can remember, product managers at Nokia have agonized over what goes into a phone box. Part of this has to do with cost or container size or environmental considerations. But a big part is really wondering what will be useful to the user and what will be used. The first few moments of ownership are crucial first impressions and we all want it to be good and useful.
But, who really reads any of the product materials? I remember we used to joke that a product insert needed to catch the eye of the customer in the time it takes to take it out of the box and dump it in the trash can.
Well, Darla, who has opened more product boxes than is humanly achievable, has a few insights for our product managers (many whom she knows). She talks about the process of welcoming and interacting with a customer once they have the product. Most interesting to me, is that the suggestions start at the box, but progress smoothly into using online tools to provide a more useful “out of box” experience.
What do you think we could do better with the un-boxing experience? How do things change when you are starting to use an online service?
End of life consideration
I’ll wrap up with an article about recycling and reusing mobile phones. Rachel King of BusinessWeek reports on challenges recycling and reusing companies are having erasing personal data off of mobile devices they receive. While laptops and computers have standards for erasing data, mobile phones are a hodge-podge of methods varying between manufacturers.
Oh. That’s messy. For example, what happens when your phone stops working and you can’t erase data that a re-furbisher might get access to after you ditch your phone? Or, how does a corporation recycle or donate phones, knowing that they have all been properly erased? I’ve heard of stories of folks getting used phones will all their data intact. How does that happen?
Image by childhoodtrophy