As part of attending the FinTechSouth conference at the Mercedes Stadium in Atlanta, GA, I was asked to participate in a short video interview with Titania Jordan. Titania has a popular online channel called CONNECT, and along with her associates from 3Ci, she was interviewing numerous payment professionals in town for this show. FinTechSouth is a conference put on by TAG Atlanta—our PR firm, William Mills and Associates (WMA), is a long time TAG sponsor. In fact my attendance at the conference was enabled by a complimentary registration from WMA. I went to the media room at the appointed time; Titania is a real pro and had interviews stacked one after another and had smooth transitions from each one. I had worked through some basic ideas about what I would cover depending on the …
Innovation ThinkTime
Change in Perspective Reveals New Insight
Something fun I get to do with my wife Samantha is go to the west coast of Florida and just chill out. We like the area of Bald Point and Alligator Point near the town of Panacea. We keep a small fishing boat at the marina in Panacea so we can have a down-and-back trip to fish for a day. Samantha loves salt water and fishing; she recently caught two nice groupers just a hair under legal limit. We then went to the fish market to buy a grouper and paid for a fish identical in size to the two she had thrown back. What gives? Commercial fisherman do not have the same size restrictions as recreational anglers―shouldn’t it be the other way around? Our favorite activity is taking long walks on the beach. Alligator Point has beautiful white sand, but the water color is much darker than other …
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Taking Innovation Too Far
I am a big Douglas Adams fan. For those of you who don’t immediately recognize that name, perhaps you have heard of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you haven’t, you need to check it out. HGG originated in 1978, the same year I graduated from high school, and combined an incredibly inventive premise with sharp and funny writing. By using an otherworldly setting, Adams introduced thought-provoking imagery without worrying about the bounds of reality. One of the technologies Adams highlighted in his books was the Babel fish, which really wasn’t so much a technology as it was an organism. Adams himself wrote there was no possibility humans could invent something so “mind bogglingly useful,” capable of tackling the intricacies of language. He also discussed the cultural baggage …
Chat is Amazing – But Regardless of the Advice, It Has to be Accurate!
How great is chat—the ability to receive quality support without having to be stuck on the phone? Beautiful! Recently, I was looking for the email address of a local Office Depot in Oklahoma City, so I accessed the specific store’s website, assured I would easily find the email address for the delivery of a print job. Alas, it was nowhere to be found. The site, however, offered a chat option. Like many chat systems, I was asked several questions upfront, including my name and the nature of my inquiry. Unlike many chat services I‘ve used, I was not asked to repeat all the same information again once I was actively chatting with a support representative. You know how frustrating it can get when you provide all the needed details, only to be asked for them a second or third time. Just …
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The Need for Self-Service Training
I was chatting with a group of U.S. Dataworks, Inc. employees about self-service and my belief that good self-service trumps great personalized service. We agreed this is generally true, though one of my incredibly cerebral programming staff, Eric, noted how many patrons of the grocery stores where he shops should need to qualify before using the self-checkout. He even suggested that customers be required to get a license, or at least take a training course and test, before they use the self-checkout at the grocery store. We all laughed at that visual: a gate with a security lock, requiring you to pass your frequent shopper card over it to access the self-checkout registers. But I get it—we have all been frustrated by the ineptitude of those using self-checkout who seem to be really …