Today Verizon announced a new customer service channel for its FiOS subscribers.  Dubbed "Verizon In-Home Agent," it's a desktop application that gives customers access to the type of back-office functions that typically require a call to a customer service agent.  Customers can use the tool to set up email accounts, configure a PC to work on a home network, upgrade TV channel packages, or modify phone or voice mail features, among other things.

When it comes to customer service, Verizon has just upped the ante on convenience.  As noted in my recent Convenience Quotient report on customer service, Web self-service is a popular method for consumers to resolve customer service issues, but FAQs/search, email and online chat have their own drawbacks.  Here, Verizon gives consumers the control and the content to resolve their own service issues without involving the company at all, if they wish. That's a huge benefit to some consumers -- not to mention Verizon -- although less tech-savvy consumers may be hesitant to use the In-Home Agent no matter how simple Verizon claims it to be.

At a press conference this morning at the New York Public Library, Sony announced:

Rhapsody announced today that it is submitting an app for iPhone.
If approved, it will be the first on-demand music streaming app
on phones in the U.S.
I won’t speculate about whether Apple will approve the app or not. Even if Apple
doesn’t, others such as Android, Palm Pre, or Blackberry might. This means that on-demand streaming to the phone is essentially here.

The question remains, however, whether on-demand
streaming apps such as Rhapsody’s will lead people to really use phones for music. Currently, only 10 percent of cell phone users in the U.S. listen to
music on their phones. 
iPhone users are already more likely to use them to listen to music than users
of other phones (59% versus 8% respectively) . So Rhapsody may help move the dial only if it enrolls users
of other phones for this service.

[Posted by Tamara Barber]

I’m currently working on a piece of research we here at Forrester call the Wave, which is our vendor comparison methodology. I’m examining vendors in the Market Research Online Community (MROC) space and am very much looking forward to sharing my findings once the research is published.

In the meantime, I’ve been doing some soul searching on what differentiates a research community from a typical online panel. Vendors and clients alike generally have very specific views on the difference. Here’s a sampling of quotes from a recent survey I fielded on MROCs^[i]:

“An online panel suggests that you'll be using it solely for survey research. While an online community is more involved - discussions, community building activities, as well as surveys.”