Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Tomorrow, Mobivox CEO Peter Diedrich will formally take the wraps off the Mobivox|PL CRM over Voice vision.  The company has commissioned analyst Jon Arnold to produce a white paper for them, but the explanation is frankly simpler than the marketing.

At the core, CRM over Voice is about the very simple idea that carriers should host users address books, and watch to see what they do with those address books.  Over time, as behaviour is tracked, a CRM over Voice application would automatically start to initiate up-sell behaviours with the customer.  For example (taken from the Mobivox white paper):

1. Educate: The first 30-60 days are a critical time in the lifecycle of new
   subscribers. If they are not meaningfully engaged by then, it will become
   costly to re-engage them later on. |PL allows the operator to communicate
   various education messages that are relevant to how long they have had the
   service, what services they are using, their language choice and more.
2. Promote: Word-of-mouth grows in importance for generating new leads with
   each passing year, and is perhaps the most cost-effective method of
   customer acquisition. Since Mobivox |PL knows the subscriber’s patterns -
   what they use, who they call, when, who is in the address book and more – it
   can pinpoint an offer and ask in real-time for a referral. Since the action of
   inviting a new user from a referral can be done right over the phone, this
   represents a very efficient use of CRM with established subscribers.
3. Convert: This is another example of using context to identify in real time a
   segment of subscribers who are good candidates for upselling. A prime
   example would be converting a subscriber from Prepaid to Post Paid. |PL
   would invoke a CRM dialog with subscribers who normally call in to add to
   their balance with a credit card. The subscriber would then be given the
   opportunity to opt for an automatic top-up plan, which is more convenient than worrying about running out of credit. Again, this all takes place in the context of making a phone call, and a voice-based CRM session results in converting the subscriber to a more valuable calling or service plan.

If this sounds like classic web marketing, it should.  Mobivox is simply taking the same techniques that successful web advertisers use and applying them to the phone.  Hallelujah.  You may recall, in 2006, a piece I wrote describing the “Integrated Conversation Web”.  Explicitly described in that piece was the idea that operators, with their rich stores of consumer behavioural information, were best positioned to create contextual selling opportunities.

Mobivox is at the vanguard of a change in the way that phone systems are used in sales and marketing.  Forget about clumsy telemarketers – you’re phone is going to know what you want and need and suggest it to you, and you’ll be happier for it.

That TicketMaster has a monopoly on the sale of event tickets in North America is not in dispute.  Now that they have achieved that monopoly, however, how should they behave?  Case in point, my own attempts to buy tickets for Leonard Cohen’s Ottawa show on May 25 / 26.  After advertising all last week that the tickets would go on sale at 10:00 AM today, not a ticket was available by 10:03.  It’s inconceivable that all 4,800 seats sold out in 3 minutes.  Inconceivable.

No,  two things happened:

1. Ticketmaster’s partnership with American Express – the Front of the Line program which allows AMEX card holders to purchase tickets 7 days in advance of the general public – is being abused by scalpers who snap up tickets in advance of the show and sell them on eBay.
2. Ticketmaster themselves have effectively become ticket scalpers with their sister site TicketsNow which sells tickets for prices dramatically higher than their face value.

As of 10:03, eBay sellers had the tickets.  I could buy from a gentleman in Norwalk Connecticut.  However, no tickets were available locally in Ottawa, where the show was taking place. 

The venue for the show is Canada’s National Arts Center – a tax payer subsidized facility constructed in the 1960’s to showcase Canadian art.  A Canadian artist is coming to play the venue.  No tickets are available to Canadian fans, except via US scalpers. It’s offensive. 

It’s clear there’s no competition in the ticketing business any more.  Perhaps it’s time trustbusters on both sides of the border looked into TicketMaster’s business practices.  Imposing limits on pre-sales, and requiring TicketMaster to halt it’s own scalping business would be a good place to start.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Ticketmaster CEO Amenable to Sale of TicketsNow (wired.com)
• Ticketmaster Is Not Having A Great Week, But Neither Are Ticket Buyers [Screw You, Consumer!] (idolator.com)
• Ticketmaster CEO: Secondary ticketing should be illegal (guardian.co.uk)
• Scalping suit filed against Ticketmaster Canada (canada.com)
• Is Ticketmaster Taking Advantage? (consumer-alerts-product-recalls.suite101.com)
• Ticketmaster’s resale site angering consumers (thestar.com)
• Ticketmaster denies resale site has easy ticket access (ctv.ca)
• Ticketmaster says pricey resale tickets protect consumers (cbc.ca)
• Springsteen ticket resale row prompts investigations (cbc.ca)
• Ticketmaster dominance in Canada entrenched by planned merger (cbc.ca)

A brief flirtation with the prepaid calling card world introduced me to NetworkIP and their CEO Pete Patullo in 2002.  Historically a player that has shunned the limelight, NetworkIP nevertheless built a solid business – 6 billion minutes of traffic annual — on providing hosted calling card services to vendors wishing to develop retail products without needing to buy infrastructure. Last year, NetworkIP announced Jaduka – a subsidiary focused on monetizing the infrastructure built by NetworkIP in a different way.  Instead of providing hosted calling card services, Jaduka would deliver voice services to enterprise via APIs that could be integrated with business processes. 

News started leaking out over the weekend that mashup king Thomas Howe has joined Jaduka as CEO. Rich Tehrani’s extensive interview with Tom is worth reading, and Andy Abramson gets to add another feather to his cap as yet another of his Telco 2.0 Scouting Report picks gets snapped up. 

It’s looking like this is the year for Telco 2.0.  With multiple players in the market, including seasoned companies like Voxeo, and newcomers like Ribbit, and IfByPhone, the entrance of Jaduka – backed by NetworkIP’s infrastructure, and fronted by the charismatic and visionary Tom Howe – couldn’t be more timely. 

Last week saw the expansion of the Calliflower international conference calling network again.  In response to requests from customers, we added numbers in Brussels Belgium, Prague in the Czech Republic, Glasgow Scotland, and Victoria Canada.  For our premium customers, Calliflower is now available as a local call in 15 countries, and 64 cities worldwide.