Outside Innovation

Are You Violating Your Customers’ Privacy?

Consumers care a lot about their privacy. They worry first and foremost about the safety of their assets and the safety of their family members and loved ones. They worry about identity theft and about having their credit card numbers and bank accounts hacked into and compromised. The next thing they are concerned about is losing their mobile phones and all the data that it contains—both because it’s inconvenient to lose all that information and also because it might fall into the wrong hands.

Now, increasingly, people—both in their consumer and professional roles—also worry about being spied on, wiretapped, or placed under surveillance without their knowledge. What more and more people are now beginning to realize is that the mobile phones to which they entrust their lives are actually tracking their whereabouts as they move around during the day. Many people find this profoundly disturbing. So they take actions that they believe will limit the ability of others to spy on them or to gather data about their daily routines by monitoring their location throughout the day. What most people don’t realize is that even if they have location services or GPS turned off, your phone location is still being monitored. What many people also aren’t conscious of is that many of the mobile apps they use and love are tracking their locations and sending that information to advertising services’ databases where that information is stored and used to target relevant ads. (If you frequent Starbucks, maybe you’ll be interested in an offer for Peets coffee; if you work out at one gym, maybe you’ll be open to a promotion for another fitness center.)

Are You Tracking Your Customers’ Locations?

Identity and Digital Asset Management

By Peter Horne

My recent post about online identity, “How to Think about Privacy and Managing Your Online Identity” discussed the fact that we don’t own our identities, as they are simply identifiers inside processes that we don’t control. My proposition was that because we can’t control the processes that control our identities, we only have limited scope for control. Basically, we can choose what processes we enter, and, once in them, we can choose what we do; but, other than that, we have no control. So we just have to be judicious about what we choose to reveal about ourselves.

We Need an Alternative Concept to "Identity"
But is that all that we can do? I think the answer is in two parts. The first part is that, at this point in time, that is all we are able to do, and the second part is that we are accepting that this is the way the online world works. But what if we change the way we think about identity - will we change what we accept? If we change what we accept, will the way we have to operate online change with it?

The problem with "identity" is that it is ethereal, and we cannot measure or manage it. We need to define identity in a way that is concrete, measurable, and something that has intrinsic value that is worth defending.

Do You Need an App for That?

A recent customer co-design session got me thinking about when it’s valuable for customers to have a mobile app versus when it’s fine to let them use their mobile phones to access your website. There is so much money being poured into the development of mobile apps, I think it’s time to become a bit more judicious about taking the plunge into mobile app development.

Do Your Customers REALLY Need an App for That?

There’s no doubt in my mind that we have now reached the cross-over point: more customers access the Internet via their mobile phones than ever before. In fact, in many countries, more than 50% of ALL Internet access is via mobile devices.

How to Excel in a Customer’s Crisis

One of the “Aha’s” I’ve had over the many years that I’ve been working with companies to improve their customer-impacting business processes is this: Most firms don’t design for exceptions and breakdowns. They design for the “happy path.” Yet, we all know that what makes or breaks most customer relationships is how your organization/people/process/partners and technologies react when things go awry.

What Do Crisis Specialists Do? There are companies that specialize in handling crises and emergencies (emergency road service, ambulances, hospitals, police and fire departments, insurance companies). These organizations specialize in:

• Providing 24x7 personal service with a great deal of empathy and appropriate resources
• Getting to the scene/person quickly (within minutes)
• Anticipating all contingencies (have all emergency supplies handy)
• Coordinating multiple service providers
• Triage (fix what can be prevented/fixed before you deal with what can’t be saved)
• Great execution/follow up (the scope of this varies depending on the purview of the crisis specialist)