Chris Crosby

Last summer I wrote a post about the book A Billion Bootstraps which led to Amy and I getting involved in Microfinance. Since that time, I’ve been wrestling in my mind with how to combine some of the most successful elements of capitalism with those of non-profits in order to create charities that are self-sustaining. The idea is to structure companies in such a way that they could generate their own consistent revenue stream by other means than donations and bake sales. The companies however would still be non-profit and targeted on specific philanthropic initiatives.

Well, long story short, I got a little distracted last fall and was never able to reconcile the concept in my mind. That is until I picked-up Muhammad Yunus’ new book Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism. After reading this, its safe to say that the creator of Microfinance has done it again. 

In this book Yunus introduces the idea of the Social Business model which he defines as:

a non-loss, non-dividend business. Rather than being passed on to investors, the surplus generated by the social business is reinvested in the business. Ultimately, it is passed on to the target group of beneficiaries in such forms as lower prices, better service, and greater accessibility

Yunus’ first voyage into Social Business was a joint effort between Grameen Bank and Danone to offer highly nutritional yogurt at prices that are affordable to the poorest people in Bangladesh (great overview available here).

It only took until Chapter 2 in the book before my head was spinning with ideas about, not only how to expand this concept to address our country’s poor, but also what will be required to create a true Social Sector and bring the idea of Social Business mainstream.  Thoughts of creating Social Venture Capital Funds and working with Congress to create new and unique tax and entity structures is rather exciting. Expect to hear more from me on this in future posts.

I also have to think that the answer to America’s (and the world’s for that matter) Health Care crisis lies not in relying on our Government to push some type of “Universal” Plan, but rather in creative individuals creating a social business model to redirect industry profits back into solving the problem.

Seth Godin has an interesting post about why your last impression with a customer is more important than the first (you know the old adage “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”).

He’s right, and I thinks its really about making every interaction count across your organization. When you consistently deliver you build credibility with your customers that leads to repeat business and the word of mouth marketing that Seth talks about. You may have a “great” sales team that wows your prospect on the first sales call, but if the rest of your team can’t deliver on these expectations then it doesn’t really matter.

This theory applies in mass when you look at a contact center where a customer may be calling (or emailing or chatting) with an agent about anything from placing a new order to questioning a billing issue. Its important to focus on every aspect of this interaction, from how long the customer sat in queue, to how long the agent left them on hold, to how professional and knowledgeable the agent was.

Sometimes you never know when the current interaction will be the last.

OK, so the title is a bit overstated, but now that I have your attention:

A couple months ago Google [quietly] released a hosted charting API. Albeit it lacks the sex appeal of their big splash products like GMail or Google Docs, it tapped my imagination.

The basic concept is that your application passes parameters to a URL hosted at Google. It allows you to define things like chart type, size, colors, data values, etc. For example, hitting this URL,

 http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250×100&chl=Hello|World

returns the following image:

Part of the reason this grabbed my attention is that its very similar to Latigent’s BlueVue (now Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite ((CUIS))) “API” for accessing reports & charts from other applications (except you don’t actually pass the data to CUIS, since that’s the real point of having a full blown BI App What I find amusing here is that Google, whether intentionally or not, has basically entered into the 3rd party control business. Very few people ever build their own charting control as its not core to their application, and there are inexpensive alternatives to coding your own. Google just introduced another inexpensive option. Now, I seriously doubt that Google will ever cut into the market share of guys like Dundas, but it could certainly address the needs of some low-level apps.

Expanding on this hosted API/3rd Party Control concept, it’s reasonable to think that a creative developer could duct-tape together the APIs from Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Charts, Google Reader (unsupported “API” here) and Google Search Appliance to come up with a rudimentary and functional presentation layer for a reporting application.

When you pepper in things like databases in the cloud, one begins to ponder if every aspect of an application will eventually be distributed, and perhaps the next software evolution will be nothing but middleware that glues stuff together.

One of the most effective, and ineffective, ways to increase the value of a customer is by upselling additional products or services at the time of a sale. Effectively this can increase your items/revenue per sale and raise your gross margin, ineffectively you can frustrate your customer and send them somewhere else. Here’s an example of the latter:

Amy and I went to open a new checking account a couple weeks ago and over the course of 15 minutes we were offered: a Home Equity Line of Credit on our home that we had owned for two weeks, we were pre-approved for a credit card we didn’t ask for, and we were pitched overdraft protection (apparently incase we somehow forget how to balance our checkbook). At this point it became blatantly apparent that the woman helping us was just reading prompts on her screen vs. actually identifying what services Amy and I might find useful based on our needs (interestingly enough we were dealing with the branch manager). 

By the end of the conversation I was almost frustrated enough to walk out and skip the whole deal, but the idea of going through the exact same scenario at another bank was nauseating.

Ironically, the only offer I did accept was the option to have my monthly statements sent via email vs. the old fashion printed/snail-mail way. In my opinion this offer was actually backwards, “eStatements” should be the standard offer and paper statements being the downsell.

The moral of the story is this:

Are you qualifying your customers’ needs and offering appropriate services and products, or are you taking a shotgun offer approach just to try and hit a monthly quota? How are you really impacting your bottom line and your customers’ experience? Are you training and empowering your employees to discern the difference, or just populating scripts for them?