Outside Innovation

Whom Do You Trust as Your Mobile E-Wallet Provider?

Coming Soon: Pay for Everything Using Your Mobile Phone
By Patty Seybold

Starting this fall, e-wallets will become available for our mobile phones. When I use the term “e-wallet,” I’m talking about enabling consumers to pay for things using their mobile phones and to pay each other via mobile phone. No cash, no plastic credit cards, no checks needed. You carry your money, credit cards, debit cards, rewards points, and loyalty cards around with you digitally. At the point of sale, you choose which payment type you want to use: take cash from your checking account, use money you’ve pre-loaded on a stored value “card,” charge it to your phone bill, charge it on a credit card account and pay later, and so on. Like a physical wallet, you can put things into it and take things out of it. And you can carry it around with you wherever you go.

© 2012 Microsoft

Microsoft's Wallet Hub will debut with Windows 8

Combine "Manage My Stuff" with Benchmarking & Peer Community?

Customers Want to Manage Their Stuff.

There are many areas of our personal and business lives in which we value e-tools (mobile and/or online apps) that make it easy for us to keep track of things, get relevant updates, categorize and classify, organize and allocate, save money, and improve our effectiveness and our bottom lines. Examples include managing your money, your health, your fitness, your vehicle(s), your capital equipment and software configurations, and your relationship with just about any supplier whose products and services you use regularly.

Recently, we've been conducting a series of B2C and B2C customer experience audits on how easy it is to "Manage my Stuff." Starting in July 2011, Ronni Marshak has audited and reviewed the branded "manage my stuff" experiences at Amazon (B2C), Staples (B2B), and, this week, Bank of America (B2C).

Customers Want to See Where They Stand & Compare Notes with Others. At the same time that we've been doing online customer experience audits, we've been observing, interviewing, and facilitating group meetings with many of our clients' B2B customers. Here's an interesting pattern we've observed across industries: customers want to manage their stuff, benchmark their performance to others in the same situation, troubleshoot problems, and get and offer advice.

Your customers definitely want self-service tools that enable them to "manage their stuff" on your portals or web sites. They also want to be notified or alerted when certain events occur. The kinds of notifications people want differ greatly by role (managing operations, budgeting, strategic planning, etc. ) and by personality (proactive vs. reactive; want to see anomalies only, or see the status of only specific things, and so on). We've discovered that customers also value the sharing of best practices, collaborative problem-solving, and root cause analysis in and around their stuff!