A Sustainable Train of Thought

I just ran across a company called Recordant.

They use microphones to capture conversations between salespeople and customers. Those conversations can later be analyzed to determine which specific words used at specific times in the course of a conversation led to a sale.

From their FAQ:

2. Do you have to tell your customers they are being recorded?

Recordant™ is a competitive advantage for your business. It tells customers that you are serious about giving them the best possible shopping and service experience. We require you to provide and post adequate signage to inform your customers that their conversation is being recorded for quality assurance purposes and employee training.

3. How do customers respond when they learn they are being recorded?

They respond very favorably. One survey showed they believed that when a transaction is being recorded the quality of “their” service is truly important to the retailer. Many customers also viewed it as assurance that they were being dealt with fairly and within the policies of the retailer. On a rare occasion a customer may not want to be recorded. In that instance, the employee can simply turn off the audio capture device.

I can see the analytical possibilities and benefits from the standpoint of running a company, but is anyone else bothered by this? Specifically, the false sense of “customer service” that’s being promoted: “quality assurance purposes” are in fact the “optimization of closing practices”, which really has nothing to do with “customer service” per se and everything to do with “convincing customers to buy”.

I suppose this is always the case whenever you’re on the phone with the bank and they’re recording your conversation for “quality assurance purposes” (which method of stonewalling is most efficient), but I never made the connection until now.

Noting the ambiguity inherent in the phrase “quality assurance,” I wonder if this is a benchmark by which to assess whether a company is interested in actual customer service or simply the mechanics of their sales mechanisms.

If you’ve used Flickr for a while, you’ve known about their acquisition by Yahoo and the subsequent inexorable march towards using Yahoo login names instead of the old Flickr login names. Well, the date has finally been set (March 15) and predictably there is a huge uproar in the Flickr message boards.

To their credit, Flickr seems to be managing this furor the best way they can, by being available for comment and kvetching in the message boards. And, really, there’s not much more they can do.

However, I can’t help but feel a twinge of discomfort at what’s happening, mainly because it shows the dark underbelly of social networking sites.

To wit: A group of people have an idea and put together some software that lets a bunch of other people engage in so-called social networking. Those early adopters are just as crucial to the success of the social network as the people who man the infrastructure and prune the message boards, etc. The difference is that the early adopters are unpaid for their time and efforts, while the infrastructure d00ds eventually/hopefully make oodles of money.

We’ve seen this happen before, just recently, with YouTube. The people who created this system weren’t the ones who put the effort into the videos which actually drew the visitors which…well, eventually attracted Google. Yet of the obscene amount of money that the company received, how much went back to the people who, when you really think about it, made it happen? It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation, innit?

There is a co-dependency between the companies that develop social networks and the people who populate them, yet the systems currently in place serve to unfairly distribute the rewards of the service: 100% vs. 0%. Is this just how it is, or can something be done to make it more equitable? Because as it stands right now, YouTube and Flickr and all these other sites are effectively telling me that my time is worthless to them. And forgive me if I don’t agree with that perspective.

Getting back to Flickr, my fear is that as these kinds of mergers continue across the Web 2.0 universe, and as early adopters begin to feel more and more disenfranchised (or burned or perhaps even pwned), their enthusiasm for this exploitative environment will wane. What will replace it remains to be seen, but I can’t help to think it will involve shares of some kind, or some semblance of ownership or investment.

Now, this is not to say that early adopters know what’s right for a company, or that they should be involved in the day-to-day management of the company’s affairs. But I do believe it’s important to show respect, because they are as much a reason for where some of the companies are today as the people who put together the business. Whether that respect is acknowledged through discounts on premium services offered by the company, or manifested in some other way, such as recognition, I think there are means to reward the risk, time, and effort assumed by early adopters.

I would venture that so-called “old skool” members of Flickr prize their old-skool status, which is in its way a reward for their time and effort spent during the early days of Flickr. In that context, an outcry about changing login procedures is as much one of principle as it is identity and social standing, even if it’s a matter of personal pride (“I was one of the first!”). It remains to be seen whether Flickr will differentiate between former “old skool” Flickr members and newer members under the Yahoo system.

All I can think about right now is the next time one of these disenchanted, former-old-skool-Flickr users stumbles upon a new social networking site, and I wonder whether they will harbor any reservations about pouring their energy into yet another enterprise which, in the end, will not be theirs.

The bigger question, of course, is: will this sort of event, relived time and again over the course of many social networking mergers, lead to a chilling effect?