Communicating with Customers

is Key

Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya

CTO, Vocalocity

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 2

Welcome to the Obvious

Its all about the Customer, stupid

2

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 3

Welcome to the Obvious

Keeping your customers in the loop is Key

3

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 4

The First Lesson

You are always communicating with your customers

4

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 5

Moments

Every customer interaction is a Marketing Moment

5

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 6

Moments

Every customer interaction is a Teachable Moment

6

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 7

Moments

Every customer interaction is a Karmic Moment

7

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 8

Second Lesson

Every interaction counts

-or-

You never get a 2nd chance to make a 3rd impression

8

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 9

Reactive Communications

“Give Me, Show Me, Tell Me”

► Initiated by the User

9

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 10

Proactive Communications

“Yo! Check this out!”

► Initiated by the System

1

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 11

Small is Simple

Prototypes are Easy (and Dangerous)

► Bad assumptions (always!)

► Interactions are easy to build out

• Services

• Domain Objects

• CGIs

• Triggers (Really!)

1

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 12

At Scale? Ack!

Systems evolve as patch-ware

► Scaffolding incompatibility

► Degradation is slow

► “Two+ phase” design

1

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 13

Third Lesson

Scaling is Hard

► You will always discover that

• You didn’t understand your own problem-space

• You didn’t understand your tool-set

• It will not scale the way you thought

► There are more failure modes Horatio than are dreamt of in your

philosophy

1

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 14

Need Cloud? Use Erlang/OTP

OTP behaviors make your life less eventful

1

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 15

Passing the Buck

gen_event

►Notifications

►Updates

► (A)sync actions

1

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 16

Choreography

gen_fsm

►What to do next?

1

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 17

“Thing”-ness

gen_server / supervisors

► Startup

► State

►Maintenance

►Management

1

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 18

Fourth Lesson

Where do you want to spend your time?

-or-

Complexity never goes away, it just moves up the food chain

1

© Vocalocity 2011. Confidential. 19

The Lessons

► You are always communicating with your customers

► Every interaction counts

► Scaling is Hard

►Where do you want to spend your time?

1

Communicating with Customers

is Key

Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya

CTO, Vocalocity