Give me my receipt… in electronic format

When I do my groceries shopping (at Kroger, Costco, Target,…) I get a paper receipt at checkout. Really? And we’re in the 21st century! All stores now have a membership card, so couldn’t they make that receipt information available to me on their web site? Then my personal finance application could import it directly without any need of double entry or complicated user manipulation. Or they could print a QR code on the receipt that would embed all that information. Using my phone I could scan it directly into an app (hello Intuit?).

All companies involved here have a great opportunity to develop some APIs to make the entire communication / information flow a lot more fluid.

Borrowing books at my local library

My local library has a great service that you can enable when you borrow books: they will send you an email to notify you that your books will come due in 3 days. Great as long as you check your emails of course. Well, what about having an app that would notify me that my books are due? I could renew them right there on the spot. It could also add a reminder in my calendar.

Beyond the functionalities of the app, the interesting point is that such an app could be developed quickly if it could leverage an API exposing the services mentioned above. Both the web application and the web would use the same services.

Paypal Europe

Recently I helped a relative to create his PayPal account in Europe. The bank took care of their part, sending the form to PayPal (in Luxembourg). From that point on no communication until I finally checked after almost 3 weeks my relative’s PayPal account. It just happened to be the day when PayPal had initiated the transfer of their 2 verification payments.

I was shocked that PayPal doesn’t have a better information communication process. I think that all key events should be shared with the customer, both by email and on their account; especially for a company like PayPal where money is involved and where a lot of people are not actually that familiar with PayPal and what they do (and how they do it).

Sony Store on-line

Recently I made a purchase on store.sony.com. After completing the purchase on-line I didn’t receive an email. After a few days I called them. The shipping had been delayed; and they didn’t send an email either. I was shocked that Sony didn’t have that aspect of customer relationship down. Every key event needs to be communicated to the customer; in particular they should be given at each interaction the opportunity to create an account or access their account.

 

HBR has a good article on the topic titled “The Truth about Customer Experience” – ”Touchpoints matter, but it’s the full journey that really counts”.

Here is an extract:

“In our research and consulting on customer journeys, we’ve found that organizations able to skillfully manage the entire experience reap enormous rewards: enhanced customer satisfaction, reduced churn, increased revenue, and greater employee satisfaction. They also discover more-effective ways to collaborate across functions and levels, a process that delivers gains throughout the company.”

“Companies have long emphasized touchpoints—the many critical moments when customers interact with the organization and its offerings on their way to purchase and after. But the narrow focus on maximizing satisfaction at those moments can create a distorted picture, suggesting that customers are happier with the company than they actually are. It also diverts attention from the bigger—and more important—picture: the customer’s end-to-end journey.”

T-Mobile payment experience

I switched from AT&T to T-Mobile (more on that experience in another post) about two months ago. Today I wanted to make a payment. Well, they don’t offer the option to schedule the payment at a later date. It’s only “now”! Sounds amazing when credit card and  utility companies, among others, have been offering that option for years!

Couldn’t some patterns be captured and published like the books  from O’Reilly, “Designing Interfaces”, “Designing Social Interfaces”, “Designing Web Interfaces” or “Designing Web Navigation”? “Designing Payment Interfaces”.

Sears – Appliance repair service

Couldn’t they give me, the client who paid for the protection plan, complete visibility into what’s happening with my repair? In particular, what’s the history of everything they’ve done on the appliance (especially when the “overflow” team is used; by the way the client has to call two different numbers and one doesn’t have visibility into what the other group does – or so they say). And since the protection plan has some not so straightforward conditions (there are different restrictions that are time bound) before they replace the appliance, they could highlight on their website where the customer stands and how close they are to a replacement.

This highlights two wide-spread challenges:

1. integration of systems from two different companies,
2. data with agreed upon semantics.

This is a common theme especially in the context of a holistic customer experience; HBR has a good article on the topic titled “The Truth about Customer Experience” – “Touchpoints matter, but it’s the full journey that really counts”.

Here is an extract:

“In our research and consulting on customer journeys, we’ve found that organizations able to skillfully manage the entire experience reap enormous rewards: enhanced customer satisfaction, reduced churn, increased revenue, and greater employee satisfaction. They also discover more-effective ways to collaborate across functions and levels, a process that delivers gains throughout the company.”

“Companies have long emphasized touchpoints—the many critical moments when customers interact with the organization and its offerings on their way to purchase and after. But the narrow focus on maximizing satisfaction at those moments can create a distorted picture, suggesting that customers are happier with the company than they actually are. It also diverts attention from the bigger—and more important—picture: the customer’s end-to-end journey.”

Harvard Business Review

I would love to have the option of having an exact copy of the paper magazine in pdf format. I could annotate it, rate the articles, etc. and why not the ads too?

In a company environment I would like to set up a group of people who could see each others comments on articles, collaboratively working and leveraging the information found in the magazine to pursue strategic and other company related goals.

Smart bags for cash tranport

For small businesses that need to carry cash from the store to the bank, concession stands, or any other business, the bag would be geo-fencing enabled, with a mesh in the plastic, so that either getting off route or an attempt to cut the bag would generate an alert. Would be especially useful in those areas where CIT services are not available.

Project WALL-E

This should be our second robot (after the car that drives itself), helping at home with the trash. WALL-E could do some serious recycling, especially if the objects embed instructions and other technical details to help with their disassembling and recycling.

HBR – Upload articles to SugarSync, DropBox, Box,…

Another aspect of managing my “stuff”; from HBR.org when I read an article I’d like to select the icon of the service I use (SugarSync, DropBox, Box, SkyDrive,…) and upload it without leaving HBR’s site. Sloan Review offers instapaper.com as a way to store articles. Of course, I would prefer a smart platform that could make recommendations based on the union of all the sources I read on a regular basis. It could actually also venture beyond and surprise me with recommendations from other sites and publications.