Continuing our series on customer relationships and business blogging, we’re now to where the rubber meets the road. Today, we’ve a couple of particularly salient examples where business blogging engages directly with the customer in order to better drive the direction of the organization. Enter the “Customer Advocate” business blog.
Customer advocate blogs (or advocate-styled posts within a larger, more general blog) are those that expressly engage directly with the customer, solicit feedback, answer direct customer questions, and generally reach out and act as a bridge between customers, their concerns and suggestions, and the organization.
When done well, customer advocate blogs will communicate full-circle, and follow the following steps:
1) Engage the conversation – Ensure that customers have a mechanism for providing feedback, suggestions, needs, wants, and the like.
2) Distill and group the feedback – Many of the feedback items may be around similar topics. Group those together and handle them in aggregate.
3) Determine your own prioritization mechanism – All feedback items are not the same. How will your organization decide which ones to address, and by when?
4) Report back – Let the customers know what’s going on. The customers took the time to share their thoughts…what is being done with them? This is the step that is often overlooked.
5) Get to closure – When things are done, let customers know. Don’t let the feedback mechanism be a black hole. If enough suggestions are submitted that don’t seem to result in feedback or action, customers are going to stop participating the conversation.
“Customer Advocate” example #1
Blogger: John Dowdell
Role: Support
Company: Macromedia
Blog Location: http://www.markme.com/jd/archives/006722.cfm
“Customer Advocate” example #2
Blogger: Robert Scoble
Role: Technical Evangelist
Company: Microsoft
Blog Location: http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/06.html#a9118
(n.b. I’ve notes into both John and Robert, explicitly asking for followup on what their respective organizations are going to do with the feedback and suggestions they’ve received, per point (4) above…this post will be updated as responses arrive)
Update:
(31Jan2005) John has responded in the comments. Thanks for the quick response!
The Social Customer Manifesto: The Business Blogging Field Guide, Part 5: The Customer Advocate
This site has a lot of recent Business Blog related posts. Happened upon this at Technorati Business Blog tag.
Direct link in topic header is to Part Five. Scroll the side bar to see the entire manifesto.
The Business Blogging Field Guide – Types of Business Bloggers
The Social Customer Manifesto has a great series going at the moment titled The Business Blogging Field Guide which goes beyond the usual ‘what is a business blog?’ question and describes six different types of business bloggers – giving…
Chris,
I’ve loving your Business Blogging Field Guide posts. I’m sure you’ve already thought of this, but you should package it up in a manifesto and attempt to get it posted on Change This (http://www.changethis.com/). It’s good stuff.
“I’ve notes into both John and Robert, explicitly asking for followup on what their respective organizations are going to do with the feedback and suggestions they’ve received….”
fwiw, I had followup linked in comments to that original entry.
But I consider that whole discussion to have been rather a strange failure. The initial query was for reality-check in case Macromedia was also committing Real’s perceived mistakes. But many of the subsequent inbound links to that post reframed what I was actually asking, and this wasn’t detected by some of the later commenters’ BS filters. That’s why it went off-topic into “bitch at Macromedia”, with “here’s my bunch of feature requests” instead of the original “Do you see anything as dramatic as those player distribution problems?”
(fwiw, I did encourage other staffers to read the whole laundry list of comments, but it remains much more effective to contact the various product teams directly, through the existing wishlist mechanism.)
tx, jd/mm