Today’s FT has a review of a new book about customer service, called The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs. Whoo, a book about customer service — I know what you’re thinking. But this one actually sounds pretty worthwhile, especially for the mobile industry.

As the review says, the overall premise is really straightforward: customers generally seek service from a company only when something’s wrong. Get those things right the first time, and people won’t want, or need customer service. Then, once things are going along well, resources you might have had to devote to extensive customer service and support — to fix things that are broken — you can devote to other areas where they’ll improve your products and make you more money.

One of the authors used to be a VP of global customer services at Amazon. I order a lot of stuff from Amazon, and I’m hard pressed to think if I’ve ever had to contact them directly about an order. Either I’ve had no problems, or all my questions have been handled by their web site. In any case, they use a metric called CPO — contacts per customer order. They’ve managed to slice this by 90 percent by figuring out why people need to contact them, what’s not working, and fixing it.

Think about this in terms of the mobile industry, in particular operators. I’m going to go out on a limb and posit that nearly all the service calls they receive are a result of something breaking or an error (whether it’s a technical problem or billing issue, and so on), or because customers can’t find adequate information about something on their own. From the review:

According to the authors’ research, customer contacts have four broad causes. About one in seven is triggered by basic quality defects (“It doesn’t work”). These must be addressed by underlying quality improvements. About a quarter take the form of “How do I?” questions. Here, the company has failed to communicate properly or its processes are confusing to customers, so it must identify and deal with these defects.

About 40 per cent of customer contacts are “Where can I get?” queries. Customers should be able to answer most such questions for themselves via a website or other self-service option that is easy to use.

The final 20 per cent of contacts are from customers wanting to buy stuff.

Think about the amount of resources that go to dealing with the non-sales contacts; then think about how many of those contacts have a positive financial result for the operator. Not very many of them. By employing some pre-service — that is, making sure things work as they should, and by providing customers with the information they need in an effective manner — operators could redirect their resources towards those cases where service contacts do require some human intervention, and on things like improved sales process that really benefit the business.

This sounds fairly obvious, but it bears repeating in this age of confusing tariffs, poor web sites and undertrained sales staff. And of course, solving these issues is much more difficult than it sounds. In any case, this book sounds like it’s worth picking up, especially if you’re in a customer care role at a mobile operator

One of my predictions for 2008 was that another Government would be “toppled by the people, who will organise their resistance primarily using their mobile phones”. I also hazarded a guess that it might be Zimbabwe, which has been misruled by Robert Mugabe and his henchmen for far too long.

While it’s too early to say if Mugabe will indeed be overthrown, Carlo dug out this piece which confirms that sms is certainly playing a central part in mobilising the opposition in the forthcoming elections on 29th March. This is also in the context when other media are controlled by the Government and opposition meetings are often broken up by force.

A central theme is also humour, with messages “creating light-hearted moments at a time when there’s very little for Zimbabweans to laugh about”.

Let’s hope my prediction comes true and Zimbabweans have a new Government shortly.

Obviously, that won’t mean their problems are over - far from it - even if Mugabe accepts losing power, he has proved totally and hideously incompetent, driving inflation to 15,000% a month and leading to life expectancy the lowest in the world at 37 for men and 34 for women. There won’t be a quick fix for problems of this scale.

But at least with him out of the way, the country stands a chance of recovery.

It’s been a little while since we last checked in with Alfie Dennen and his posse over at moblog:tech, but things are moving right along. Fresh off their win of a Media Guardian award earlier this month, they’ve now been nominated for three interactive BAFTAs.

Congrats Alfie and co.!

Cellular News says:

People who send large quantities of SMS messages could be suffering from a mental disorder more usually associated with internet addiction - writes a doctor in the latest issue of the American Journal Of Psychiatry. He wrote that people who are denied access to the internet or mobile phones displayed feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression.

“People who send large quantities of SMS messages could be suffering from a mental disorder”… or maybe they just like to chat to their friends?

AdMob (my employer, if you’re not from around these parts) has just served our 20 Billionth ad.

Yay!

My own involvement in the company goes back just over two years now, when I met Omar for the first time on St Patrick’s Day (March 18th) in Philadelphia, where he was just finishing the first year of an MBA at Wharton. The platform had been running for exactly two months at that point.

I realised straightaway that AdMob was what I’d been looking for in mobile marketing, even though it was tiny at that point and little more than proof of concept really. The business plan I bought into, and which we both thought might be quite ambitious, showed that we should have served about 3.5 Billion ads by now. It’s not often a startup achieves nearly six times on one of its key performance indicators.

I actually started working as the first employee in April and was even paid in May

While the last two years have been really exciting and I wouldn’t have missed them for anything, much of the engineering work in the background has been about stabilising and scaling the platform, which has had to cope with ridiculous growth pressures. However, that’s really behind us now and we’re about to start launching a range of great product enhancements, as well as new ideas, that will make a big difference to our business partners, but also to the mobile ecosystem itself.

Watch this space. It’s about to get really exciting.

I’ve written plenty in the past about Motorola’s long-running problems; the latest in the saga is that the company has decided to split off its handset business into a standalone company in an attempt to reverse its fortunes.

This is a financial “solution” that should give the company’s sagging share price a boost, but in and of itself, it won’t do anything to help its handset business. The fundamental problems of a poor cost structure, and, more importantly, a weak handset portfolio remain. Until the product line improves significantly, it’s hard to see much changing — whether the business is a part of, or separate from, the rest of Motorola.

Following the success of their event in Barcelona, the organizers of the Mobile Jam Session are putting on another one next Monday at CTIA in Las Vegas. Rudy de Waele tells me they have a few spots left, so if you’ll be around, sign up and check it out, as it promises to be a great event. I’ll be there, so flag me down and say hi.

More on the flap over US operator Sprint’s recent launch of a transcoder that uses a fake user-agent and breaks developers’ attempts to automatically serve up mobile-friendly content:

First, Ed Moore from Openwave, the vendor of the Sprint transcoder, stops by in the comments to say that the company is working to “get the exclusion lists up to strength and introduce OpenWeb 5.7 which automates mobile web site detection and lets through the phone user agent.”

Second, developers are working to create some guidelines for friendly transcoding. Tom Hume has some suggestions — including one to create an aggregated whitelist vendors could look to — while WURFL creator Luca Passani has come up with a “Manifesto for Responsible Reformatting”.

More discussion at WAP Review and Mike Rowehl.

LG has released a new device called the LG-SH240. Looks pretty basic with its 2-megapixel camera and all (especially for a Korean handset).

But its key feature isn’t one defined by tech specs. Apparently its selling point is a keypad that feels like human skin.

You know, I never really thought about that before, but maybe I am missing out on something by only having devices with plastic or metal keys.

Words are failing me here, so I’m going to stop and go stir my fava beans and open a bottle of chianti now.

I’m really pleased to announce that I’ve been invited to speak at the prestigious Web 2.0 Expo event in San Francisco in April. It’s got to be one of the biggest and most prestigious events in the digital calendar, so it’s really flattering to be asked.

I’m doing a panel called “After The Phone Rings: Money and Mobile Content” on 24th April, which I’m sure I’ll have something to say on.

I hope to see you there. Or if you’re in the Bay Area around this time and want to meet for a chat or a coffee, let’s see if we can organise something. If you’d like to book a ticket (for the event, not a chat!), you can get $100 discount by using this code websf08sbg when you register.

Hope to see you there.

Russell