Power to the customer!

It must have been in 2001 when Marco Gianotten from Giarte asked me to write a chapter for one of his books. The piece I wrote was called "Customer at the helm" and described ideas to lower transaction costs by having customer self-services options instead of investing in costly data entry and cleaning. 7 years is almost a lifetime in IT but took this idea, at that time acknowledged by many, ever off?

Well yes and no:

Yes
Of course Internet gave us some options to make at least sure that information is going here where it was intended by giving individuals access to MyAccount and subscribe functionality to make sure the holy grail of our era, the email address, at least is OK. But this "light weight" self service still is very rudimentary and is focused on identity management rather than customer intimacy.

But surely web shops and the immense popular market places are the killer self service examples, one would argue. OK, it shows the public is willing to put the time in and to do the work for their own transactions but we are talking about dedicated solutions, isolated from the companies' applications and data and more utilizing a convenient media than going for maximum vendor/customer alignment. So my statement is:

No
Most companies never really dared to give customers access to the information stored by and about them. Ever tried to find information about your pension scheme from your insurance company, let alone make changes? Have fun.

Would it not be ideal to have access to all information stored about you within a company (order info, invoices, complaints, emails, profiles, etc.)? In the end it's all about you. The best most organizations can do is offer you a telephone help-desk, mostly paid, with idiotic slow menu's, long waiting times and in the end a hopefully friendly person telling you that according to what they see on their screen looks correct.

It can be done: Energie Direct is a nice example. All your information is stored and accessed through your personal portal. Any changes that you want applied you either can do direct or if it is not a predefined option, just send a message about it. All communication, including invoicing, is done electronically.

Of course this is a retail example, designed from the start to work this way. But even with a traditional infrastructure it is rather easy to achieve the first level of better and cheaper customer intimacy: just give them access to their information; they will tell you when anything is wrong for free. Results2Match believes in this concept. Check out the MyInformationVault solution for details.