Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Has Your Business Language Lost its Commercial Roots?

When I came across “in my neck of the woods” in Richard Brautigan's The Revenge of the Lawn, I was intrigued. Do woods have necks? I filed the expression right next to “being on top of things.” This evoked images of a person sitting on the very top of a pile of stuff. At the time, I was working as simultaneous interpreter and translator for a center that focused on neurological and early child development. And completing my degree at the University of Bologna from the U.S. Not an easy commute. Professors almost never approved translations as theses. They made... Read more →

Getting Closer to the End Product: Return on Quality

“'The content farms' model is going away in favor of quality,” says Paulina Karpis. “Future media will be more distribution of a well-made piece of content.” Karpis is co-founder of BrunchWork, a co-learning model of education. She was speaking on a panel at a Reuters event on marketing and customer experience. My tweet elicited a few sighs of relief: many are exhausted from so much content being thrown at them. And the noise keeps burying the signal. As I said in a short article about bars and signal strength: WiFi connection bars rarely represent the quality of the connection, they... Read more →

What can a Company do to Deliver Experiences and Satisfaction?

The best companies are defined by priorities, not bound by capabilities. Horace Dediu uses Apple as a lens to analyze business strategy#: Apple, since its inception, has always been oriented around its customers, not its products. The questions asked by management are “what can the company do to deliver experiences and satisfaction” rather than “what products can the company build”. Here's the difference: A priorities-driven company habitually re-designs its processes and its resources. A resources- or process-driven company re-designs its priorities as its capabilities change. It's not just semantics. Further down: Companies sell objects or activities that they can make... Read more →

Authenticity, it's Your Call.

We may not know what's real today, but we surely know how to spot a fake – the result of a mediated, manipulated, and focus-group-tested effort. Take for example customer conversations. So much work goes into cramming all sorts of meaning into scripts, that at the time of delivery they sounds hollow and insincere, if not a little robotic. If you watched Bicentennial Man#, you may be inclined to believe that robots want to have more heart. You pick up the phone to call a company's customer service line, already regretting having done so and steeling yourself for the obligatory... Read more →

Customer Lifetime Value

There's a reason why you've been on hold with customer service for an hour says the Wall Street Journal, that company may have decided you're not profitable. It's one of the stories I shared in the most recent Learning Habit issue. Algorithms determine Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) by keeping a tally of how much money a customer spends. It's important to remember that CLV is about profit and not just revenue. Companies determine the CLV of a person as a score. The score may include geography — the zip code of where we live — and the number of returns... Read more →

The Best Story with the Most Impact

Brand is an interesting concept for many organizations, especially in the digital era. It's helpful to define what you do and to understand how clients and customers experience your product and service. In some cases, it can help a company reconnect with purpose, or define a new one. Having a brand strategy helps move beyond existing as a product — many Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, but also professional service organizations start there — and building an actual business. The practice of positioning the value you offer helps define purpose for the team, your clients, and potential investors. It's... Read more →

Today in Branding: ConvertKit Reconverts and Airbnb Logo Stays

On July 1, 2018 ConvertKit announced a new company name and logo to its users. The announcement of the rebrand to Seva wad made at their annual conference. It took only a few days for conversations about the cultural and religious implications of the word to reach scale. it was only then that founder Nathan Berry and team started reaching out to customers and non-customers to discuss the name. That's when they realized there was a deeper meaning they had overlooked. As Berry says in an email to customers this week#: Seva is not just a word that means “selfless... Read more →

You say Tomato, I say Tomato... When Language is the Enemy

Things have come to a pretty pass Our romance is growing flat, For you like this and the other While I go for this and that... Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong taught us a thing or two about the subtle disconnects that can kill relationships. All's fair in love and war goes the saying. Lovers that want to stay together resolve their issues, and meet halfway. Isn't it time we stop being at war with each other? It's unfortunate that strategy conversations continue to be full of the language of war. Because the focus on killing, winning, and competition is... Read more →

What Brands can Learn from How Entrepreneurs Use Social Media

The handicap many established brands have is that they have a product or line of products they need to market ― that's often enough to be wired in thinking about social media as channels, rather than tools. Entrepreneurs don't have those constraints. Because they're often thinking only about a problem. Serial entrepreneurs know the drill ― you become obsessed about a problem because you see a gaping hole in the market. What do you do? As you brainstorm with your co-founder(s)/team, you're talking to everybody. Literally anyone who might have an inkling of some part of the problem. Because that's... Read more →

Love Lessons in Customer Experience from Mr. Rogers

“Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal. We are intimately related. May we never even pretend that we are not.” This was part of Fred Rogers' commencement address at Dartmouth College in 2002. His message was simple — deep down we know that what matters in life is helping others win. That was his lifelong message. Later in the short talk, he repeats what he said during his lifetime achievement... Read more →