Shel Holtz recently had some issues with his computer setup. Shel:
“I’m running Windows XP SP-2 and have been happily running the public beta for Office 2007 (which I love). A minor problem has occurred whenever Microsoft releases an update. I have to repair the Office 2007 installation in order to get it working again. After this past week’s update, though, bigger problems occurred. I cannot get into Outlook, so I started a repair but got a message telling me the Office 2007 installation was corrupt and that I should reinstall. So I tried reinstalling, but that only got about 20% through the process before it gave me an error (2711, I believe). I tried uninstalling Office 2007 but got the same corrupt installation error. And reinstalling Office 2003 did no good at all—I cannot launch Outlook 2003 because of a mismatched .dll file.
So I have no Outlook and, effectively, no Office installation.
So…any Microsofties out there with a clue what I should do?”
This triggered the thought: instead of this being a process where a customer puts a note in a bottle and throws it into the blogosphere, what if this were a pre-meditated process? Here’s how it would work:
- When an organization puts out a product, the organization defines and publishes a particular tag that they will listen for in the blogosphere when there are customer questions (for example, “office2007question” would have been a good tag the MS could promote with its Office 2007 product)
- If a customer has a question with a product, he posts the issue (just like Shel has done) with the tag(s) of the associated product(s)
- The vendor organization, which is theoretically listening for posts tagged with its “support tags” takes notice, and addresses the issue on the customer’s turf.
I believe we’ve just (re-)entered the era of the customer support “house call.”
Further reading: A Customer Support Barn-Raising
Support tagging
Christopher Carfi threw out a interesting idea yesterday… When an organization puts out a product,
Customer consciousness
After Guy Jackson, Electronic Publishing Manager at Macmillan Dictionaries, left a comment on my post about the OED/KB917422 issue, I was thinking how we’ve come to accept that a blog posting about a product, made in some corner of the
I like this idea. Chris Pirillo came up with the idea of doing this for feedback a while back and came up with the “freedbacking” tag that companies can use when attaching another company tag or simply using the unique string in a post. Bloglines support this and actually listen. I’ve had them visit my site and read my freedback. 🙂
I’d suggest perhaps rather than companies distributing unique tags for each and every product that a standard be formed for them to follow. Might be an idea to throw at the microformats people.
Carfi and Barnett on Support Tags
Alex Barnett picks up on an idea from Chris Carfi, which Alex is calling support tags: [from alexbarnett.net blog : Support tagging] By providing a support tag [in a blog post, like “office2007question”], it could allow for further structuring around
craig…thanks for the good words. i think this is inevitable. there will be questions of format and implementation, and i feel it’ll be an occam’s razor sort of thing…very simple, and very effective.
Beacon Tags, Support Tags and TekTag Bug Types
I came across some interesting blog posts last week on the topic of support tags, aka beacon tags. The original post from Chris Carfi was picked up by Alex Barnett, who refers to these tags as support tags. Stowe Boyd