Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Aug 14, 2019 6 tweets 1 min read Read on X
A Japanese innovation which I expect to see in the US before long: video conferencing kiosks at bank branches for relatively low-volume transactions which, for regulatory or customer-comfort reasons, require a bank officer to meet with the client.
This lets you centrally provision the bank officer at a call center in a market where bank officers are abundant and inexpensive and increase their utilization, rather than having to have relatively expensive bank officers constantly underutilized at your most expensive branches.
A sample transaction, which takes about an hour of an officer's time at my local bank, is onboarding a new deposit account customer. This combines a bit of data gathering, a bit of salesmanship, and a bit of regulatory compliance / KYC.
(The question is almost literally:

Select which of the following you will use your new bank account for:

a) Daily life
b) Operating your business
c) Nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons development
d) Terrorism
e) Operating an anti-social group
f) International wires
)
A shadow implication of this is further deskilling of the retail bank branch employee base, since traditionally the people doing this sort of work have to be able to handle the (fairly expansive) set of things that anyone in the neighborhood could want a banker to do.
The telephone booth services are going to be provided by a computer and call center rep symbiosis, though, and while the system has to know how to handle anything, the call center rep only needs to know how to handle whatever queue they're assigned to.

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More from @patio11

Jul 19
Hugops all around today re: the Crowdstrike issue, including for all tellers working for a particular large national institution who are currently entirely stopped on anything requiring computer access.
Frantic branch manager was serially delivering the news that they were impacted by quote the MicroSoft outage end quote and that ATM and online access *might* work.

(It is, ahem, sporadic.)
In “could have come out of a tabletop exercise”, sudden surge by many customers of ATM transactions has them flagging customers as likely being fraud impacted.

Good news: you have an automated loop which allows a customer to recognize a transaction.

Bad news:
Read 8 tweets
Jul 18
I have many thoughts on this thread, but it also stands on its own.
Any customer service process you create, where the nature of the product sold does not radically exclude most of the population, needs to be robust against substantial diversity in capabilities of the general population.
Many people, when they are told a narrative of a sequence of events in interacting with a corporation, will default to believing that that narrative is a basically accurate recounting of history.

People who have worked in CS are less likely to default to this understanding.
Read 22 tweets
Jul 15
My colleague @jeff_weinstein, who also worked on Stripe Atlas, had a good podcast episode about product management, engaging with users, creating delight, dealing with incidents from a comms perspective, etc.

lennyspodcast.com/building-produ…
A thing that I really like about Jeff, which appears to be contrarian enough in large tech companies to mention, is that he exudes willingness to talk to customers without shunting that responsibility off to someone in a different org silo, to read about at next quarter’s sync.
You can choose to simply do things. You have a telephone. You have Zoom. Your customers are on the Internet. You can choose to talk to your customer. You can choose to talk to them today. You can choose to walk out of a meeting right now and do it.
Read 9 tweets
Jul 2
There is something a little magical about giving your kids Dragonbox for the first time and watch them just intuit some of the rules of algebra, based on good game design.
Liam even raged at the app for not allowing him to use the communicative property of multiplication. He definitely doesn’t know those four words, but “If 1X is X and X1 is X then clearly it doesn’t matter if I drag the one onto the X or the other way!!!”
Liam: Why’s I get two stars?
Me: On the seventh step you waved your fingers a bit too much and caused a tap that the app thought was wrong. Which is fine because…
Liam: WE DO IT AGAIN.
Read 9 tweets
Jun 21
Two weeks ago my buddy @fulligin pulled me aside and said "I have something to show you." That something was the Daylight Computer, which I was previously unaware of.

I've since bought one and am using it fairly extensively for reading. Vincent recorded some impressions:
The DC-1 has a whiff of magic to it, comparable to the first time using a Kindle.

(Other people profess to have this feeling from the iPhone/iPad the first time. I honestly don't remember those as being "my life now has a before and an after" moments. Kindle was that.)
The Kindle is a substitute for paper, via eInk. It's the best available way to buy books, a somewhat mediocre reading experience which acts like an inferior substitute for paper, and an absolutely gobsmackingly frustrating software/hardware artifact to use.

I love mine to death.
Read 12 tweets
Jun 13
Matt Levine has a great piece today (well, you knew that) covering Goodhart’s law in the context of how ineffective it is to track mouse movements as a proxy for white collar productivity.

I think this is tempting thing for management to institute because there is a… suspicion.
That suspicion is not “so-called ‘email jobs’ are actually not productive at all.” This is believed by many people on the Internet. Those people are greatly miscalibrated. The world runs on email. Email causes physical results in the world. Coordination/communication are valuable
The thing which management believes is “I have a rather strong suspicion that, somewhere in my vast workforce of people doing white collar jobs, there are malingerers. Not merely people who are bad at their job. No. Some who are actively abusing me, and laughing about it.”
Read 14 tweets

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