Here is very interesting work that has some relationship to CEBP given that voice, face. iris or fingerprints can be used.
BIOMIDS' focus is on helping organizations in the healthcare and financial services sector reduce the use of passwords and better leverage their employees' mobile devices. The recent blog post about mobile biometrics being the next killer app seems right on target.
The post seems especially forward looking given recent acquisitions by Apple in fingerprint authentication technology and Facebook with Face.com. One of the obstacles to widespread biometric adoption in the Enterprise has been socialization of the technology. Biometrics needs to be viewed as a better process than the current user name/password processes. It is expected that these big consumer technology companies will help to broadly socialize the use of biometrics over the next couple of years. Of course, the consumerization of IT trend has been with Enterprise CIOs for the past few years. My sense is that CIOs will quickly see the benefit of adding biometrics to improve specific Identification or Authentication business processes within their enterprise. Given the growing trends with password thefts it is doubtful that CIOs will be hesitant to adopt biometrics within their organizations. Especially since it does double duty...improving the broken username/password process and leveraging the BYOD mobile device trend.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
CEBP could improve Healthcare even more: Part 2
The previous blog discussed how real time communications was improving the Pharmacy, Physician, Patient transaction process.
Here is the next step in the process improvement that hasn’t been nailed down yet. We need to use improved communication methods to improve patient care relative to medication usage.
In the US, policymakers are painfully aware of the fact that several unhealthy lifestyle conditions including diabetes and heart disease take up a disproportionate amount of health care spending.
Researchers at the CDC have gotten even more specific with a report that 4 drugs cause almost half of the emergency visits in the US.
According to researchers, nearly 100,000 hospitalizations every year are linked to adverse drug events such as allergic reactions and unintentional overdoses. Nearly half, or 48.1 percent, of those hospitalized were adults 80 years old or older.
“These data suggest that focusing safety initiatives on a few medicines that commonly cause serious, measurable harms can improve care for many older Americans,” said lead study author Dr. Daniel Budnitz, director of the CDC’s medication safety program. “Blood thinners and diabetes medicines often require blood testing and dosing changes, but these are critical medicines for older adults with certain medical conditions.”
“Of the thousands of medications available to older patients, a small group of blood thinners and diabetes medications caused a high proportion of emergency hospitalizations for adverse drug events among elderly Americans,” he added.
Read more: http://www.thestatecolumn.com/health/according-cdc-four-drugs-er-visits/#ixzz1f1y6QKXw
Physicians, patients, and insurance companies have figured out how to improve the transaction process of filling prescriptions. We need to go the next step and use real time communications to improve the monitoring process.
One could imagine tying a regular automated daily phone call check in to any patient taking certain medications who meets certain criteria. Outbound messaging combined with very simple DTMF gathering of information from the patient would certainly help to lower the number of ER visits.
For more information on these topics contact us at www.marketlaunchgroup.us
Here is the next step in the process improvement that hasn’t been nailed down yet. We need to use improved communication methods to improve patient care relative to medication usage.
In the US, policymakers are painfully aware of the fact that several unhealthy lifestyle conditions including diabetes and heart disease take up a disproportionate amount of health care spending.
Researchers at the CDC have gotten even more specific with a report that 4 drugs cause almost half of the emergency visits in the US.
According to researchers, nearly 100,000 hospitalizations every year are linked to adverse drug events such as allergic reactions and unintentional overdoses. Nearly half, or 48.1 percent, of those hospitalized were adults 80 years old or older.
“These data suggest that focusing safety initiatives on a few medicines that commonly cause serious, measurable harms can improve care for many older Americans,” said lead study author Dr. Daniel Budnitz, director of the CDC’s medication safety program. “Blood thinners and diabetes medicines often require blood testing and dosing changes, but these are critical medicines for older adults with certain medical conditions.”
“Of the thousands of medications available to older patients, a small group of blood thinners and diabetes medications caused a high proportion of emergency hospitalizations for adverse drug events among elderly Americans,” he added.
Read more: http://www.thestatecolumn.com/health/according-cdc-four-drugs-er-visits/#ixzz1f1y6QKXw
Physicians, patients, and insurance companies have figured out how to improve the transaction process of filling prescriptions. We need to go the next step and use real time communications to improve the monitoring process.
One could imagine tying a regular automated daily phone call check in to any patient taking certain medications who meets certain criteria. Outbound messaging combined with very simple DTMF gathering of information from the patient would certainly help to lower the number of ER visits.
For more information on these topics contact us at www.marketlaunchgroup.us
CEBP improves Healthcare: Part 1
Digging into a Health Information Technology press release I noticed an update on a HIPA compliance topic referred to as NCPDP Telecom D.0 (NCPDP D.0).
It took some research but this little bit of news reflects significant changes in the way that doctors, pharmacies and health insurance companies communicate with each other.
Specifically, it requires pharmacies and insurance companies to interact using real time communication standards rather than the previous batch information standards.
I know this sounds like esoteric stuff. Yet, think about your typical interaction with a pharmacy over the past year as compared to a few years ago. I deal with a very large regional drug store chain so they may be ahead of the curve.
1. If you need a monthly prescription refilled many pharmacies proactively call you to tell you it is ready. At worst, one need just call a number on the bottle and request a time to pick it up.
2. Annual updates or anything requiring your physician’s involvement can most often happen over the phone within 24 or 48 hours.
3. For the most part there is little or no involvement that is required between the patient and the insurance company regarding prescription drug processing.
4. I am also told that Drug Enforcement Agency work in conjunction with Pharmacies has been greatly improved. Unfortunately, due to the increase in prescription drug abuse this technology enhancement has been vital.
There are certainly still outlier scenarios but the vast majority of pharmacy/physician/patient interactions have become faster, better, and cheaper for all parties involved thanks to real time communications. Go to MarketLaunchGroup.us for more information on these topics.
Patrick Murphy
It took some research but this little bit of news reflects significant changes in the way that doctors, pharmacies and health insurance companies communicate with each other.
Specifically, it requires pharmacies and insurance companies to interact using real time communication standards rather than the previous batch information standards.
I know this sounds like esoteric stuff. Yet, think about your typical interaction with a pharmacy over the past year as compared to a few years ago. I deal with a very large regional drug store chain so they may be ahead of the curve.
1. If you need a monthly prescription refilled many pharmacies proactively call you to tell you it is ready. At worst, one need just call a number on the bottle and request a time to pick it up.
2. Annual updates or anything requiring your physician’s involvement can most often happen over the phone within 24 or 48 hours.
3. For the most part there is little or no involvement that is required between the patient and the insurance company regarding prescription drug processing.
4. I am also told that Drug Enforcement Agency work in conjunction with Pharmacies has been greatly improved. Unfortunately, due to the increase in prescription drug abuse this technology enhancement has been vital.
There are certainly still outlier scenarios but the vast majority of pharmacy/physician/patient interactions have become faster, better, and cheaper for all parties involved thanks to real time communications. Go to MarketLaunchGroup.us for more information on these topics.
Patrick Murphy
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Why is the CEBP value proposition being stolen away from Telcos?
# Martin Geddes: Telcos will not be the hubs of multi-sided markets in connectivity. Commerce platforms will give away access to drive transactions.
According to Martin, I’ve been looking in the wrong place for UC/CEBP inspiration. For background, one of the key opportunities in multisided Telco related markets has been CEBP.
Geddes is typically right on target. For the most part, the innovative activity is not coming from Telcos or telco inspired and dependent firms, it is or will come from companies that are focused on driving consumer or business transactions.
Several major examples have made news examples.
Amazon’s Kindle has come with wireless data connectivity as a free feature for years. Of course, the KindleFire is being positioned as a one stop commerce platform. Gaming stations have Unified Communications tools baked into their systems. In theory, Microsoft’s cloud initiatives dovetails nicely with their Skype acquisition. Given track records for Skype and Microsoft it is premature to make any real predictions about successful integration and collaboration efforts.
One can certainly see mobile content providers giving away or subsidizing the sale of low cost mobile entertainment, sms, communication devices to teenagers and young people globally under the assumption that all this demographics’ entertainment purchases will flow through their mobile entertainment, communication,commerce platforms.
Providing mobile phones to remote villages around the globe to encourage the use of mobile commerce via sms is already happening. Similar to credit card companies in the US over the last five decades, get the commerce platform in the hands of the consumers anyway possible.
It seems that the important innovations so far, are with consumer driven initiatives. Obviously some of these niches like gaming, app stores, and mobile payments are very big.
Are any of these innovations and the value they are creating being driven by Telcos? Not really, as Telcos continue to deal with commoditization issues the only differentiator over the last few years has been provided by Apple’s alignment with ATT.
So, from the Telco perspective, how do we bring more CEBP/UC style innovations directly to businesses?
The irony is this challenge is no longer a technology problem. The tools, talents, platforms or apis required to integrate most communications functionality into practically any business process are understood and affordable. Many Telcos have platforms that allow for new services and apis to provide innovative solutions to clients. Furthermore, the client use cases and return on investment calculations are already proven.
The challenge that has not been overcome by most Telcos and telco dependent companies is their view of the customer world is horizontal.The “most” creative Telcos and vendors may admit to several types of customers: consumers, business- class, and enterprise...alas small, medium and large is the same customer segmentation done by my local ice cream shop.
The challenge for Telcos and their vendors is one of organizational structure and culture change on the revenue generating side of each company. Sales and marketing teams in CLECs and the vendors that support them have to get hyper focused on industry verticals...or at least CEBP vertical solutions.
Here are two examples of vertically specific opportunities that would allow Telcos to move beyond the selling of commodity voice and data services.
Healthcare is the vertical with the most money sloshing through it in the US today.
1. The Federal government is providing $42,000 subsidies for physicians to adopt EMR technologies. Amazingly, few of the EMRs that I have reviewed have any real communications functionality embedded in their platforms. Here are two challenges to be solved by UC/CEBP.
First, making sure that patients don’t miss appointments has hard ROIs understood by everyone in healthcare. Secondly, the ability to securely transfer EMRs within and between healthcare organizations and physicians has lots of lags and drags in the process.
K-12 and Higher Education continues to see above average growth while serving the most connected of our generations.
2. Outbound messaging and surveying applications have become a standard requirement for most schools and towns within the last six years. Why couldn’t a CLEC provide school districts or municipalities partner with Student Information Systems or Municipal CRM platforms to provide outbound student/citizen messaging applications as part of the voice and data packages.
Identifying the right types of CEBP functionality to add real value for customers is a matter of focus. Regardless, it does come down to a fundamental question. Are the Telcos and all the Telco dependent firms really willing to think about customers with a bit more complexity than small, medium, or large. Then, are the best firms willing to align their sales and marketing organization to take ownership of this communications value proposition?
According to Martin, I’ve been looking in the wrong place for UC/CEBP inspiration. For background, one of the key opportunities in multisided Telco related markets has been CEBP.
Geddes is typically right on target. For the most part, the innovative activity is not coming from Telcos or telco inspired and dependent firms, it is or will come from companies that are focused on driving consumer or business transactions.
Several major examples have made news examples.
Amazon’s Kindle has come with wireless data connectivity as a free feature for years. Of course, the KindleFire is being positioned as a one stop commerce platform. Gaming stations have Unified Communications tools baked into their systems. In theory, Microsoft’s cloud initiatives dovetails nicely with their Skype acquisition. Given track records for Skype and Microsoft it is premature to make any real predictions about successful integration and collaboration efforts.
One can certainly see mobile content providers giving away or subsidizing the sale of low cost mobile entertainment, sms, communication devices to teenagers and young people globally under the assumption that all this demographics’ entertainment purchases will flow through their mobile entertainment, communication,commerce platforms.
Providing mobile phones to remote villages around the globe to encourage the use of mobile commerce via sms is already happening. Similar to credit card companies in the US over the last five decades, get the commerce platform in the hands of the consumers anyway possible.
It seems that the important innovations so far, are with consumer driven initiatives. Obviously some of these niches like gaming, app stores, and mobile payments are very big.
Are any of these innovations and the value they are creating being driven by Telcos? Not really, as Telcos continue to deal with commoditization issues the only differentiator over the last few years has been provided by Apple’s alignment with ATT.
So, from the Telco perspective, how do we bring more CEBP/UC style innovations directly to businesses?
The irony is this challenge is no longer a technology problem. The tools, talents, platforms or apis required to integrate most communications functionality into practically any business process are understood and affordable. Many Telcos have platforms that allow for new services and apis to provide innovative solutions to clients. Furthermore, the client use cases and return on investment calculations are already proven.
The challenge that has not been overcome by most Telcos and telco dependent companies is their view of the customer world is horizontal.The “most” creative Telcos and vendors may admit to several types of customers: consumers, business- class, and enterprise...alas small, medium and large is the same customer segmentation done by my local ice cream shop.
The challenge for Telcos and their vendors is one of organizational structure and culture change on the revenue generating side of each company. Sales and marketing teams in CLECs and the vendors that support them have to get hyper focused on industry verticals...or at least CEBP vertical solutions.
Here are two examples of vertically specific opportunities that would allow Telcos to move beyond the selling of commodity voice and data services.
Healthcare is the vertical with the most money sloshing through it in the US today.
1. The Federal government is providing $42,000 subsidies for physicians to adopt EMR technologies. Amazingly, few of the EMRs that I have reviewed have any real communications functionality embedded in their platforms. Here are two challenges to be solved by UC/CEBP.
First, making sure that patients don’t miss appointments has hard ROIs understood by everyone in healthcare. Secondly, the ability to securely transfer EMRs within and between healthcare organizations and physicians has lots of lags and drags in the process.
K-12 and Higher Education continues to see above average growth while serving the most connected of our generations.
2. Outbound messaging and surveying applications have become a standard requirement for most schools and towns within the last six years. Why couldn’t a CLEC provide school districts or municipalities partner with Student Information Systems or Municipal CRM platforms to provide outbound student/citizen messaging applications as part of the voice and data packages.
Identifying the right types of CEBP functionality to add real value for customers is a matter of focus. Regardless, it does come down to a fundamental question. Are the Telcos and all the Telco dependent firms really willing to think about customers with a bit more complexity than small, medium, or large. Then, are the best firms willing to align their sales and marketing organization to take ownership of this communications value proposition?
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Was British Telecom's acquisition of Ribbit a success or failure?
On July 29th, 2008 BT announced it had acquired Ribbit for $105 million dollars in cash. At the time I was working with Jaduka, a Network IP company. Although, we were a bit envious many of us saw this exit as validation of a wider industry vision that the global telecom companies were ready to reinvent themselves. The vision of inevitably becoming a dumb pipe provider had begun to shock a few global telcos into action. The concept of a Telco 2.0 world was beginning to take hold, so we thought.
Two plus years after the acquisition has been finalized, implemented, and accounted, can it be viewed as a success or failure?
From the financial standpoint of the founders and investors in Ribbit, it must be viewed as a success. It can be counted as a minimum 8x return on the total $13 million dollar investment. The company had only been started in early 2006. Ribbit was a text book Silicon Valley startup and exit.
The next questions are whether BT and the wider industry view the acquisition as a success.
Ribbit's founders, lead executives and much of the original talent at Ribbit are no longer employed by BT. Some would consider that loss of staff natural attenuation during tech company acquisitions. Entrepreneurs having achieved a liquidity event don't typically stick around large companies. However, it gets tougher for BT to defend the loss of their leading executive force behind the acquisition, JP Rangaswami. His team was seen as the leading evangelists for re-inventing the Telcos.
Some might say that a move to SalesForce can be expected for an executive most comfortable with the title of chief scientist. World class executives make moves all the time and JP's team was recognized as leaders by the industry. So, maybe the people side of the BT/Ribbit acquisition was always destined to work out like it has.
However, the BT phrase that I have heard used several times over the last few months regarding Ribbit is that it is being "internalized." No one seems to use the term and then follow it up with a jaunty phrase of congratulations. I know corporate speak is strange but it feels more like a pyscho-analytical term to me. Internalizing the Ribbit platform within BT suggests that it will be used as a self help tool kit.
I am confident that somewhere within BT accounting a credit and debit EBITDA sheet can justify the $105 million dollar acquisition. The Ribbit platform as a tool for internal development and the Ribbit soft switch as a no cost alternative to vendor supplied development tools and switches could be viewed as "internalized" assets with depreciation value. Given the US dollar exchange rate, any of us could come up with a financial equation that justifies the deal.
On paper, both sides can probably make claims that the acquisition was a financial success.
Does it feel like a success to the wider industry? Is Telco 2.0 style innovation being driven through out BT or the wider telecom industry because of this acquisition?
At this point in time, the primary BT/Ribbit failure is one of hopes, expectations, and vision. There are worlds' of innovation happening within the broader telco application industry. Can this innovation always be supported and leveraged by the giant global telecoms. No, of course not.
What are the factors that drive success or precipitate failure and can we control for them?
Patrick Murphy
508-364-3464 (m)
pmcape@gmail.com
www.facebook.com/pmcape
Two plus years after the acquisition has been finalized, implemented, and accounted, can it be viewed as a success or failure?
From the financial standpoint of the founders and investors in Ribbit, it must be viewed as a success. It can be counted as a minimum 8x return on the total $13 million dollar investment. The company had only been started in early 2006. Ribbit was a text book Silicon Valley startup and exit.
The next questions are whether BT and the wider industry view the acquisition as a success.
Ribbit's founders, lead executives and much of the original talent at Ribbit are no longer employed by BT. Some would consider that loss of staff natural attenuation during tech company acquisitions. Entrepreneurs having achieved a liquidity event don't typically stick around large companies. However, it gets tougher for BT to defend the loss of their leading executive force behind the acquisition, JP Rangaswami. His team was seen as the leading evangelists for re-inventing the Telcos.
Some might say that a move to SalesForce can be expected for an executive most comfortable with the title of chief scientist. World class executives make moves all the time and JP's team was recognized as leaders by the industry. So, maybe the people side of the BT/Ribbit acquisition was always destined to work out like it has.
However, the BT phrase that I have heard used several times over the last few months regarding Ribbit is that it is being "internalized." No one seems to use the term and then follow it up with a jaunty phrase of congratulations. I know corporate speak is strange but it feels more like a pyscho-analytical term to me. Internalizing the Ribbit platform within BT suggests that it will be used as a self help tool kit.
I am confident that somewhere within BT accounting a credit and debit EBITDA sheet can justify the $105 million dollar acquisition. The Ribbit platform as a tool for internal development and the Ribbit soft switch as a no cost alternative to vendor supplied development tools and switches could be viewed as "internalized" assets with depreciation value. Given the US dollar exchange rate, any of us could come up with a financial equation that justifies the deal.
On paper, both sides can probably make claims that the acquisition was a financial success.
Does it feel like a success to the wider industry? Is Telco 2.0 style innovation being driven through out BT or the wider telecom industry because of this acquisition?
At this point in time, the primary BT/Ribbit failure is one of hopes, expectations, and vision. There are worlds' of innovation happening within the broader telco application industry. Can this innovation always be supported and leveraged by the giant global telecoms. No, of course not.
What are the factors that drive success or precipitate failure and can we control for them?
This post is one attempt to get more industry journalists, analysts or business school teams to take a deeper look at a few of the past technology driven acquisitions made by global Telcos. The success or failure of a particular initiative or acquisition is not the most important question. What are the factors required to drive Telco innovation? Can innovation really happen from within a Telco anymore?
Patrick Murphy
508-364-3464 (m)
pmcape@gmail.com
www.facebook.com/pmcape
skype:pmcape
twitter:pmcape
Thursday, August 12, 2010
CEBP offers our enterprise clients a way to surf the wave of social crm
One of the major technology trends of the past few years has been the consumerization of technology adoption. Meaning, unlike in previous decades where the business market was the first one to adopt technology, consumer applications or devices are now the leading edge of technology.
This trend has resulted in consumers (all of us) pushing to make our employers and business relationships adopt the technology that we use most regularly. Social Media networks like Facebook and mobile sms tools like Twitter are great examples of consumer apps that are being pushed into the business community creating a social crm channel. Opening up these new tech empowered social crm channels has become a real challenge for businesses of any size.
Creating and sustaining a customer, vendor, friend, community communications strategy has real strategic and tactical complexities as well as opportunities. For large consumer driven enterprises, the massive scale attached to opening and managing multiple social crm channels can become mind boggling. There are two very good recent reports by Gartner and Altimeter covering these social CRM trends.
With many billions of customer service contacts each year at an average per call cost (domestically or off shore) measured at $5.00 adding tens of billions of additional consumer interactions requires new thinking and tools.
Of course, these new consumer channels need to flow through the businesses contact centers. Yet, this rapidly becomes a tsunami of real time communications and social media traffic that will test the capacity of any contact center. More vitally, consumer expectations have changed. Proactive responses into the consumers’ preferred communication channel is the new standard. The traditional metric of first call resolution within so many hours is dramatically out of step in a world of consumers posting their negative experiences to their networks of hundreds and thousands. The old saying that a happy customer tells 5 people and an angry customer tells 25 people about his experience needs to be exponentially updated.
To add even more complexity, an old issue , identity verification, becomes even more important as we add millions if not billions of consumer contacts into these channels.
CEBP solutions like VoiceSage can become an integral part of these solutions. Fortunately, VoiceSage’s ability to leverage telco grade database queries offers a fast and simple method to provide identity verification for any consumer facing enterprise. These types of data feeds are no longer a function of hardware but of programming interfaces.
I’ve previously touched on this theme of CEBP solutions as a glue technology. Social media and mobile technologies are the tools of choice for consumers. Connecting, pulling, leveraging these consumer tools with traditional enterprise contact center technologies is not being done well now. CEBP solutions can be used to connect these two distinct worlds.
CEBP solutions allow our enterprise clients to buy themselves time to open these new social media/mobile communication channels without drowning their business.
Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage USA
This trend has resulted in consumers (all of us) pushing to make our employers and business relationships adopt the technology that we use most regularly. Social Media networks like Facebook and mobile sms tools like Twitter are great examples of consumer apps that are being pushed into the business community creating a social crm channel. Opening up these new tech empowered social crm channels has become a real challenge for businesses of any size.
Creating and sustaining a customer, vendor, friend, community communications strategy has real strategic and tactical complexities as well as opportunities. For large consumer driven enterprises, the massive scale attached to opening and managing multiple social crm channels can become mind boggling. There are two very good recent reports by Gartner and Altimeter covering these social CRM trends.
With many billions of customer service contacts each year at an average per call cost (domestically or off shore) measured at $5.00 adding tens of billions of additional consumer interactions requires new thinking and tools.
Of course, these new consumer channels need to flow through the businesses contact centers. Yet, this rapidly becomes a tsunami of real time communications and social media traffic that will test the capacity of any contact center. More vitally, consumer expectations have changed. Proactive responses into the consumers’ preferred communication channel is the new standard. The traditional metric of first call resolution within so many hours is dramatically out of step in a world of consumers posting their negative experiences to their networks of hundreds and thousands. The old saying that a happy customer tells 5 people and an angry customer tells 25 people about his experience needs to be exponentially updated.
To add even more complexity, an old issue , identity verification, becomes even more important as we add millions if not billions of consumer contacts into these channels.
CEBP solutions like VoiceSage can become an integral part of these solutions. Fortunately, VoiceSage’s ability to leverage telco grade database queries offers a fast and simple method to provide identity verification for any consumer facing enterprise. These types of data feeds are no longer a function of hardware but of programming interfaces.
I’ve previously touched on this theme of CEBP solutions as a glue technology. Social media and mobile technologies are the tools of choice for consumers. Connecting, pulling, leveraging these consumer tools with traditional enterprise contact center technologies is not being done well now. CEBP solutions can be used to connect these two distinct worlds.
CEBP solutions allow our enterprise clients to buy themselves time to open these new social media/mobile communication channels without drowning their business.
Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage USA
Monday, July 12, 2010
Could the CEBP market be as large as the postal service?
The US postal service is once again running billions of dollars in deficits. Its total volume continues to decline by billions of pieces each year. The number of employee layoffs increases. The requests for rate increases and reduced services continues. A Newsweek post argues that this decline in the postal service is actually good for the economy.
My colleagues in the UK tell me about the rather unique tradition of regular postal strikes that tend to be timed to cause maximum disruption near holidays. To be fair, it can be argued that the Royal Mail may have turned the corner at least from a financial perspective if not with service improvements. Their total volume continues to decline too. Despite declining volumes, revenues, and technical obsolence postal services remain some of the world’s largest employers.
Despite these negative signs it is understood there are remaining social contexts and regulatory demands for ubiquitous mail services.Yet, that is really the only supporting argument. Many of the business related reasons for using traditional mail are obviously outdated already. For the majority of us the mail has become a test of our commitment to recycling rather than a useful government service. It is difficult to imagine a true transformation of something now popularly referred to as snail mail.
At the same time, we can look at the Telco industry (once also a government protected monopoly) and ask if it has a hope of evolving into anything more than a dumb pipe. The next question that comes to my mind may seem a bit unusual.
What if Telcos or possibly a major CEBP focused business process outsourcer decided they were going to directly compete for business revenue and functions that traditionally go to the postal service?
For major Telcos and BPOs the first question is whether the potential market is large enough. Are there billions rather than millions in potential revenue? The postal service is a perfect example of a two sided market that benefits from winner take all economies. Thus, the revenue numbers attached to just enterprise sent consumer mail are in the tens of billions of dollars in the US and hundreds of billions if not in excess of a trillion dollars globally.
The only major difference between the business functions provided by the postal service and CEBP solutions is in terms of the marketing function. At least in the US and UK, permission based marketing is the regulated and cultural standard for telco inspired solutions. A similarly enforced permission based marketing regulation would be the final nail in the coffin of mass mail marketers who rely on gross volume to generate single digit responses.
This “marketing” difference is not as clear cut in many developing countries that use affinity marketing as a means to subsidise mobile phone adoption and mobile payment transactions. Interestingly, I wonder if many of these same countries have as strong a history of government sponsored mail services compared to the UK and US.
This current marketing difference is more a problem of creative business models and culture than one of technology. Being able to proactively send a customer a targeted appreciated marketing message by voice or sms will become more common as consumers and retailers continue to get comfortable with social media and understand the value of creating opt in permissions for their trusted networks of friends and businesses. Marketing guru Seth Godin bluntly describes the difference in business models as smart versus dumb.
If one goes through the range of reasons why mail has traditionally been most useful for all industries VoiceSage’s clients have already found many more productive solutions through the use of our CEBP application. In many instances the client uses CEBP solutions to remove the need for postal mail entirely from their processes. In other cases the enterprise uses CEBP solutions to improve the experience of any remaining paper based communications. Our ability to provide just in time personalization while handling global scale allows our clients to generate ROI across both big and small business processes.
Our UK, Irish, and US based VoiceSage clients rely on CEBP solutions to provide logistics, collections, communications, and customer service business process improvements every day. With a Telco or BPO style strategic partner,VoiceSage clients in parts of EMEA could certainly tap the marketing power of CEBP quickly.
We have never thought of ourselves as competing with the largest postal services in the world. Maybe we should.
Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage
July 12, 2010
My colleagues in the UK tell me about the rather unique tradition of regular postal strikes that tend to be timed to cause maximum disruption near holidays. To be fair, it can be argued that the Royal Mail may have turned the corner at least from a financial perspective if not with service improvements. Their total volume continues to decline too. Despite declining volumes, revenues, and technical obsolence postal services remain some of the world’s largest employers.
Despite these negative signs it is understood there are remaining social contexts and regulatory demands for ubiquitous mail services.Yet, that is really the only supporting argument. Many of the business related reasons for using traditional mail are obviously outdated already. For the majority of us the mail has become a test of our commitment to recycling rather than a useful government service. It is difficult to imagine a true transformation of something now popularly referred to as snail mail.
At the same time, we can look at the Telco industry (once also a government protected monopoly) and ask if it has a hope of evolving into anything more than a dumb pipe. The next question that comes to my mind may seem a bit unusual.
What if Telcos or possibly a major CEBP focused business process outsourcer decided they were going to directly compete for business revenue and functions that traditionally go to the postal service?
For major Telcos and BPOs the first question is whether the potential market is large enough. Are there billions rather than millions in potential revenue? The postal service is a perfect example of a two sided market that benefits from winner take all economies. Thus, the revenue numbers attached to just enterprise sent consumer mail are in the tens of billions of dollars in the US and hundreds of billions if not in excess of a trillion dollars globally.
The only major difference between the business functions provided by the postal service and CEBP solutions is in terms of the marketing function. At least in the US and UK, permission based marketing is the regulated and cultural standard for telco inspired solutions. A similarly enforced permission based marketing regulation would be the final nail in the coffin of mass mail marketers who rely on gross volume to generate single digit responses.
This “marketing” difference is not as clear cut in many developing countries that use affinity marketing as a means to subsidise mobile phone adoption and mobile payment transactions. Interestingly, I wonder if many of these same countries have as strong a history of government sponsored mail services compared to the UK and US.
This current marketing difference is more a problem of creative business models and culture than one of technology. Being able to proactively send a customer a targeted appreciated marketing message by voice or sms will become more common as consumers and retailers continue to get comfortable with social media and understand the value of creating opt in permissions for their trusted networks of friends and businesses. Marketing guru Seth Godin bluntly describes the difference in business models as smart versus dumb.
If one goes through the range of reasons why mail has traditionally been most useful for all industries VoiceSage’s clients have already found many more productive solutions through the use of our CEBP application. In many instances the client uses CEBP solutions to remove the need for postal mail entirely from their processes. In other cases the enterprise uses CEBP solutions to improve the experience of any remaining paper based communications. Our ability to provide just in time personalization while handling global scale allows our clients to generate ROI across both big and small business processes.
Our UK, Irish, and US based VoiceSage clients rely on CEBP solutions to provide logistics, collections, communications, and customer service business process improvements every day. With a Telco or BPO style strategic partner,VoiceSage clients in parts of EMEA could certainly tap the marketing power of CEBP quickly.
We have never thought of ourselves as competing with the largest postal services in the world. Maybe we should.
Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage
July 12, 2010
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