Business to customer (B2C) communication is a key part of the relationship between the two parties. There are times when you want and appreciate the communication, like when a credit card bill is due. Other times, you need to search for the information you need, such as holiday shopping options, so you look for relevant offers online or traditional media, like newspapers. On a more regular basis you can seek out deals, specials, and business hours for restaurants and similar establishments. From the customer’s perspective though, the reality is the majority of communication from businesses comes unsolicited, mostly in the form of advertising.
At the checkout counter, online or off, businesses to capture my email address or phone number (or, increasingly, your Facebook account ) in an effort to establish a means to communicate. Most of the time though, after you provide your information, you get overwhelmed by marketing. Constant emails for this deal or that, when you really have no desire to purchase anything. This is what is called the signal-to-noise ratio problem (see sidebar).
Groupon is the great example of this. Groupon’s emails are deleted on a daily basis without ever being read. In an attempt to combat this, many people have a 2nd email account or fake phone number for spam and the messages are forever lost in cyberspace. The business is blasting a megaphone into the woods and there is no one around to hear it. The customer is scared of what happens when they give out information, so they hide. This leads to missed opportunities for both the customer and business. In effect, they tune into the 2nd email account when they want an offer. Having a SPAM email account is the duct tape to relevance.
A lot of businesses offer the customer options in terms of what types of marketing messages they receive, but the customer must rely on the vendor’s system to do this. There is no standard or easy way to do this from all devices, especially mobile. Life would be better if there was a way to easily control the communication channel, including opting in instead of opting out. Tangled developed Person2Person technology to empower these business to customer channels (and vice versa). If a customer can control their channels they are less likely to hide and great businesses will Astound their Customer.
The Signal-to-noise ratio is sometimes used informally to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange. For example, in online discussion forums and other online communities, off-topic posts and spam are regarded as “noise” that interferes with the “signal” of appropriate discussion.
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