Ideas, Rule

I am doing some research for a service around Twitter, and stumbled across Kingfisher Airlines twitter account. What I saw was instead of Kingfisher saying “What they were doing?”, they are solely using Twitter as a CRM tool. Saying thanks for customer who have left them thank you note, or in some cases asking sorry to the angry customer who were not satisfied with some service.

Well, it’s all fair to use such social networking tool — but the downfall is, you are wasting time or may be turning off those customers who want to follow you to understand your promotions, flight announcements, last minute schedule changes, some critical security updates. Personally I feel, using Twitter for Saying Thank you, visit us again will flatter “that one” passenger, however will turn away several potential passengers who want to follow the business/ enterprise and gain more out of their tweets.

It indeed is an art how to distribute your tweets between tackling customer complains, building rapport by saying thank you on their good experience, sending our promos, delighting travelers with useful announcements etc. Well I feel the sooner an enterprise learns this art, the more useful such social tools will be — after all it is all about ROI.

I recently moved to London from New York and naturally I had to pick a bank where I can open an account. After looking at various options, I thought HSBC will be a good fit. So here I go to the bank with my HR letter, passport, visa details, address proof (basically all the documents saying I am who I am)

The customer service guy tells me big things about HSBC etc and how good it is. Okay. Also they will be charging me 6£ per month (did not pay anything like this in US, neither in India). They opened the account but guess what?

After 7 days I go to them and tell them that I have not received my debit card. After checking through their systems this is the conversation I have.

HSBC guy:  Sir we have sent that card to your U.S address

Me: What? Why? How?

HSBC guy: Yeah, that is the address we have on file for communication with you.

Me: But I am here, and I need a card here so that I can use it. Why would you open an account of a person living here, but send the card his other country address.

HSBC guy: Yeah, I understand but that is how we do it!

(And you call yourself world’s local bank. With such stupid business processes)

Me: So should I go to US to collect that card? Will HSBC be paying for it?

HSBC guy: Well, you can order one by calling the customer representative and ask them to block the previous card. Thank you for patience!

(BULL SHIT)

I had to call their helpline, and explain him the situation. He said you can pick up the card from the branch itself in next 5 days. I go to the branch again after 5 days and here we go.

Me: Hi, I am here to collect my card.

HSBC guy: Sure, here is your card.

Me: Okay, give me the PIN also. Without the PIN I cannot use my card anyways.

HSBC guy: Well, that is a good point. The pin would have gone to you address, and which is (after looking into computer),  your New Jersey address.

Me: !@#$!@#$@$#%@#$%@$%@#!@!@!!!!!%^&^&*%*^

It happened that I had to order the pin several times and till date I am waiting for my PIN and not able to use the card. Meanwhile they ordered me a withdrawal slip book, so that I can walk in a bank and stand in a line, go through all verification procedures and get some cash (as I cannot use an ATM because I dont have a PIN)

They could send me the slip book, but not the PIN.

What a mess! And if you complain, they make you look stupid as if they are doing it the right way and the customer is annoyed without any reason.

I rent out cars a lot. For apparant reason, that I don’t own one. Now as any other customer of these “Rent-A-Car” services (Enterprise.com, Avis.com, Hertz.com) I go to their website and look for the cheapest deal. The place where I live I have to pay $60 per day (without taxes) for the basic version of the car.

What made me think was, to pickup the car at cheaper rate, I (the customer) have to travel for almost 1.5 hours in a public transportation. I go to this location because it is connected by public transportation (which I came to know from a different site – njtrasit.com)

Now all I want these guys to do is when they present me the Search page, can they not have a search criteria which says “Show location accessible by public transport?” There are tons of APIs available which can be used in their website to present the information and filter out the data.

Am I asking for too much, or should I start paying whopping 60$ per day rent for a small size car?

Yesterday I was at Open Everything NYC held at UNICEF Headquarters, United Nations Plaza in New York.

John Britton (the organizer and the host) was right when he said that weather was responsible for people who registered and did not show up. I think we were around 50-60 people, but it seems actually more than 250 of them said they would come. I had some interesting conversations on how Openess and sharing would make a difference in the fields of music, journalism, education, enterprises.

We also had some wonderful speaker like LESLIE HAWTHORN, Schuyler Erle (btw, I just liked the way he presented RapidSMS, very innovation idea.)

I was impressed with the spirit of openness and the urge to spread it in so many different sectors. Being a techie, I always thought does open source makes sense in other areas. Well it totally does or else Youtube Symphony wouldn’t make sense or take place.

We had several sessions on topics posted by the attendees themselves. I had put a topic “How and Why Enterprise can become more Open?”. All the participants chipped in their views and opinions and had a great time networking. (I shall write a different post on this particular topic)

I am still waiting their Wiki to get updated with the photographs and the videos.

I would definitely recommend others to attend this event next time.

I don’t know if its just me or all you guys feel the same way about emails. On an average I receive around 50-70 emails.

Here is mockup thread (and believe me entire world is copied on this email)

Due to blah blah blah, the XML message mentioned below did not go through successfully. We want your sign off to send this message again the downstream system.

(the story goes on and on)

To this someone replies

Yeah, I think this is very critical etc etc etc, and would appreciate if we can get this data into the system as business is getting affected blah blah blah ..

(yeah, we know business gets affected even if IT people sneeze a lot and waste time)

This is just a beginning of this thread. Then people start saying, we are doing release now. Business gives their sign off. Another communication on the release is completed. Reply is  a big thank you. To which another reply is Thanks for your patience … gawd, Microsoft Exchange is getting killed, please stop!

I am not saying here that Emails should be replaced by Twitter. My point of view is Twitter is making us believe that 140 is beautiful, sufficient and crisp. If you cannot do in that, that means you should take effective writing courses.

Anyhoo, some tool like twitter which will sell and work in Enterprises should be built and adopted.

One thing which is truely part of every Infosys employee is the INFOSYS BULLETIN BOARD (or BB as it is called). During my stay with Infosys, Bangalore, I did not visit the Bulletin Board often, but heard quite many things and discussions on the same.

Be it technology, social talks, queries, buy/ sell — it had it all and straight from the heart (well brains too)

I had an idea then, and created a presentation below. I had sent it to Nandan Nilekani, and he was kind enough to reply back and asked to me to talk to a senior project manager and see where it goes. Meanwhile I moved out of the company. 

However I still feel that this idea has some potential. And why only Infosys? I am sure most of the companies have a forum where employees express their opinions. If possible, why don’t use that collective intelligence to contribute towards a social cause.

An Idea for Infosys Bulletin Board

Came across this site at Salesforce – http://mystarbucksidea.force.com

I guess the ailing coffee giant is trying to use some collective intelligence. Not a bad idea. I also added one of mine. Check it out!

http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/ideaView?id=087500000005HzzAAE

Feel free to comment too.

Okay, 2008-09 is Twitter year. It’s a whole new world out there with its own language containing words like tweets, @, RT etc. However my guess is Twitter started to capture and share “What are you doing?”, and is thus is becoming a complete Internet Drain. I was following a friend and he is talking about coffee, snow, oatmeal. I mean it might be “cute”, “informative” to some, but definitely not me. Yeah, reminds you of Facebook or other social networks. In the beginning it looks great .. but eventually turns out a chaos.

Here is my wishlist of new applications which can be built on the Micro-blogging framework. Frankly it will be great if these features are available in Twitter itself so that I don’t have to keep track of other apps built on Twitter APIs.

1. Filter Tweets (Fileets)

Well, I want to know what my friend A is doing in the evenings, and should be able to subscribe to only those tweets which are posted in the evening. Don’t want to know what he is having for breakfast, or that he had a heated argument with his boss (who doesn’t!!)

Yeah, alright I am following Obama, but then I am only interested to listen on the TARP or Economic Rescue Plan.

The point is if I am following 100 people and they all post 10 tweets, either I will miss some tweets out of these 1000 or I will go crazy. Well I might even get fired from my work place to be so loyal to Twitter.

2. Pattern Twitter (Pwitter)

Advertisers want to see pattern. Scientist as well. Nature herself has a pattern. Why don’t these social networks see that? If I am following people who talk mostly on Innovation, Ideas, Venture Capital — it should pattern it out and get me useful suggestions to follow other users who contribute on such topics.

3. Answer Twitter (Anster)

Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Questions, Answerbag.com — so many places to ask questions. Why? Can’t we use a Twitter model instead? It would be more productive.

4. Group Twitter (Gwitter)

10 years back Yahoo Groups were so popular. We all use to have groups for close college friends, another group for entire class etc etc. Several of them. It was fun people posting their updates, attachments. This trend got replaced by Facebook, Orkut and likewise networks.

These days I feel even usage of Facebook is an overkill to keep in touch. Isn’t Twitter sufficient enough? But then I want different groups in Twitter.

Well lets say I will create one group as NY Friends, another one as College Friends. Start adding people in these groups so that they can read and write on these groups.

5. News Twitter (Nwitter)

I am thinking of working on this idea, and is in it’s very early stage. So instead of writing what it is about I might be able to show it to you. Till then please keep thinking and tweeting

In my last post I wrote about how there should be some kind of monitoring service. One of my friends critiqued me that this is against the whole concept of freedom of expression blah blah blah.

I disagreed. The service is meant only for Enterprises and companies susceptible to get pulled into court because either employee has said something inappropriate. Now the next question is does this “check” apply for every social network? NO. Minitoring applies to those sites where employees put their company names (examples: LinkedIn, Facebook) because now the world sees their talks and associates them with the company.

Think about anti sexual harrassment policy we all sign when we take up a job. Infosys did not have any such policy and when Phaneesh Murthy’s scandal came up in 2003, it was company who had to pay 3 million USD.  Why? The simple reason is Infosys did not a policy which employees had signed. 

I am referring to similar issues which companies will face. So if we have such service they will serve two purpose.

A. Corporations will get a disclaimer from the employees that whatever activities an employee does, enterprise doesn’t have any role in it.

B. Monitor and report back any illegal/ inappropriate talk on the web, so that before it reaches every mailbox it can be pulled down.

Yeah, I think it will be needed soon.

Sometime back I came across this article in Economist. Here is a paragraph from it.

“On October 31st Virgin fired 13 of its cabin crew who had posted derogatory comments about its safety standards and some of its passengers on a Facebook forum. Among other things, crew members joked that some Virgin planes were infested with cockroaches and described customers as “chavs”, a disparaging British term for people with flashy bad taste. On November 3rd BA began investigating the behaviour of several employees who had described some passengers as “smelly” and “annoying” in Facebook postings.”

While talking to a friend, I was telling him a possibility of Social Policing. With several hundred online social networks around, with several million working professionals, there is a high chance of one “uttering” something not meant to be. The concept goes like this.