Service Strife and Table Stakes

From Twitter to Facebook to Springer Nature, weak service offerings reveal a lack of customer alignment

Service Strife and Table Stakes

Are you feeling “verified”? Both Facebook and Twitter have attempted to create recurring revenue streams by offering paid options for account verification. Of course, Twitter’s approach has been a disaster, with terrorists and poseurs approved as long as they paid. Facebook’s approach is more likely to be valid, as it depends on government identification, but to what end?

Other offerings in Facebook’s approach include customer service and enhanced account security — options that shine a light on these issues in a way that’s a little awkward, to say the least, given the company’s history in both areas.

Springer Nature recently started informing authors that paying an APC would provide them with the added benefit of having their manuscript automatically deposited in PubMed Central (PMC) — a move that seems designed to push authors away from subscription journals, and Springer Nature bizarrely away from growing its recurring revenue base (note: investors value recurring revenues at 2-3x transactional revenues):

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