Imagine a small rural village in Sweden. It’s nighttime and a new dad drops the only remaining bottle of baby formula on the floor as his hungry son wails. The closest grocery store will take at least 40 minutes round-trip. That was the moment that technology expert Robert Illiason started thinking about alternatives. He realized living in a rural part of the world, where shops close early puts a strain on customers. He came up with the idea for Näraffär (meaning “shop nearby”), the first unmanned grocery store where customers can buy small items such as baby food at any time of night or day. The store is run using a mix of cameras, apps and other technology which he describes as fairly simple to set up. In this podcast you will hear from Illiason, who is an IT consultant specializing in databases and business intelligence, mainly working with automating processes and data flows. He has worked with customers such as Ericsson, TeliaSonera and, mainly, IKEA. He is also a writer and who keeps his finger at the tech pulse for several Swedish IT magazines.
In this podcast you will learn:
The key components of an employee-less store
Surprising insights into customer behavior
Future predictions around retail technology
There’s a major challenge today facing every B2B company, and that’s customer engagement. Gallup has recently released a new guide discussing some of environmental factors causing B2B companies to ask themselves about their customer engagement strategy. The guide is based on in-depth interviews with hundreds of thousands of customers and analysis from measuring the engagement of 18 million customers. B2B companies need to work to be just as agile and ready as B2C companies when it comes to how they engage their customers—and how engaged those customers actually are. In this podcast I speak with Ed O’Boyle Gallup’s Global Practice Leader who oversees strategic vision for the company’s worksplace and marketplace practices. Ed brings more than 18 years of marketing and branding experience to Gallup. He previously served in roles in brand management, strategic planning, and innovation at Diageo, Capital One, and Frito-Lay.
In this podcast you will learn:
Everywhere we look we see more people and brands raving about Snapchat. But we don't hear much about anyone using Snapchat for customer service yet. However one company has recently generated some attention in Social Media Today for actually responding to customers that need help via Snapchat. The company is called iOgrapher—a company iOgrapher sells cases, lenses, microphones, tripods, and LED lighting to turn almost any iPhone or iPad owner into a traveling video producer. The company’s motto is “Life, Camera, Action.” Founder David Basulto invented the iOgrapher ipad mini case for filmmaking. The company has generated a lot of attention—Steven Spielberg is reportedly a customer.
David is a former teacher and had a successful career producing feature films and television for firms like Icon Entertainment and Lifetime Television. His films have won awards at many film festivals, including the Toronto Film Festival. After seeing the shift to digital, he dove head first into learning as many tools as possible and fell in love with the iPad.
In this podcast you will learn:
The art to doing customer service well on Snapchat.
What big companies can learn from a start-up about killer customer service.
Meeting customer expectations on Snapchat
This week on the Modern Customer Podcast we talk about all things mobile innovation. Our guest is Christophe Gillet Vice President of Product at Vimeo. In this capacity he leads the product vision for the brand, including oversight and ongoing development for Vimeo’s creator platform tools and overall viewing experience. Under his leadership, the team has introduced new subscription tools for creators selling on Vimeo On Demand, rebuilt Vimeo’s search functionality and made significant updates to Vimeo’s suite of mobile and connected TV apps.
Christophe joined Vimeo in 2014 from Adap.TV, which was acquired by AOL in 2013, where he launched and led product for their programmatic linear video advertising platform. Christophe has also held product positions at Ebay, Vuze, and Ipreo. He holds six patents across media and ecommerce, and was awarded the CES Innovation Award in 2012 for the Fan TV iPad app.
In this podcast you will learn:
How the industry needs to rethink native mobile video products
How Vimeo aggressively ramped up its mobile efforts to service both creators and
audiences
How the mobile digital content space is evolving
Le Tote is a lot like Netflix—you pay a monthly fee and get unlimited deliveries of clothes and accessories. This company has been growing like crazy. Le Tote shipped 1.7 million products to customers in 2015. They predict they will send out 400 million dollars worth of product in 2016. Revenue grew 600 percent last year. Over 90 percent of their customers are repeat purchasers. Not bad for a company that initially launched with the intention of allowing pregnant women to share clothes!
efore Le Tote the CEO and founder Rakesh Tondon’s wife was going through her second pregnancy and they agreed it would be wonderful if pregnant women could swap clothes with one another. Women generally have to buy tons of larger clothes they only wear for a few months and then toss. Le Tote creates an option for women who would prefer to borrow clothes for this temporary physical change. Rakesh and his cofounder Brett Northart decided to go from a mainstream model offering regular women’s clothes and branch out to a niche model offering both regular clothes and maternity-wear. I had the opportunity interview to Rakesh on The Modern Customer Podcast. You won’t want to miss this one.
In this podcast you will learn:
The Le Tote customer service strategy vision
How to create a winning customer service strategy
Why the subscription model is hot now