Will be pumping out thoughts very soon and in 2013 and beyond.

Keep track of my other project  - Next Bank.

This blog now has had 850 posts since it began in February, 2007 as a mere idea and innovation tracking tool for me as I entered a new industry. Since then its certainly become more than that, and has opened my eyes and all sorts of doors across the globe. But now we use differnet ways to get these points across – mostly now in 140 characters! Plus it’s all about a simpler life, not just work. Work like this takes a back seat to family, day job, wine, golf, footy, etc.

To all the people who supported the efforts I made here, a big thanks.

You can find me tooling away at my new idea (amongst others) called Next Bank. Next Bank is an events company as well as a thought leadership and consulting collective that hopes to really shine a light and share with the industry the best and brightest people and ideas. Our first event was Next Bank Asia in May 2012. We have events coming up in Europe & Japan in 2012 and again in Singapore in 2013. If you want to know more, drop me a line via here.

Also you can now follow me on twitter at one of the following handles:
@robfindlay - my own personal views on mostly non-work stuff
@nextbankorg - the umbrella brand for our new Next Bank concept
@nextbankasia - follow this for news on Next Bank Asia events, news and ideas
@nextbankeurope - follow this for new on Next Bank Europe events, news and ideas

Onward to new ideas and adventures!

Cheers,
Rob Findlay

• Jack Dorsey,  the darling of all financial services press, talks about Square and how the company hopes to infuse financial transactions with a dose of human intimacy.  A great profile and insight from Wired.
• Citibank Singapore gives customers the ability to deactivate and reactivate a credit card on the spot, as well as the option to specify a time period to activate overseas transactions for ATM and debit cards.
• The reality is, consumers view most banking brands as undesirable and wholly undifferentiated. That’s why the battle cry ‘Differentiate or Die’ has never been more relevant in the financial sector.
• Digital wallets will start to transform not just the customer interaction but the entire payment ecosystem – for example, PayPal is now accepted at more than 2,000 Home Depot stores across the country. In the next month, the company, which once existed only in cyberspace, will invade Abercrombie and Fitch
• Expect big news about Google Wallet out of this week’s Google I/O, the company’s annual conference for developers. The word from several people familiar with the plan is that Google will announce changes to the product amounting to a “Google Wallet 2.0.”
• This Qatari bank branch looks more like the interior of a luxury yacht than a place you open a savings account
• Among the many victims of RBS’s systems meltdown over the last few days, the most unusual may be Natalie Westerman, a 22 year old woman who happens to go by the name @natwest on Twitter.
• Challenges such as financial illiteracy and enacting the right regulations to prevent consumers from being scammed are identified by one industry watcher as reasons for slower adoption of mobile payments technology in Asia.
• Asia’s affluent segment is one of the fastest growing and most exciting in banking today. Yet, their needs have been underserved, or served in a fragmented manner, by banks.
• Facebook phasing out credits, in with real payments and local currencies, could become the next Paypal!
• This Kickstarter project is funding a Facebook game, created in cooperation with top game developers, psychologists, debt-counselors, youth and behavioral economists, allows kids to experience the consequences of personal financial decisions and learn how to avoid debt traps in a safe environment.
• The Bull and Bear Steakhouse at the Waldorf-Astoria in New Yorkis cutting back the prices of its cocktails in line with stock market drops.
• Among the features of Kiwibank’s new iphone app (and there are many — a fast-access 4 digit PIN log-in, full account history, lists of future payments, funds transfer options, bill payments and much more), the most notable is a click-to-chat service. If a customer needs help, they can just push a button in the Kiwibank app to initiate a two-way chat with a service agent.
• This Siri based assistant in BBVA’s internet banking is interesting too – can a computer give you financial advice?? Probably.
• Chinese bank card provider China UnionPay, the only bank card available in China, is teaming with China Mobile Ltd, the state-owned telecommunications company, to create a mobile payment business using NFC technologies.
• If only we could write customer letters like this – one day! (Fake alert)
• Pesky startup Square, slowly taking over merchant transactions in the US, has design at its core. “Traditionally in a financial institution, you have massive barriers to working together, you have a risk-averse culture and you have a lot of fear,” Founder Jack Dorsey said. “It’s rare for a financial institution to focus on design first.”
• Speaking of Square, iZettle aims to be its competitive European rival, with $31m in funding this week.
• This video explains the 08 Financial Crisis in laymen’s terms – we should use the same format and tone for ANY complex product or service for our customers. Any of these epipheo videos could give you more of a clue too.
• DBS have launched a new Rewards iPhone app – not necessarily pretty but some simple gain and redeem functionality there
• A review of a handful of flagship bank branches from across the globe – does the flagship branch still have its weighty meaning?
• Digital wallets are fast becoming more sophisticated, and more importantly more comprehensive. Lemon.com is the latest app on the block that can handle all cards and receipts, although Apple’s new Passbook feature is the clear leadout towards the wallet when combined with iTunes.
• I challenge you to keep your conversations with customers as simple as these classic money related drawings from Carl Richards at Behavior Gap. Don’t get too distracted by these fun venn diagrams from This Is Indexed though.
• Dave Birch gives a great presentation proposing a safer approach to personal (banking) identification. Dan Gusev gives further commentary on it.
• Commonwealth Bank have run a huge campaign around the word CAN – see the ad and range of services to back it up – not sure the ad hits the mark! Aussies hate these motherhood statement bank ads
• A new partnership with PayPal will give TiVo users the ability to explore interactive ads and buy products directly through the interface using their PayPal account.
• The financial crimes that are destroying the economy of the developing world. For every dollar of aid that flows into developing economies, many more leave through complex networks of shell companies, false invoices, and tax havens. What would happen if all that money stayed in these struggling economies?
• Moneydesktop looks to be a comprehensive PFM tool for both customers and banks
• Facebook has begun rolling out a new mobile payments system  that reduces the number of steps users must take to complete a purchase from seven to two.
• This cute short film from Rikke Asbjoern (made for Cartoon Network) explores a common UI problem: tiny, densely-packed buttons = fat fingering.
• Looks like everyone is getting into the mobile to mobile payments – even big old Barclays
• Investors should buy assets in U.S. dollars and other currencies of strong developed nations because Japan may default within five years, said Takeshi Fujimaki, former adviser to billionaire investor George Soros.

 Other sources of customer experience & focus innovation

• The ‘First Person Pathfinder Experience’ delivers a virtual tour of the car’s interior that highlights key features of the vehicle while emulating the interaction between customer and car in a showroom environment.
• Microsoft has bought corporate network tool Yammer (think internal Facebook) for US$1.2bn … why?
• Speaking of Microsoft you probably saw they launched their Surface tablet, challenging the iPad and other similar devices. Biggest buzz? The keyboard built into the cover …
• We need to run our large, slow companies like small nimble startups otherwise startups will overrun us
• All the winners of the recent Cannes Lions Advertising Awards are here in this slideshow … only one bank there I can see
• Ever wonder where people check in on Facebook?.
• Work Backwards from the Customer. Stick to a vision and the company shall succeed, advises Amazon Senior VP Diego Piacentini in this interesting video.
• Gulf News, the UAE’s leading English daily newspaper, wanted to reach even more readers and convert them into subscribers. It turned to the ritual of the daily coffee as a way to get closer to customers, with Twitters help.
• Asus, the tablet and PC maker, do a nice show and tell on the power of tablets and how they designed and developed theirs
• Think Skype is big? Go see how many people are using Tencent’s QQ right now
• A lost wallet in a stadium box-office containing a ticket to the next important derby belonging to a fan of the opposite team. Would you give it back?
• Yes iTunes has landed in Singapore (and 11 other countries too).
• And the iPhone 5 will have NFC built in – prepare for everything to change!
• Who’s getting ahead, Singapore or Hong Kong?
• Ever wondered what the new Apple office might look like? Put on your sunglasses – here comes the glaring porcelain white interior you’d imagine Apple would have. Office Snapshots is a great site – all the startups office spaces are there!
• Obsessed by interesting facts and data? You must sign up for the BrainMail email newsletter today! So essential …
• Turn ANYTHING into a touch interface (Watch the video!). Banana Piano? Pencil Joystick? Water Dance Pads? Cat Photo Booth? All possible.
• It’s clear mobile advertising just hasn’t taken off like it was supposed to. Its still exploding but not all pervasive…
• 32 innovations that  will change your tomorrow – electric clothes anyone?
• Nokia to cut 10,000 jobs, which means some pain for Microsoft no doubt
• Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, went to China for a 2 month ‘holiday’ (sabbatical?) and took one second of footage per day, stringing it together into this terrific set of ‘moving’ postcards
• 2 things from Japan- This vending machine has a see through interactive screen for you to choose and fulfill your purchase; this scanner recognizes products by their shape and by how they look, making barcodes obsolete
• Microsoft intends to advertise to you based on your mood, not just your demographic. Instead of showing targeted ads by only tracking the user’s online activities, the patented technology can also recognize the user’s emotional state based on facial expressions, speech patterns, and body movement. Also rumors today that Microsoft is launching a challenger product to the iPad … (good luck with that!)
• The US Government has released its roadmap for digital government. Some techy content here about accessing and using data in meaningful ways. “At its core, the strategy takes a coordinated, information- and customer-centric approach to changing how the government works and delivers services to the American people”. Nice. Next challenge – execution.
• From Love to Bingo – one of the rules of advertising is to show the product – here’s how you do it when your product is millions of stock shots – great ad!!
• This project uses design to solve 50 problems in 50 days in a journey acrossEurope. Wonderful that he solves problems rather than dreams up new (unwanted) things using a pen and paper. Not too common these days (except here in CX!).
• Make room in your 2013 budgets for this made-from-scratch fresh pizza vending machine. Makes oven cooked pizza in less than 3 minutes and comes complete with takeaway box, cutter, oregano and napkin. (Yes I’ve mentioned pizza before – it’ll be a theme here!)

Global financial services innovation & news

• This may be old news for you but last week a Goldman Sachs banker wrote this scathing leaving letter published by the New York Times. Culture eats strategy for breakfast so the saying goes … this letter seems to support that.
• PayPal have launched a ‘Square-like’ dongle for the iphone that allows small business merchants to accept credit card payments from the convenience of the mobile phone. Nice packaging, nice ecosystem approach. Huge game changer for the cards and merchant businesses. Watch the video here. There is an equivalent here in Singapore called SwiffPay
• Speaking of mobile money, 2 really interesting articles from Fastcompany – the broader argument on a cashless society, and another specific mobile phone solution called Geode.
• Wells Fargo have become the biggest bank by market value. They’re also consistent winners of most customer satisfaction surveys amongst the big banks in the US. This is a unique double, that only someone like Apple can parallel.
• Nice ideas that play on the strength of local knowledge and connection with local communities and customers. Can we be so bold to do the same here in Singapore?
• Using this new app from Commonwealth Bank you can check your account balance without logging in. Security issue or not? If the Aus regulator lets that one through, most others would too.
• You may have heard of the Big Mac Index – a common form of commodity across the globe that we can all understand. It’s an intriguing measure of purchasing power across currencies relative to the USD. Where does Singapore or Malaysia sit?
• An update on Singapore’s efforts to digitize signatures to prevent online banking fraud, looking at the monitor itself as a potential tool to avoid man in the middle attacks

Other sources of customer experience & focus innovation

• These colorful tents are designed to stand out in their natural setting, whilst also having a little fun doing so. Fancy spending a night in a giant piece of cheese or watermelon, or a circus tent, or under an old quilt?
• Gerry McGovern makes a good argument about focusing on a users tasks not your content. This uses a website analogy but of course could apply to any channel customers use. (Vimeo video) “Get to the task. They want to get in, they want to get out as quickly as possible”
• Dollar Shave Club takes a fresh approach to the usually boring – and expensive – subject of mens shaving razors. Building fans before they’ve even sold them a razor! Watch the video (if you have access!)
• We’ve all heard of Flash Mobs – they’re kind of old now. Next comes Cash Mobs – a group of folks get together and flood a local, independent business, each ready to spend about $20. A nice way to spontaneously support a local business that’s doing good.
• The Jawbone JAMBOX speaker is a simple speaker linking to a smart phone via Bluetooth but this add shows its multiple functions, simple use and fashionable styling
• Scrabble Typography Edition anyone? Beautiful.

A benefit of only being in the banking industry for 5 years or so is that I can very clearly see the pattern of change from when I started and to now – and I can tell you in the more traditional banking landscape … not much has changed.

But change is going on all around that landscape, and banks need to focus on this.

Now. Today. This week.

They need to be aware of what is happening to customers, innovators, competitors, and technologies, for these forces will determine their futures, not the other way around.

Here are the obvious signs that I read about and see that show many large, old banks are really unaware or unwilling to whats happening:

1. Your bank’s HQ still in a swanky, marble laden ivory tower in the most expensive street in town – this is deliberately intimidating architectural language designed to engender trust, but really means you have to ask their permission to get your money. Modern new office spaces now concentrate more on quality of light, space and environment, and employee happiness and productivity more than the Georgian era monolithic structures did.
2. Your bank doesn’t realize its role is as a guardian of customers money as opposed to an entity that holds the purse strings in our lives
3. Your bank is launching expensive new ‘flagship’ branches, when the numbers of people visiting branches is in decline. Three new branch refurbishments could probably fund the best online banking offering in your banks local market.
4. Your banks new ‘flagship’ branches are going ahead anyway and look like an Apple store, except not quite as good. (Sorry Citi, but it shows).
5. Your banks branches are laid out in a dumb, functional way, with poor understanding of customer flow or task, then overlaid with various wasted trickery like coffee machines and book stores. But you’re forced to the branch by archaic documentation and identification requirements, when you’d rather have finished that application or process at home online, or on the phone where you started it.
6. Your bank is still considering the business case of social media, when the likes of Facebook and Twitter are replacing alternate communication tools – like speaking to each other face to face, or even sending an email
7. Your bank also bans social media at work, without spending any time to understand how they might leverage it, or at least understand thats how people communicate internally these days (Yammer is awesome!)
8. You bank doesn’t care that much about the usability and effectiveness of intranets or internal tools, despite these being the platforms that power employees to do their work ALL day, EVERY day.
9. Your bank is yet to really understand or embrace mobile, when at the same time in growing numbers every person on every train, bus, lounge room couch, desk and cafe table is peering into their phone screen for hours at a time
10. Your bank still thinks that people who use iPhones, iPads and Android phones are ‘tech-savvy’, when the power of these devices is that they’re ridiculously easy to use, and DON’T need a PHD to use.
11. Your bank’s internet banking experience is still a dumb transaction history list – no insight, no advice, no appropriate cross sell, no getting ahead financially. IB and more so MB will be the main tool people use to understand, manage and grow their wealth.
12. Your bank has dozens of home loan, credit card or other such products, when a handful of simpler more suited products would do just fine and actually resonate far more powerfully with customers (the burden of choice can be overwhelming!)
13. Your bank attempts mass brand campaigns that talk about their connection with you, your heart, your spirit and other such ridiculous claims (only bettered by Telcos – I’m talking about you M1!)
14. Your bank’s mass brand campaigns are also ‘leading’ the corporate culture, rather than ‘reflecting’ it – this is dangerous. What if you can’t (or never will be able to) do what you claim?
15. Your bank ‘knows its customers’ so well, it has a really detailed PPT presentation about them! (The Bank has never ‘met’ these customers though)
16. Your bank doesn’t ask customers what they really need, only what they want. And doesn’t include customers in the creation and implementation of new products and services, holding them close to their chest until launch. This is doomed to failure, or at least consigned to the ‘… meh!’ pile of banking offerings.
17. Your bank has never mapped an experience end to end to see what a customer really goes through – ‘wow it takes 3 weeks for that document to get processed …” – or has never been a customer – stood in a queue, filled a form, navigated a complex IVR menu. Many times, the leaders of these banks have not been in a branch, call centre or customers place of banking for years (who needs to when you have a dedicated Private Banker??)
18. Your bank is willing to outsource what a customer would call its core competency – service – whilst those functions that protect shareholder value – audit, risk – are generally internal and protected. Whats that saying about the fermium model? If your not the customer you’re the product. Perhaps to a bank, customers are their products that they make money from, rather than the other way around.
19. Your bank thinks design is how things look not how things work
20. Your bank thinks usability isn’t important than face to face service, when probably three quarters of a banking ‘relationship’ is spent dealing with documents, forms, statements, fact sheets, websites, apps, queue ticket machines, interfaces
21. Your bank still bends you over a barrel with complicated, jargon filled terms and conditions documents, snaring you for fees, charges, sneaky up selling and other tricks – people are tiring of this so quickly
22. Your bank thinks customers want ALL the functionality when really they only want the core functions, and the rest can hide somewhere else for a while (until I want it , now!)
23. Your bank doesn’t think a call centre is more important than branches, despite the volume of interactions and their critical customer experience. Call centers matter, hugely. And will be an increasingly important channel IMHO.
24. Your bank carefully watches the direct competitors for new ideas, launches, products, services etc, when customers think banks are all the same, and desperately hopes Apple, Google or Amazon would open a bank one day to sort it all out. If Richard Branson can’t crack it, then maybe the ghost of Steve Jobs can.
25. Your bank doesn’t need consultants or outsiders, because your bank knows best. That lacks courage and humility to me.
26. Your bank makes it hard to switch to or from the bank – the idea of ‘stickiness’ in offering and service reeks of artificial ways to make it hard for a customer to leave the bank. This is only annoying and frustrating, not subtle to the customer or endearing to the bank.
27. Your bank reveals its true motivations at annual shareholder meetings, without really mentioning customers. But back at the office, the bank is all ‘customer-centric’ again
28. KPI’s and incentives are still tied solely to revenue, rather than a mix of business and customer success or satisfaction (these are often polar opposites in objective and difficult to balance!). In the one moment the boss creates a culture of focused customer service, then in the next bangs the desk demanding the team makes its revenue targets for the month/quarter/year – how does a team does this at a frontline level constantly across a diverse team and long time period?
29. Your bank insensitively gives out ‘market rate’ bonuses to high level execs, as if the term PR didn’t exist or wasn’t important
30. Your bank fails, gets bailed out by governments and tax payers, then makes the same mistakes again, or spends the bailout on the previous point instead of improving customer service, experience and the value proposition
31. Your bank uses the term ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’ to justify a million pretty stupid decisions

Has any bank cracked all this? No. And I’m not saying every bank sucks. Many banks have cracked many of these items, and done it well through for example product and policy (NAB and its Fair Pricing and Banking), customer experience improvements and functions (DBS, Standard Chartered, and my employer OCBC – I’m biased, because the bank I work for is increasingly getting ‘it’ and are doing good things – I’m sure there are more, please share!) and great channel ideas and executions (CBA, ANZ, most of the Kiwis and Spanish banks, Umpqua etc). What I’m saying is every bank has the potential to be something truly great to its customers (I wouldn’t expect customers to love my bank, just like them), all it takes is the conscious effort to do so.

Does a bank need to do ALL the above? No.But some or most would be good before its too late and disintermediation takes over. The economic crisis I believe has, in a surprising way, lead banks to a sense of security – in times of economic uncertainty there is a flight to quality – deposits into the big banks. Once this uncertainty is over and the global economy is moving again, watch for alternate banking brands and models like Simple, Movenbank, UBank, FRANK, etc to really vault forward, at least in short term experimentation and adoption.

Has any ‘non-bank’ player got all this? No way. I’m amazed for example that no one, no one at all, has really cracked the aggregated PFM space. I don’t know why that’s so hard. But many non-banks may be better positioned to create a new offering that meets all these frustrations above.

What other signs are there?

Here’s a quick description for you:

Think of the last banking conference you went to. It probably was just like the last one, and the one before that.

Too often, too many banking or financial services conferences are either too corporate, too close-minded or just plain boring.

They don’t include certain fringe players in the industry who can bring new innovative ideas to the table. They don’t include entrepreneurs with new business models for fear of the threat they pose. They don’t connect thought leaders together, or enable the serendipidous coming together of different industries.

Most importantly, these conferences often don’t talk about the reality of the change in front of the industry. The changing consumer, fast evolving technology, increasing uncertainty and volatility at the same time as increasing opportunity are all key environmental factors in any financial services firms roadmap.

Next Bank Asia aims to confront all these issues.

Next Bank Asia will create an open dialogue about all these things, using innovative new formats and agenda items.

We’re looking for designers, technologists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, innovators, governments, policy makers, corporates and banks to come together to discuss new ideas, real futures and how we can collaborate to make banking better for our customers and our businesses.

We already have some globally recognised speakers.

Brett King, Chris Skinner, David McQuillen, Annalie Killian and others are lining up to create a stellar agenda. Be a part of it!

We’re not conference organizers. We’re like you.

We work in the financial services industry like you do. We’re not an events company. So whilst we’re learning about conferences, we know about the issues you confront as well as anyone.

Our motivation here is genuine – we want constructive, challenging, and enjoyable dialogue, not boring speeches formulated by an events company.

We’re going to challenge the conventional conference format too.

An agenda will contain a special VIP event accessing 2 of the brightest brains in global innovation, presentations from thought leaders, demos from entrepreneurs and small businesses, and a huge socially responsible banking section on how the industry is helping (not compromising) the unbanked and developed markets. We’re looking for any interested parties to send us a proposal for their presentation. There’ll also be a cool venue, great food, perfect coffee, cool merchandise and proper conference bags – you know, all that stuff that normally sucks at most conferences.

You create the agenda, not us.

Got any bright ideas? Let us know how you’d like to see Next Bank Asia come together – your participation in constructing the agenda is welcome.

Want to know more?

Visit NextBankAsia.com
Follow @NextBankAsia

Of course always feel free to drop me a note directly or comment via Twitter – lets have some fun here!

Hearing this from people frustrates me no end. It’s either an unfair judgment of someone’s own abilities – we can all be creative if we let ourselves be – or a copout that that type of work isn’t for us serious corporate adults – its for kids, or art students.

This is of course absurd. We’re all creative in many interesting and colourful ways.

Creativity has been discussed and debated by some of the worlds greatest minds, both in long and recent history. A real revolution in allowing creative thinking and activity is even making its way into the workplace – think colourful and expressive spaces and studios, 20 percent time, etc.

But we need to take it a new level.

We can all be creative, appreciate creative things. We can be artists, dreamers, visionaries.

But to advance ourselves (and our business opportunities) we also need to be creators of creative things – builders, sculptors, entrepreneurs, leaders, directors, project managers, and executors (not executioners).

Be inspired and interesting with your ideas, but make sure you’re also productive and make the idea come alive.

Be creative, and a creator.

• They’re well produced and look professional (that’s a given right?)
• They tell stories in plain English (or American, depending on your bias) what the product or service is all about
• They use real people in situ to explain
• They show the product or service in action, or demonstrate how it works rather than some complicated diagram or explanation
• They reveal the real benefit to the user rather than wrapping in corporate justification or jargon
• They’re short and sweet, to the point

We should use videos like these (and these in my previous post) to explain things to customers, in this simple way.

Something I’ve always been critical of is the overly simplistic, lazy and fasle measure that is Customer Satisfaction.

Asking customers how satisfied they are on an 11, 7, 5 whatever point scale is a question they just don’t ever consider.

I’m not even sure about NPS anymore either. The mythical BBQ conversation (somehow an Australian-specific market research analogy) of ‘which bank would you talk to people at BBQs about” is stupid – no one speaks about banks at BBQs, people. They talk about their life, their kids, their jobs, their holidays, not banks, insurance companies, utilities. They might talk about experiences, but not the brands or banks themselves. I don’t think so, anyway – its not something we can keep bringing up in meetings anymore.

Let’s rephrase it simple customer centric terms:

• How happy are you with the service you receive from the bank?
• Or perhaps more importantly, are you not unhappy?
• Did the experience you had meet your expectations? Why or why not?
• Did you get done what you needed to get done? Do you need to go in again??
• Are you better off financially being with this bank? Are you making more interest on your savings or saving on your loans and fees?
• Did the bank make you want to do more business with them?

Ask customers to help you create measures around Customer Success not Customer Satisfaction:

• TASK COMPLETION – Did the customer complete the task they started?
• CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS - Did the customer experience meet expectations?
• WEALTH CREATION - Is the customer creating better financial outcomes for themselves?
• REPEAT BUSINESS – Is this new business or repeat business?

Don’t get caught up in the miniscule percentages, the 0.3% movement in your customer sat. That’s not real, accurate or something you can lean on as real change.

Concentrate on the real customer outcomes – they got done what they needed to, had an ok time doing it, it benefitted them financially either in the short or long term, and if all goes well, they might come back and give you more business.

Let’s face it, in this current environment, you’ll be grateful for that right?

Some of you may not know that I have a dirty secret. Some of you may know that I’ve decided to join, for a short fleeting moment, a group of people that others find … odd, or perhaps obsessed. I’ve decided, for one bleary eyed Sunday morning, to do a triathlon.

I know what you’re thinking. Lycra, sunglasses, cut to the hilt, chugging Gatorade, doing 100km practice runs, swimming across oceans and riding in volcano fields.

Well, you’d be wrong.

I’m doing the smallest triathlon you can do, so small that I actually wonder if I can wade out to the buoys rather than swim (I really hope so), so small that I fear it’s actually the category 8 year old kids do. You’ll see me crossing the line, then collapsing. Like a winner should.

Still, it’s a target.

And in the spirit of ‘training’ I’ve started using the Nike + app and online training tool. There are many more, possibly better training tools out there, but for me, this will do fine. Fancy graphics and a female voiceover motivates enough, as did the fun of buying new trainers for the little GPS thingy.

Using the system made me think about some of the customer experience lessons this little system taught me – I needed the distraction. Here are the 6 things I can come up with.

Its not about Nike or Apple
No doubt its branded NIKE, and incorporates your ipod or iphone, and that’s part of the reason why you buy it (perhaps the whole reason). But once you use it, it could be made by anyone (who can design a good UI that is) because all of a sudden its you who is driving every aspect – settings, content, data. The tool is merely an empty vessel that you fill with your data. It just works, pretty much out of the pack Adding a GPS transponder in your shoe is simple. Downloading and setting up the app is no worse than the better apps out there. And somehow, I was expecting some sort of link or calibration between the GPS unit and the iPhone, but no. You start a workout on the app, get running, and its captured. Whilst this is a fairly simple function compared to getting a new credit card or internet banking app to work, sometimes we need to keep it this simple.

It connects you to people like you
Yep the standard ‘social’ bit goes in here. But this isn’t the normal application of social that we’re used to. Many social ideas and models rely on the number of participants to correlate with the success of the model – Facebook a good example. But with Nike +, you can have 0 friends, 1 friend or 1000. It doesn’t exactly matter, as long as you go running. Motivation and competition are obvious benefits here. And you can find people who run like you do, as fast as you, near you, or even like the same music.

You set the perameters of success
Everyone has a different idea of what success looks like, what their goals are. So setting your objectives is easy (simple goals like number of kms, time running, etc) and of course can change over time, rather than being locked in. This means your program can respond to how lazy or motivated you are, or towards a specific goal (like a sodding triathlon)

It gets better the more you use it…
The more data you contribute, the more the system might learn about you. Understanding your best or worst times, where you run the best, what time of day, what conditions, what music you’re listening to, what music makes you run faster, all these things can help you create a better ‘athlete’ (use that term loosely folks)

And then Nike creates CRM gold!
Of course NIKE is currently harvesting all that data, and no doubt flogging to the record companies, back to Apple, who sell it back to NIKE and via the iTunes store. Something like that anyway. Again, Apple is creating an ecosystem that connects data, handphones, music, nike apparel, and the lifestyle around all of it.

In the end, it creates good, positive customer behavior
Any piece of gadgetry that captures my data, possibly for unscrupulous reasons (“if it’s free, you’re the product not the customer” someone once said), but gets me out running and getting fitter is fine for me. Means to an end and all that.