From the outset of this whole operation, I’d been thinking about the similarities in what we were doing to those of Mint.com in the personal financial space. Okay, I’m slow. I’d consistently referred to us as customer experience company, but it just wasn’t triggering the “I get it” type of response I’d hoped for. And it was also being used by a bunch of CRM companies that were trying to break out from the pack. Still an inside-out context.
So one day, as I was doing some writing and included the words “…inverse of a CRM” – when it hit me; we are a service relationship management company. Just like my young GroupTable entrepreneurs we, Mint.com, PageOnce.com and a bunch of others were setting about turning the tables on those who provide services to us. Not in a bad way, but in an extremely empowering way for consumers. Make my life easier, more efficient, more livable. Help me get things done that I need to get done, but am confused by – like all those individual logins – in just one way…. my way… Whether my way means by phone, by email, by text message.
We started testing the grock factor by calling our friends, and analysts, and academics expert in the service field and grock, they did. In fact, Mary Jo Bitner, one of the resident experts at the CSL pointed me straight to a publication in the MIS Quarterly Executive (Volume 4, No. 2) 2005 titled Customer-Managed Interactions: A New Paradigm for Firm-Customer Relationships, where some very esteemed academic researchers foretold this inversion through technology. They called it Customer Managed Interaction at the time. Because technology and market dynamics have changed a bunch in the intervening years some of their predictions aren’t among those that might make sense for today, but the desire and applicability for consumers taking control of their world and how the companies they want to do business with interact with them is more relevant than ever before.
As I’ve grown busier – and oh yeah, older – I’ve noticed how much the technology of the world has changed the way I get through every day. I’m one of those early adopters of things like online bill payment, online travel purchasing and other such stuff as makes my daily life easier to get through.
I was coaching a group of first time entrepreneurs at the University of Central Florida Venture Lab as they worked on development of a collaborative, virtual study group site for the collegiate set called GroupTable. During the process, I began to learn a bunch from these guys about the behavioral differences between Millennials and the rest of us. These young founders were building a business around the busy, busy, multi-threaded lives of college students and the fact that meeting online was as natural to them as breathing – and oh so much more efficient when they only need to come together in short bursts to get group projects done for school. They were taking the lessons of corporate collaboration and turning it upside-down: Collaboration for the good of the individual on a short-term basis vs. collaboration for the good of the entity that becomes part of an ongoing knowledgebase. I liked it.
The whole time the team got me up to speed on their research, I whined about my own time pressures, thinking my problems were no different from those who were my son’s age (I was kidding myself of course, but you know, you try to feel young however you can). So these smart and practical young men introduced me to something I found pretty interesting; Mint.com. I liked it.
It was a fairly early beta. But I’m a startup person, so I’m okay with that. It gave me one place to see a bunch of the financial relationships I had without even having to think about ‘logging in’. Better than that, it automagically reminded me of little things like when credit card payments were due. Mint also gave me some interesting tips and pointers along the way and began to use some intelligence to compile what looked sort of like the budget I once tried to formulate in Microsoft Money. Very interesting….