Real-Time Economy Community - New ideas

Customer Communities: Social Customer Service and Product Development

Jaakko JÃ€Ã€tmaa — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:29:53 GMT

Problem: Companies claim to be customer oriented but in truth they fail to be truly and effectively near their customers.

Proposition: The power of the social media and the Internet should be utilized by building customer communities dedicated for sharing answers, ideas and solutions. Public customer community would be an open place where customers and employees of a company could meet and share information.

Implementation: Customer community should be implemented to the web and be easily accessible by anyone. It should offer tools (at least) for the following actions: asking questions, reporting problems and sharing ideas. Company should employ dedicated personnel who monitor the activities in the community by answering customers' messages and actively participating in discussion e.g. by commenting new product development ideas. Company should also enhance loyalty by e.g. rewarding the most productive members, sharing exclusive information or organizing competitions - in general, having fun with customers.

Value: Several operational benefits arise: Extension of customer support beyond traditional call centers and e-mailing. Cost-effective way to answer growing customer population (the ratio of new customer servants to new customers is no more linear). The productivity of an individual customer servant is increased exponentially as the given answers are re-usable and remain viewable to everybody - also repetitive issues decline. Response times increase. Company quickly starts getting better and faster product feedback and more accurate and innovative ideas for product development as the customers themselves know their needs best. Community can be integrated into products as a value-added service.

Strategically, the key issue is customer engagement: customers are no more treated only as buyers but important actors who are in true relationship with the company. This effectively affect to customer retention rates and satisfaction and thus company's financial performance in the long term.

Virtual lounges and communicating with your superiors

Sampo Remes — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 09:14:48 GMT

Some companies see social medias as bad thing that distracts the employees and lowers the working efficiency. But I think there might be some opportunities to improve flow of information within the company. Social medias could be customized to company's needs, for example block some features and make some of your own.

I think in many workplaces there would be benefits if employees could "brainstorm" in real-time chat rooms or lounges. E-mail and personal meetings are widely used for that but why not move some of that to social network?

Also work-related questions for employees closest manager could be sent when they come to mind, and if the manager was busy at some other activity he/she could answer those questions when they get back to their desk. Manager could then assess the situation and decide wheter to answer the question or get the answers from higher up. If managers had their own "chat room" where employees could send the questions (but could not read other peoples questions so that it would feel easier to ask knowing that only superiors can read them), any available other manager could answer the question right away. There would have to be some guidelines for managers what kind of questions can be answered on behalf of other managers. Stepping on someone elses toes isn't much improvement to general atmosphere.

Twitter-like newsfeed application could publish any important updates instantly. If someone was waiting for other peoples work to finish, that would cut the waiting times to minimum. Those newsfeeds could be customized so that those directly related to one's own work could be shown as some kind of pop-up messages. Maybe the working motivation would rise if employees would know that anyone can check if you have finished anything today. And managers would be able to transfer employees to other tasks if they have finished their own tasks earlier.

If such things could be implemented without employees getting the feeling of "big brother" wathcing over their shoulder I think there could be many good uses for social media at workplaces.

Real-Time Economy Community wins WSA Finland 2009 award

Tuija LompolojÃ€rvi — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:41:08 GMT

Real-Time Economy (RTE) Community has won the World Summit Award (WSA) Finland 2009. The award was received at the 12th International MindTrek Conference in Tampere, Finland, on 8 October 2008. According to the jury RTE Community rises to the challenge of proceeding towards a real-time economy necessitated by the complexity and uncertainty of the contemporary society.

The WSA was started in the framework of the United Nations (UN) World Summit on Information Society as an initiative from Austria. It is the world's premier contest for excellence in e-content and creativity. The awards honour producers of interactive multimedia and innovative ICT applications and they are the only awards supported by a Public Private Partnership between professional organisations, industry, governments and UN organisations.

e-Content products or ICT applications are entered in the WSA via national contests held in 168 countries. The national winners in the eight WSA categories are submitted from each country based on the national jury process. RTE Community will represent Finland in the WSA 2009 contest in e-Business & Commerce category.

The WSA winners will be announced in June 2009 in Monterrey, Mexico.

More information:
http://www.wsis-award.org/index.wbp
http://www.mindtrek.org/competition/wsa (in Finnish)

Speeding up innovation in the Real-Time Economy Community

Tuija LompolojÃ€rvi — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:07:00 GMT

Press release, 6 October 2008

Speeding up innovation in the Real-Time Economy Community

The Real-Time Economy Community is launched today.
The main idea in the community is to innovate and develop new real-time technologies and services. The community is open for everyone to join.

The Real-Time Economy (RTE) Community promotes initiatives related to innovation and to the creation of new networks that enable the diffusion of real-time technologies (such as RFID and electronic invoicing). In addition to turning the business process more real-time, these innovations and technologies also pave the way towards a society where learning, decision making and services are all in real-time.

- In order to make the change happen, we need forerunners on all levels from grassroot level to CEOs, states the RTE project coordinator, Tuija Lompolojärvi. The community networks globally all the experts, service providers and their clients, researchers, media, and other people interested in real-time technologies.

The main objective of the community is to encourage the members in the community to share their experiences related to new technologies and, moreover, to innovate new ones by posting ideas on digitalization and thus challenging others to give comments.

- Another important objective of the RTE community is to distribute knowledge and research results related to real-time technologies and digitalization. At the same time, it promotes research initiatives on new technologies through the Real-Time Economy Competence Center which has been created at the department of Business Technology at the Helsinki School of Economics, adds Esko Penttinen, the coordinator of the competence center.

Towards more sustainable development

The Real-Time Economy Community persuades consumers and businesses to decrease their ecological footprints by promoting the digitalization of various business processes. Furthermore, the community encourages its members to critically evaluate their daily routines in terms of energy consumption.

- Take for example the current invoicing practices. Sending and receiving invoices in paper format consumes excessive amounts of time, energy, and paper, even though electronic invoice technologies are already available. It has been estimated that electronic invoicing would save 14 million trees annually, lowering considerably the CO2 emissions at the same time (100 g CO2 per invoice), reminds Penttinen.

The RTE community has been developed and created using open source code and the community utilizes many new innovative features of the web 2.0. Currently, the community receives about 1,000 visits per month, but this number is expected to increase considerably after the official launch of the community on October 6, 2008.

Further information:
http://realtimeeconomy.net
http://www.hse.fi/rte

RTE project coordinator M.Sc. (Pol.Sc.) Tuija Lompolojärvi, ext.tuija.lompolojarvi@tietoenator.com, tel. +358 44 051 8689
RTE competence center coordinator Ph.D. (Econ.) Esko Penttinen, esko.penttinen@hse.fi, tel. +358 40 575 4520
Professor Virpi Tuunainen, virpi.tuunainen@hse.fi, tel. +358 50 589 7541
Director Bo Harald, bo.harald@tietoenator.com, tel. +358 50 641 01

The Real-Time Economy Community has been developed as part of the TEKES funded Real-Time Economy program which is a collaboration between Helsinki School of Economics, TietoEnator, Federation of Finnish Enterprises, leading Finnish banks, Confederation of Finnish Industries, TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Center, Dimes ry, and Dicole Ltd.

Real-Time Competition

Tuija LompolojÃ€rvi — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:47:49 GMT

The Real-Time Economy Community will be officially launched at the Real-Time Enterprise Summit on October 6, 2008 (Finlandia Hall, Helsinki). To celebrate this, we give out an exciting prize for an active contributor to the community.

The prize will be drawn from the pool of contributors during September 29 - October 13. All the users who contribute an idea and/or comment on existing ideas will automatically participate to the draw. The winner will be announced on RTE community website.

Be active - win a prize!

Link to mGovernment site

Matti Vartiainen — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:15:05 GMT

There is an European network (http://www.mgovernment.org/index.html) whose activities might be worth following. They are interested in developing mobile services.