“Call me” to fight “flashing”
Here is an interesting example of customer driven innovation. Vodafone invented “call me” to answer the network congestion generated by people flashing others. Flashing is when you call and hang up immediately - leaving a trace in the missed calls list - to tell the other person you want a call back.
‘Call Me’, which allows Vodacom subscribers in South Africa to send up to five messages per day, free of charge, requesting a call back from the receiver. Services such as these have emerged in response to consumer behaviour, users who would have previously ‘flashed’ the person they wished to speak to by ringing their phone once and hanging up. ‘Call Me’ formalises the process, helps minimise network traffic through fewer prematurely disconnected calls.
All those companies who hired researchers like Jan Chipchase, Genevieve Bell or Younghee Jung to study customers behaviors around the world are now able to innovate much more easily. It might have been hard to justify hiring an anthropologist inside big companies a while ago, now it is an indispensable part of product or service building teams.
