With the travel and prep for the Telco 2.0 conference, I’ve had to neglect this humble bloglet. For the first time in 3 years, my login cookie even expired!
Anyhow, this second I’m on hold to United Airlines (total cumulative call time so far to book round trip with flyer miles: 70 minutes — 55 to place reservation last night, 15 to pay, and still counting.)
There’s been some chatter on the blogs recently about Vonage and their troubles. I wrote back in 2003 that they were doomed because their “POTS over IP” business lacked differentiation and opened them to regulatory attack.
Anyhow, sat here listening to Gershwin at 8 pence a minute to an expensive 0845 number, I’m thinking … so, what is “better telephony” in this case?
Just give me a moment Sir, I’m placing you on hold… 24 minutes.
I’m not suggesting Vonage could have unilaterally delivered all this. It can’t. But Skype plus eBay could have grown it from their merchant base.
31 minutes, phew, all done. One round trip, 2 adults, 1 child, 1 infant, same planes. US airline miles, UK credit card, German aircraft. 85 minutes on the phone — and none of that was queuing, all just data gathering, calling other departments, and general faffing. Still, not as bad as using Continental miles on CSA Czech — then I turned up at the airport with my confirmed reservation, and they told me they’d unilaterally cancelled it…
However, Skype is a strategic screw-up. (Unless you’re an investor who sold out, in which case it’s a genius plan.) With the new business directory and premium rate calling they’re fighting on their weakest fronts: search against Google, and minutes against the telcos. They’ve got an intuitive idea that the money’s in linking consumers to businesses, but not the brains or balls to execute on the core problem: the crap telephony experience.
It’s not going to happen, though.
They screwed up the consumer-to-consumer experience by not insisting that all the Skype-approved handsets had to at least support the display of presence data. Instead, we generally got a worse version of landline telephony, just with fancy audio for three people out of the hundred in your address book (but either tethered to a PC, or unusable over Wifi). I can’t even be bothered to use the freebie handsets vendors sent me — I just stick with my landline cordless phone most of the time now. The Skype experience at home is always PC on, speakers (not headset), webcam, and milling children chatting to grandparents — a use case that works well and gives a better experience than a normal phone which sounds terrible on speakerphone and the kids press the buttons all the time and run away with it behind the sofa for a confessional with nana.
They didn’t break the “ring, pickup, talk, goodbye” pattern. I should be able to tell if someone else is on the phone, and I should be able to request a call (“Martin wants you to call him after 4pm.”) It should be a premium telephony experience from a Skype handset. Free telephony should only be about the minutes, not the rest of the package!
For consumer-to-business calling, they needed to think big. Partner with Avaya or whoever. Upgrade call centres to be “Skype compatible”. It’ll be worthwhile because a multi-modal and better experience results in lower costs, higher self-service rates, and warm fuzzy customer delight. It’s the Gillette model in reverse: free or cheap consumer phones as the razor blades, better call centres as the handles. Oh, and license the technology to anyone and everyone, just keeping enough governance to ensure interoperability.
By the way, that call to United? I used Jajah callback to the deskphone here in the office. Sick and tired of poor audio quality from SkypeOut. Indeed, internally we’re using our mobiles more and more as we’re tired of unreliable VoIP. The only VoIP that works for me is PhoneGnome (hi, David) — rock solid reliable, unintrusive, solves a problem (voicemail to email). Oh, and that’s the only one that works with the stuff I already have — my existing number, wiring, payments, and handset. (Raise hand: I have commercial interest.)
Funny that. Maybe Skype should have bought ‘em first, and forced all these handset vendors to have at least matched the existing landline experience by embedding the PhoneGnome technology. Embrace, extend, extinguish. Skype jumped right to extend, did only half the job.
Shame. The Lotus 123 of telephony.
They’ll probably end up extinguished by someone who understands ecosystems and platforms.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:57 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Hello Martin,
Don't you see that there is a whole business model hiding in your frustration? I certainly do.
In fact, I have written the thoughts around that business idea in a blog entry couple of months back:
http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2007/01/calling-for-support-calling-for-trouble-the-business-idea/
Hi Martin,
Not trying to solve all of your problems but as for dialling an expensive 0845 number..... why not convince them to implement a Mexuar Corraleta Click-to-Talk service (www.Mexuar.com) being IP all the way from browser to call center it's free regardless of how long you're on hold....as for that issue - it's out of our technical control.
Cheers,
Dean Collins
Dean@Mexuar.com
Hi Martin,
With the long waits on the phone at United - Skype has a great opportunity to take a share of that 8p/min call. I'm thinking, maybe trade some online visual ad space during the call wait ?? Better still, if they can let you personalize what you want to see in the Skype window while you are on hold (like how your favourite telco stocks are doing) ;-)
Its all about customer integration. More at http://www.infosysblogs.com/livewire.
Posted by: at April 12, 2007 05:48 PM