I have bought a few breakfasts and lunches this way in Tokyo, but I liked the spin Jeremiah places on it, as he describes the Apple store experience too. Automatic Waitress and Cashier On a similar note, when we went to Tokyo, you ordered food at a ‘vending’ machine, you plunk in some coins, punch the picture you want (above) and quantity and a receipt plops out. You sit down at the counter, hand the receipt to the polite cooks who serve you. This saves time as the employees don’t have to deal with money, you don’t need a waitress, … Continue reading Automatic Waitress and Cashier

 In this old (2005) post, Doc applauds the launch of Google Blog search, and comments on the relevance of that kind of search compared to the “non live web”. As of today, Technorati’s traffic is #751 on Alexa, pushing 80 million page views per day. Other Live Web search pioneers include Bloglines, Blogpulse, Feedster, IceRocket and PubSub. The results they yield are radically different from what you get with Wide Web searches, as well as from each other. Mostly, the results are newer. They’re also more likely to come from individuals and live news services than from companies with static … Continue reading Searching the World Live Web | Linux Journal

First thing from BAI.  Bank advocacy is generally very low amongst our customers. Speaking Thursday at BAI’s Retail Delivery Conference & Expo, IBM Banking Solutions Executive Scott Lieberman said IBM research found that just 24% of U.S. consumers are advocates for their banks, notwithstanding the industry’s widely touted improved customer satisfaction scores. Lieberman defined advocates as customers who recommend their bank to others, are receptive to additional products and services and stay with their bank even when offered competitive products by other institutions. Source:  Wanted Customer Advocates   Technorati tags: customer+advocacy Continue reading Wanted: Customer Advocates

Wells are leading the customer advocacy charge online, with this enhancement just in time for Xmas.  My Savings Plan is integrated with Wells Fargo’s online personal finance tools, including My Spending Report, which helps clients manage their spending. Source: BankNet 360 – Wells Fargo Creates New Savings Tool My Spending Report, is a tool that aggregates all your bank account, and credit card spending and provides an automated analysis.  This is accomplished using merchant information associated with debit card, and credit card spending, and categorising your spending.  It allows for the customer to add their own categories or categorise other … Continue reading BankNet 360 – Wells Fargo Creates New Savings Tool

 I have been writing about CRM.  Turns out Wikipedia has a good discussion on this topic. There are three fundamental components in CRM: Operational – automation of basic business processes (marketing, sales, service) Analytical – analysis of customer data and behavior using business intelligence Collaborative – communicating with clients Source: Customer relationship management – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia These three components are defined here as follows: Operational CRM Sales force automation (SFA)  SFA automates some of a company’s critical sales and sales force management tasks, such as forecasting, sales administration, tracking customer preferences and demographics, performance management, lead management, account management, … Continue reading Customer relationship management | Wikipedia

Dave points to an article about Wizzit in Africa.  Wizzit, which is a mobile banking provider that offers a transaction banking account accessible via mobile phone and debit card. It has about 50K customers for its virtual bank (there are no branches). Customers can use their mobile phone to make person to person payments, transfer money, purchase prepaid electricity, and buy airtime for a prepaid mobile phone subscription. Source: Digital Money Blog: Mobile banking in Africa Its interesting how 3rd world countries can go straight to wireless technologies – we can learn about consumer adoption from these lessons.   Technorati tags: … Continue reading Digital Money Blog: Mobile banking in Africa

A rather theoretical piece from Carlos, but the concept makes sense, and this is how I would have expected CRM to evolve.  Customers will form their customer service opinion around the product or brand – not necessarily a specific dealership’s service department. This dynamic underscores the importance of maintaining good performance across all dealerships in the channel. Furthermore, the manufacturer must account for the entire customer service picture, which may extend beyond the service department to sales, financing and other departments. Source: Customer Service as Marketing through Statistical Modeling While he is speaking of car dealerships, the concept and alignment … Continue reading Customer Service as Marketing through Statistical Modeling

I was thinking about this point earlier so this post validated what I was starting to realise. There’s a lot of buzz around the blogging phenomenon but the numbers show that there are only four million active bloggers in Europe. However, European bloggers are very attractive to marketers as these consumers are young, early adopters of new technologies, and heavy Internet users. They also trust each other and are more open-minded than the average online consumer. Source: Forrester: Interactive Marketing All Forrester Research There are 56 million blogs in the world. Of those 26 million +/- are real, so Europe … Continue reading Forrester: Only four million bloggers in Europe (20%)

 Update to the earlier post.  The increased phishing in the first half of this year, is resulting in significant increases in fraud attempts through Banks’ online banking throughout the world. More of us are getting conned into giving out our bank details over the internet. Phishing fraud uses emails and fake websites to trick customers into revealing their username and password. Between January and June this year there were more than 5,000 cases. That’s compared to 312 in the first six months of 2005. Source: BBC – Radio 1 – News – Online banking fraud rockets   Technorati tags: fraud, … Continue reading BBC – Radio 1 – Online banking fraud rockets