The Jolly good fellow of Google

Recently I was privileged to have a lunch session with Chade-Meng TAN, Google's 107the employee and first Singaporean to be so employed at Google and a man with the most unique title “the Jolly good fellow of Google”.

Not something I can deny since I don't know him too well!!!

In any case the thing that I agree with him is that personal and professional development springs from personal inner development and happiness and directly translates to organizational growth and profits.

Think about it. If keeping your employees happy translates to profits why are several of the organisations and organizational leaders who are driving profits by retrenching people doing. The answer is simple .. they have a paucity of ideas, while there is no excuse to keep underperformers in the organisation, a concerted push to openness and information sharing will lead to a greater understanding of each others needs and a consequent movement towards a shared organisational goal.

None exemplifies this philosophy better than HCLT with their motto of “Employees first and customers second”. Keeping the employees happy and informed is key to employees understanding organisational needs and engaging them to deliver and exceed the performance targets and more fully responding to the customer and market needs at the point of customer interactivity.

In todays flat organisational structures and knowledge based industries, the key to competitiveness lies in unlocking your employees knowledge and creativity to the greatest impact and by following their mantra of employees first and customers second HCLT has not only managed to keep their employees happy they have outperformed their peers in the market.

Just as a happy person shines a beacon of light on the activites that they accomplish moral of the story is that unlocking employee skills and creativity by minimizing command and control structures is key to growth and productivity in this new age of the Gen Y employee.

Customer Service and Mobile

Business spend millions of dollars on customer service systems, yet how many customer service systems integrate with mobile – the most common device in the world and one that is getting ever more powerful and capable by the day (think iphone and clones!!!)

Fundamentally businesses need to ensure that they utilize the most effective mix of communication channels to reach out to their existing and prospective customers and any business which ignores mobile does so at its peril for mobile is both more efficient and arguably cheaper(relatively) than other channels giving the early adopters a strategic advantage to gain market share.

Today the most widely available device is the mobile, yet how many big businesses prioritize collect of mobile numbers? Most continue the old habit of getting people to fill in a fifteen field form where half the data is unverified garbage.

You cannot conceive of such a form on the mobile due to the screen and input limitations and that's a good thing because too much information leads to analysis paralysis, and the mobile forces you to be specific about what is the objective that you want the user to reach. the second thing is that given the current limits of the mobile interface it forces people to get to the objective quickly or lose the customers interest..and thats less bullshitting all around.

On a website with a user's eyeballs captured businesses can be quite flowery and inundate the user with a lot of bullshit .. oops “marketing information” to try and convince the customer to buy or do something, the mobile forces marketeers to pare things down to bare essentials or lose the customer and this is where ad agencies and marketeers can once again showcase their creativity to try and achieve maximum impact from minimal communications.

Cutting straight to the chase … That's mobile for you.

Mobile Channels – a universe unto itself

SMS/MMS, Voice, IVR, USSD, STK, Data/web and sub channels such as mobile -search, mobile-social media, mobile-content, and mobile-games there's a whole alphabet soup of mobile channels out there.

This diverse set of options for mobile presents complications for the poor marketing/strategy manager who needs to advise the business on the best approach to engage mobile. Each channel has its own strengths and considerations that must be factored in to ensure a maximally effective business ROI. I have attempted below to provide a brief overview of the main choices.

SMS is good for short quick info messages or impulse triggers such as a call for action on an broadcast media advertisement, further more SMS is well known and used by a majority of the world's population so is very suitable for broad accessibility.Add-on the fact that the great majority know and use SMS make it the most suitable channel for interactive type application such as surveys etc.

MMS is good to communicate higher value product info such as a luxury car, house/condo's, jewelry or similar high value items, however the lack of a common standard and device compatibility issues hamper the viability of the MMS service for broad accessibility.

Voice is good when the product or service is more complex or needs a human touch to explain and interact or get consent. Example of voice services include outbound/inbound telesales and support. Voice is another one of the mobile channels with universal accessibility.

IVR is good to automate straightforward business processes and communication needs which do not need human intelligence such as for example flight and account status, request for information, automated service booking etc. This is particularly true in asia where data penetration and services coverage is quite spotty particularly in the rural areas.

USSD is a session based protocol which has the benefit of reduced latency as compared to SMS which has somewhat higher latency as it uses a store and forward mechanism, USSD has another benefit in that any USSD messages will pop up on to the front of the screen irrespective of whatever else the user is doing – for example *101# for callback initiation. USSD is typically used for dynamic menu choices and telecoms application like callback and telco services (network settings etc).

STK – SIM Toolkit is an intermediate layer that lies between the SIM and the mobile device and is typically used for menu type application where users can naviate through a smorgasboard of choices. This is again typically only used by the service providers.

Lastly then there's data – note here that data covers the entire range of IP packet communications and not just web surfing through given the ubiquity of web sites and service most people can be forgiven for thinking that HTTP equates to data, however the very flexibility of the IP packet communication together with the well established framework of HTTP (including browsers and support ecosystem of Javascript etc) allows for a great deal of user communication and information/transaction services can be provided over this medium, infact the mobile web is still in infancy and I look forward to far more services being mobilised in the coming days than is available currently.

Mobile Mobile - where art thou

Mobility today resembles the early days of the Internet, where connectivity was poor and many businesses were contemplating the wisdom of connecting to an unknown network or in today's equivalent much less even contemplating the need for creating a mobile web presence.

Today just as businesses without a website are not even in the customers considerations, very soon it will be considered absurd not to have a mobile web site, extrapolating scenarios a few years down most firms moving forward will have an integrated mobile presence and services that uses customers accessibility on the mobile number(s) as a core consideration to deliver services and information.

The situation as it stands today is one where the mobile is rapidly expanding as a channel for interacting with consumers, and it will continue to be increasingly relevant to businesses as the networks, devices and technology advances to enable richer and a more personalized interaction anywhere anytime.

Realising this both Google with its admob acquisition and Apple with its Quattro acquisition are acknowledging the fact that mobile is going to be the next screen with the most eyeballs and that they need to have a presence in that space.

Likewise technologically advanced businesses who have taken early advantage of this channel are seeing immense ROI returns not to mention benefiting from a business channel with minimal or no clutter and compedition.

Many of my customers, users and professional colleagues ask me about the mobile future and query me on how should they engage with the channel. These conversations have ranged from high-level strategy dialogues to tactical campaign activities.

However what all businesses and organizations need to know is that they need to consider certain fundamental aspects of consumer behavior and channel abilities before they can tackle the challenges they face when interacting with their consumers on their mobile device.

Businesses need to understand fundamentally that the mobile user experience does not follow the PC user experience. The PC experience is a user being (typically) immobile with a full fledged keyboard with a mouse and a relatively large screen, however the mobile space is far more challenging with a variety of input devices and user contexts such as in a que, on the train or walking home or even driving!!! as well as far greater interactivity choices, voice, keypad, trackwheel, trackpad, navigation keys etc and it requires a different and dedicated approach to optimize the delivery to mesh with the user objectives.

About Me

My name is Siraj Iqbal, I work for Dizilife - a mobile startup in Singapore, I love chocolates, technology and RC cars not necessarily in that order.

As the headGeek with a capital G  I get to play with developing a range of technologies while at the same time defining the product roadmap and delivering the company's core development of services. (Talk about geeks having fun!). 

In previous stints I had worked on pfingo a Fixed-Mobile convergence service which was successfully launched and saw rapid subscriber growth and foosti another startup which pioneered the worlds first reverse billing GPRS engine (1800 for mobile data).

In my spare time I race with two sons using my RC cars.