theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

Finance on the web: automated budgeting tools for the less affluent among us

The web just seems to be made for managing money. From the beginning, things like stock trackers and portfolio trackers were present, and they keep getting more sophisticated. Direct trading online forever changed the investment industry. Payments were next, but quickly moved outside the control of the banking sector.

PayPal and its rivals
PayPal, of course is one of the gorillas, and shows signs that it may someday try to do more than facilitate payments. Initially, it was about buying online, but it rapidly expanded the options for both payers and payees. Some time ago they added a personal payments function, so you can send money somewhere.

It seems so easy, but it wasn't that many years ago that people had to do things like wire money to do this sort of thing. You can already keep funds on your account there, and go across currencies with ease. It would be a short jump for PayPal to add other features that would make them look a lot more like a bank.

While PayPal has buried most of its direct competitors, there are still lots of P2P payment systems around. And eventually the banking industry caught up, and said 'OK, you can e-mail a payment. But only if you aren't a business.' 

There are many other direct P2P payment systems around. iKobo is still in business, using fulfillment of the transfer via a VISA prepaid card at any of one million ATMs worldwide, and anywhere else that VISA is accepted. Senvia is another. There may actually be hundreds of these, targeted at specific ethnic and geographic niches. At one time, Western Union and your country's Post Office virtually owned this game. Not anymore.

Budgeting systems, the new battleground
The new battleground appears to be budgeting tools that help the average person manage their money more effectively, linking directly to the transactions.

CIBC has budgeting and expense management tools attached to its credit cards through a service called CreditSmart.

Manulife One launched a service to permit you to integrate all your balances and offset borrowing costs. In addition to this, the statement classifies spending. It seemed like a really smart idea, but seems to have lacked serious uptake due to the lack of retail distribution power such as the banks have.

There are more online budgeting tools than ever. Many of the most recent entries have nothing to do with a bank, and they are definitely going to force the financial industry to raise the bar if they want to stay in the game. Here's a few that have come to my attention -- and I'm guessing there are many others.

The Automatic Money Manager promises to help you "take control of your money."

"The system retrieves all your transactions from your financial institutions, automates your bills, manages your spending & savings, and gives you access whether you are at home, work or on your mobile phone."

The system works using the "envelope" system of budgeting, with direct linkages of your accounts to the tracking system. For things like credit card spending, every transaction on a credit card is automatically linked to the "pay credit card" envelope, to encourage full balance payment each month.

Pretty slick for only $129 per year, or $189 if you sign up for two years.

MVelopes promises "complete control of your finances" for the same prices as above, and also has mobile phone access. A really informative site, it even lists the banks you can link into. And it's a HUGE list.

Banzai promises similar benefits for only five minutes a day and $4.95 a month, and calls their envelopes Jars. They have the added benefit of bonuses for signing up others. They've brought their fake-Zen-speak to the site, which makes me think they won't make it over the long term.

Mint offers the same automated account linkages and some budgeting features, and it's free. [It's not entirely clear to me what their business model is, but I'm guessing it's targeted advertising for financial products.] In addition, Mint lets you compare yourself to others on spending and saving.

If you want to set goals and track more than your budget numbers, there are starting to be services for that, too. Goalmigo and 43Things are social communities where you can set and monitor goals and get group support.

MyProgress promises to track how you are doing relative to everyone else on practically everything, from net worth to fitness. [Looks like a lot of data entry, however, so I didn't have the patience today.But dang, the possibilities are enticing, aren't they?]

Conclusion

All that stuff that used require hard work with a ledger book looks like it might finally become automated. And if, like me, you hate repetitive detail, this could be a really good thing.

Acknowledgements and stuff

Thanks to TechCrunch for some interesting comments on MyProgress, and the lead to Goalmigo

If you want to see how this trend translates to business, check out Bizner.

The need for instant anywhere anything: Hair Pod

We seem to want to get anything we want on our own schedule and pretty much anywhere.
A big part of this trend is the desire to wedge something useful, fun or productive into any little snippet of time. Everyone is in a rush. We all feel like we are behind. We want little luxuries, but we want them in the most convenient possible way.
Which is why getting your nails done or having a quick massage in an airport is happening, as I reported on a while back.

Organizations that recognize and respond to this desire are finding ways to wedge little experiences in to the places where we have to wait. The latest one to cross my path is this: Hair Pod.

Hair Pod is an instant hair salon set up to do trims. It looks like it's mainly targeted at guys, but I can think of a few times a quick bang trim would have been well worth it on a trip.

There are a number of interesting design features, including a vacuum system to clear away all the cut hair, a mirror, storage for luggage / shopping and a coat cupboard. And the whole thing folds up and has closing panels when not in use.

It feels like the natural evolution of the shoe-shine stand.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Reshma Anand for sending this along to me.

When will we have real online ID that works? Identity 2.0

You must take the time to look at this presentation from Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of Sxip.

Why, you ask ...

Well, it's close to the most innovative use of PowerPoint I have ever seen. Or maybe is ... I'm not sure. It's pretty amazing.

Plus, he talks about Identity 2.0, which is a real eye-opener.

Identity 1.0 is the system of driver's licenses and similar identity validation and certification systems that work so well in the real world today.

What we have online is a siloed system where the user provides the data used to validate identity in most cases, not a third party (like the drivers' license, birth certificate or passport). And where you have to keep setting it up over and over again at every web site. Arggghhhh! And I know you know what I'm talking about here.

The most bizarre thing about the silo issue is that to simplify, we end up using the same ID and password all over the place. Which -- let's be realistic here -- is something less than good security practice.

Mr. Hardt has some interesting ideas about Identity 2.0, in which the online world will mimic the real world. Clearly, this is going to affect a lot of organizations.

Take a few minutes, grab a coffee, and become absorbed by this very interesting presentation.

Acknowledgements and resources:

Thanks to reader Forrest Christian who passed along the link to this amazing presentation.
Dick Hardt's company is Sxip. (pronounced "skip")  His blog is here.

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The innovation research is finally in print!

For more than two years, I've been involved in a major research project on innovation. This wasn't the kind of research that academics do, it was the kind that practicing business people do.

My colleagues and I conducted round-table discussions with more than 150 executives and managers from 121 organizations. Most of these events were held in person, but a few were online discussion forums.

The net result was published as a book by the main research sponsor, the executive education arm of Schulich School of Business.

We had the book launch this week, in connection with the ribbon cutting for the Centre of Excellence in Innovation that the school launched in concert with this research. There was air kissing, hand-shaking, and even book autographing, along with fancy things on crackers and suitable adult beverages.

We learned a lot of really interesting things about innovation. We exploded a few myths. And we got the stories and experiences of working managers in all kinds of industries who have lived the emotional roller-coaster on innovation. Here's a one page graphic that summarizes some of the key learning, and the interesting paradoxes we found.

Download summit_framework_v6.pdf

We weren't talking to the research participants about "new product" or "new technology", although that certainly came up. We went looking for innovation in every form and every functional area, from finance to marketing. The book is about the themes that emerged from this research.

There is only one place to get this book, if you'd like to read it. You can order it from Schulich online. All proceeds of the book go to the school. [And they include shipping, you've gotta love that!]

Resources
PS. If you happen to be a blogger or a national columnist, and you'd like a review copy, shoot me an e-mail, I'll see what I can do.

Keep your thinking up to date: or how we will look like idiots in the future

We all hold certain truths to be self-evident. Unfortunately, we are often wrong. This is one of the things that culture can blind us to.

Here's a good example, that I assumed was an urban legend, but according to Snopes it isn't.

It's a guide to making women more efficient at work from a 1943 trade magazine called Mass Transportation. It contains a fair bit of idiocy, and a lot of ideas that we have discarded today, at least as far as hiring women is concerned. [I daresay the transportation industry is not noted for its liberal thinking even today, so they may have been a bit outside the norm in 1943.]

Here's the thing: If you want to be innovative about your products, your services, your brand, you may have to rethink some conventional wisdom. The trick is actually recognizing the conventional wisdom when you see it. Because the conventional wisdom is so well understood, it often isn't spoken about. And some of it is still true, like the bit in this article about having uniforms that fit people. [d'oh]

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jean [aka my Mom] for sending this along.

Images from www.Snopes.com, a great source for checking out things that just look wrong, and often are. But not always

Customer Care: Helping the 20% or Are you any better at this than Dell?

There is so much effort going into "Customer Care" these days, that there are times I think it's all just working great. It must be. Everyone says it is.

I get a lot of advertising material about systems that are designed to support Customer Care, make it "World Class", and so forth. Here's what I think. This stuff is great for the 80%.

Most of these Customer Care systems are designed to identify the 80% of common problems and make solutions to those problems happen quickly and efficiently.

Even though the whole project team knows the system is designed this way, everyone acts like the other 20% don't exist. When we encounter an incident from that 20%, we keep stuffing it back into the other set of routines.

In fact, EVERY time something doesn't get resolved the first time by one of these systems, it needs to be escalated to the red team, the swat team, or whatever you call it. Because these systems DO in fact work for the 80%, anything that jams up or falls out somehow has to be one of those 20% issues. And the main pipeline of customer care can't handle the 20%. These need to be quickly routed to some skilled and empowered team who can diagnose and fix problems. They often aren't.

I think we've all been there. In the spiral from hell [see diagram above], where YOU are the one documenting the problem, YOU are the one recapping all the previous ineffective efforts to solve it, and YOU are the one coming up with ideas that might work.

Sadly, I am in one of those spiral circles right now with Dell, trying to upgrade my DataSafe backup for more space. Yup, just trying to give them money, and they don't seem to want to take it under any circumstances. I've had one online chat session, several e-mails, and a lengthy phone call with my GOLD Tech Support. [Who can't help because it is a sales problem, although heaven knows they have tried.]

Eventually, I think they are going to realize that some glitch is slowing down sales of DataSafe, investigate, and figure out that something in their fulfillment for this product is screwed up. In the interim, the Customer Care machine will keep squeezing a lemon and hoping for orange juice.

Of course this is one of the great ironies of 20% issues. QUITE OFTEN they are early warning signs of some problem on the fulfillment end. QUITE OFTEN they are valued customers, early adopters, and other people who don't give up easily. All the more reason to flag these items quickly.

You want to improve Customer Care? Start looking at how you handle the 20%.

Resolutions for 2008: Avoid PowerPoint Hell

Let's all resolve to avoid PowerPoint Hell this year, and avoid creating it for others.
Here's my simple strategy -- send this video to your work group and ensure you include the worst PowerPoint offenders in your organization. [This kind of point is best made with humor, and this is very funny.]

Don McMillan: How NOT to use PowerPoint

Thanks to Adam Lawrence for the link.

How to build an e-mail list in a nice way: or how good places are good at many things

I was skiing over the holidays at Lake Louise and at Sunshine Village. Both great places to ski, but the customer experience at Lake Louise is just superior in so many ways, from the quality and variety of the food to the fact that the chairs are real (not attached to the table like a high-school cafeteria).

They bring a lot of extra touches to their operation. Over the holidays, they were playing pleasant generic seasonal music over loudspeakers. They had Santa skiing around the place (here's my shot of some little girls following him down the hill).

Santa made an appearance in the main lodge, and was available for photos at no charge. They took one with my camera, but also took one with their own camera and sent it to my e-mail. That's the one below, right. Now isn't that a nice way to build an e-mail list?

Plus they were giving out candy-cames to everyone who got a picture.

One of the things I notice is that good experiences aren't just good because the BIG STUFF is good. The LITTLE STUFF is also good. If you want to improve customer experience, you don't have to wait for the giant, innovative comet to come hurtling at you out of the sky. Instead, you can steadily work to light up little stars all over the place. If you keep at that, all the customer focus this generates will make it much more likely that you'll see the big innovative opportunities.

Happy New Year: Guess what, you are already behind, and taxes will be due soon

I haven't even finished my plan for the year, and I can see I am already behind. There's no hope of billing enough in January to meet my goal for this month. So I'll need to double up somewhere else, or just accept the fact that I set the target too high.

Meanwhile, everyone else wants money and the forms are just starting to roll in.

Every association I belong to wants me to send in my membership renewal. The subscription reminders are going to start showing up any day now. And tax filing in all its glory is just around the corner.

If you have SOHO or SME customers, I suspect they are in the same mood. They have the January grumbles.

I got the GST filing form yesterday. And thank goodness, because it didn't turn up last year, which became a real hassle. [I tried to netfile, but you can't netfile without the form, don't ask me why.] There are four pages in this packet, printed on both sides. I've been trying to find the filing deadline.
I've just finished scouring the darn thing yet again, hoping to avoid another frustrating visit to the CRA web site. Because being late is so expensive, I am starting to get twitchy and paranoid about the whole thing. I think that's exactly where they want me: twitchy, confused and paranoid.

No matter how much the government claims to be making the process simpler, business taxes are a mine-field. There's pointy things with trip-wires just waiting for you. I know a lot of smart business people, people with a lot of education, people who can cope with tremendously complex issues, people who can run big stuff and run it well. And invariably we get snagged on some tax issue when we are running our own virtual organization.

These snags usually cost thousands of dollars to fix. I heard about another one just recently, a tale of woe from an honest guy, someone I respect and trust, who inadvertently screwed something up and is now in the glue big time.

I was thinking about this when I spoke to my insurance company a few days ago. My spouse usually handles the car insurance. But he can't anymore because of privacy rules. The renewal letter clearly states that only the named insured can talk to them. It's a lot like talking to the tax man.

They seem friendly enough, but they're always fishing around, just like some kind of tax auditor. "By the way, do you use the car to commute to work?" "No, I work from home." "Really, that's interesting," he says,"what kind of work can you do from home?" "Marketing research," I say. "Consulting. That kind of thing." Where has this guy been living, I wonder? "Oh, so you have clients coming in to your home then?" he asks, with a gotcha sound to his voice. "No, my clients do not meet me in my home," I have to repeat several times before we have to revisit the commuting thing. Then he starts in on business equipment in the house. I am finally able to shut that down by telling him I have business insurance from another company. Gotcha, I think to myself.

Sadly, you can never call gotcha on the government because there is no alternative supplier of taxation services.

In the private sector, you can't make a dime without improving your productivity every year. Customer and consumer expectations are high and rising for all of us. Every time I hear an exhortation from the public sector about how we need to raise our productivity, I think about the time and effort spent dealing with the public sector.

OK, rant over. We now resume our regular programming.   

Resources:
Another wonderful film in the Prelinger Archive provided the stills for this post: Despotism, made in 1946.

Being authentic equals being less formal

The holiday travel season offers so many opportunities to watch excellent and horrible customer experiences play out before you. The annual year-end parade of travel horror stories -- presented as comic -- must have felt awful to the people who experienced these nightmares. (e.g. waiting up to 11 hours on the tarmac)

When you know your systems are going to be stretched to the limit, it can really help people to experience a human voice in communication. This hand-drawn sign I saw at a WestJet counter recently is exactly the kind of thing I mean. It engages because of its humanity. It's the antithesis of bureaucracy-speak.

The words at the top say: "We all thank you for being prepared ... especially the guy behind you in line."

A bank manager taught me a similar lesson some years ago. He was writing things like "Manager's Loan Sale" on a similar white-board and putting it near the teller line. It stood out precisely because it wasn't official, wasn't formal, wasn't a pre-printed poster, and wasn't scripted by head office.

Sometimes we need to let go of consistency in communication in order to leave enough room for some humanity.

The evolution of the hotel lobby: just plug your MP3 in here

On a recent trip through the lobby of the Sheraton in downtown Toronto, I noticed these unusual rocking chairs. They have audio plugs and holders in the arm, and speakers behind the headrest. The idea is that you plug in your MP3 player, and you can listen to your music through the speakers in the chair.

While I was taking the pictures, one of the hotel staff told me that the chairs are really popular with guests. They are usually facing the interior courtyard (which has a waterfall and large trees), and guests can look out at the courtyard and relax to their own music.

I think this reflects a desire to be part of the social milieu at the same time as having a very personally engineered sound environment: headphones shut you out a bit too completely.

I noticed something similar while downhill skiing over the holidays. Many skiers now wear headphones, and ski jackets are sold with specialized pockets and wire carriers for this same purpose. But skiing is more social than it appears, and I witnessed several instances where the headphones were interfering with communication in small groups. One woman said to her companion: "I'm talking loud enough, your headphones are why you can't hear what I'm saying."