Got an email yesterday from Brian Dear, of brianstorms.com:
“Hi Chris…Big fan of your Social Customer Manifesto blog here…Just went through a delightfully awful customer experience with Intuit. Blogged the whole thing, thought you might find it amusing.”
Indeed! Brian blogged his whole convoluted experience trying to get his QuickBooks Pro 2005 “Slowbooks Amateur 2005” up and running, including a hysterical* exchange with a customer service rep who sounds like a cross between Jeff Spicoli and Patient Zero. The comments indicate that Intuit may have lost a potential customer or three based on Brian’s experience.
Then, not 10 minutes after reading Brian’s account, I’m listening to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code for 18JAN2005. He not only talks about his ongoing hassles with British Telecom (BT) and EasyNet in getting the last 15m of wire put in place so he can get broadband, but records and podcasts the entire conversation with EasyNet customer service. (Click on the MP3 link; the EasyNet conversation starts at about the 4:50 mark in the recording.)
What does this mean? It means that the barrier to entry of publishing…be it via blogs, web pages, podcasts, what have you…has gotten so low that customers, at any time, can share exactly what their experiences are with the vendors with whom they are working. Not only that, but these experiences become persistent and searchable, sometimes to the point of being more visible than the contrivances the companies themselves are putting out.
Warms my heart, this does.
* – well, hysterical if you’re into schadenfreude, that is…