Later this month, Bank of America will roll out a mobile payments trial to its employees in the New York metropolitan market. One of the primary goals of the pilot is to understand the user experience expectations of potential mobile payments customers, according to Michael Upton, Bank of America’s executive leading the initiative. The trial involves outfitting users’ phones with a microSD card that supports contactless payments based on near field communications (NFC) technology.

This is not the first large trial of contactless payments. Citi, Chase, and other large US banks have invested millions of dollars in trials of NFC programs launched by MasterCard and Visa. These efforts, though, have relied primarily on chips embedded in the user’s credit or debit card. Citi earlier this year also introduced an NFC sticker that users can apply to their mobile phones, alleviating the need for a physical card. The Bank of America pilot takes this a step further by including a mobile wallet application that can support multiple payment cards. Users could, for example, make contactless payments from their Bank of America, Citi, Chase, and American Express accounts all through a single mobile app.

Another day, another announcement of social media M&A. Today, Alterian announced its acquistion of Intrepid, a social media consultancy. With this move Alterian adds further professional services strength to its existing listening platform, SM2. Congratulations to Intrepid and Alterian.

I reviewed Alterian's SM2 product in our recent Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms 2010, highlighting many strengths, but observed an area that most needed improvement: the level of services offerings and overall consulting. Combining Intrepid's existing consulting team with the SM2 product will address this gap well, improving Alterian's product line. I spoke to the Alterian team and learned that this move mainly comes as a result of increased client requests for professional services related to social media analytics.

Here at Forrester, we've seen the same growing demand for professional services around listening initiatives. Many clients ask about building, or improving, their programs but lack the internal resources -- social media knowledge, listening expertise, measurement skills, and, most importantly, time -- to go from passively collecting social media data to improving their marketing or business goals from insights within the data. As a result of the growing client interest, we recently published a report on the topic: "How Listening Services Support Social Intelligence." This report outlines the many ways consulting teams assist in the listening process -- from training and support to customized reports and strategic planning -- and tells Customer Intelligence professionals what kind of help they'll benefit from the most.

Google has said nothing about its rumored social networking offering, but it may be that the company has just revealed its secret weapon to take on Facebook.  The new Priority Inbox feature in Gmail hints at social media’s next great battleground: Relevance!

Facebook itself inadvertently demonstrated the value of relevance and what is most wrong with the current Facebook user experience.  The Facebook Places announcement event two weeks ago was the geeky event you’d expect, but there was an unexpected moment of clarity and beauty in the midst of the typical discussion of APIs, partners and functionality.  Facebook VP Chris Cox told a story set in the future that defines the true promise that social networking has yet to fulfill:

“In 20 years our children will go to Ocean Beach and their phone will tell them this is the place their parents had their first kiss, and here’s the picture they took afterward, and here’s what their friends had to say.”

It’s a great story, isn’t it?  But today’s Facebook experience offers no chance this experience could actually occur.  Instead, here’s what would happen based on the current Facebook functionality:  Those kids will visit that beach and their parents’ precious story will be nowhere to be found on the Ocean Beach Places page.  That wonderful 20-year-old status update and picture will be buried under 500 pages of less meaningful messages such as “Don’t buy a hot dog from the snack bar,” “Here’s a picture of some hot babes I took here,” and “Beach kegger party this Saturday night, dudes!” 

One of the questions I'm frequently asked by clients is if virtual agents are a good idea. Many of us have had frustrating interactive agent experiences over the years (recall Clippy, Microsoft’s animated paperclip that launched a thousand parodies).

Times have changed, and I think virtual agents are worth taking a look at. Today’s virtual agents can guide consumers through your Web site while answering questions effectively and conversationally. 

As virtual agent technology continues to become more sophisticated — features such as integrating with enterprise systems like shipping and delivery or CRM availability on mobile devices — virtual agents will continue to take on more complex customer service issues.

One of the benefits that I think is really compelling is that if a consumer escalates to live help, the transcript is pushed to the call rep, reducing call resolution times and sparing customers the annoyance of having to start from the beginning to explain their problem.

These features matter for many reasons. Here are two big ones.