How To Drive Your Customers Away, The AT&T Wireless Way

Having myself been stung by the AT&T Wireless process and service nightware, I read with great interest the story of their downfall and presumed sale next month. The toll: a significant number of the company’s 31,000+ employees will likely lose their jobs, and the remaining customers will have to migrate. One take on the root cause:

“Years of substandard customer care, spotty coverage and dropped calls had taken their toll.

‘The line from the company was that we lost those people out of bad luck,’ said a regional sales manager. ‘But they walked away flipping us the bird. They aggressively walked away from us. They couldn’t wait to get away from us.'”

Ok, it’s not rocket science, folks. Do these things:

  • Listen to your customers
  • Make sound business decisions based on that input
  • Do what you promise, when you promise to do it
  • When your customers are defecting in droves, don’t spend millions of dollars upgrading the “company’s Falcon 50 jet to a bigger Gulfstream jet for commuting — then put millions of dollars more into a new interior for it.”

(shakes head…)

I Don’t Trust You. Yet.

The concept of “I can’t trust you, until I get to know you better,” is at the core of a great posting by Christopher Allen in the Life With Alacrity blog. Christopher’s thoughts are a great window into how real relationships are built with customers. When two people are “building rapport” with each other, they are going through this process:

This is how I typically explain progressive trust when I meet someone in-person at a conference:

You are now spending your most precious resource, that most unrenewable commodity — time, in order to listen and understand what I have to say.

Why do you do so? Because by the act of us being here in this common space, at this conference, you have found a very simple credential from me–that I’m willing to spend time here in a place that you are interested in as well. In turn, I’m willing to spend more time chatting with you for the same reason.

Why do we continue to chat, and not move on to other people to discuss with? Because as we chat we are exchanging a number of credentials — people we know in common, common interests, meaningful ideas, etc. We may also present credentials typically issued by others, like our business cards, or explain our relationship to the host…As our collaboration grows, we will find ourselves seeking more and more credentials, endorsements, etc., but they will not be enough. The next level of trust can only be established by experience of commitment — for instance do we call back when we said we would? These tests typically start with small things, and then grow to larger things. At some point this may ultimately grow to form simple verbal contracts; over time richer, deeper social contracts are agreed upon that might not be written down.

Ultimately we may bring in third parties to witness, and thus possibly enforce our mutual obligations…

Some great thoughts there, along with a followup by Clay.

Progressive trust is required to create real relationships with customers. How do you do it?

Killing Marketing As We Know It

I love how SUN’s President & COO, Jonathan Schwartz, dispenses with the boring, uber-sterile traditional glossy marketing approach and just tells customers what’s going on.

For example, the organization has recently begun selling their systems directly on eBay. Instead of overdone PR, he states what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how it affects their strategy, customers, and partners (and, not incidently, this move also gives them perfect information on the true market price of their systems). Schwartz also uses it as a bully pulpit to raise doubts about SUN’s competitors. He also dimisses a minor confidentiality leak that took place when the marching orders he gave ended up on a t-shirt wearing dog.

What SUN has done goes beyond simply giving their fromage grand a microphone, however. They actually have set up an environment that is is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything. Sports. Music. One of their bloggers, “Mary,” even states “I use this blog to explicitly and without apology market to you.”

SUN is in the process of killing Marketing as we know it and, in the process, is getting closer to their customers

(thanks to Rick Klau for the lead)

Real Life Example: Using Social Software To Reach Customers

How did this happen? While most commercial businesses are still trying to figure out the basics, a state government agency in Utah has put up a great example of how to use social software (in this case, a blog) to better connect with customers.

This eGovernment site goes into the details about how they are using their weblogs as a customer relationship management tool:

“…we have a group blog that is accessible by PIOs and others from multiple state agencies to generate the news for our State business portal. We have other multi-party blogging ideas in the works.

We may even use blogging as an inexpensive, easier and more effective way to do customer relationship management / contact management for an internal service fund. For example, each customer agency becomes a category in the (internal facing) blog. People post to the blog category any time they have contact with that agency. Managers and CRMs can subscribe in their aggregator to those agencies (categories) that they have an interest in. Add a search engine to the blog for additional power. You have an effective solution in hours or days rather than months.”

Nicely done! Since our friends in Utah are doing so well in this regard, I would suggest setting up an enterprise social networking conference here as soon as a possible.

Biz Blogging Takes Off

A lot of thoughts today on blogging as a way to bring an enterprise and its customers closer together. Building on the internal/external model of blogs, I think that blogs (and all social software) can bridge the gap in four different ways.

1) Enterprise to customers
2) Representative with customers
3) Enterprise with customers
4) Customers with customers, sponsored by the Enterprise

(“to” implies a one-way information flow, “with” implies a conversation)

However, to round out the internal/external way of looking at things, we might want to think about the “external” interactions through the more traditional viewpoints of sales, marketing, and service. Some examples:

Potential Marketing blogs, in addtion to “branding”
– Product direction
– Uses of existing products

– Case studies of existing customers
– Calendar of events

Potential Sales blogs
– 1:1 blogs between representatives and customers/prospects
(question: would you be more likely to interact with a sales rep if he/she had a blog?)

Potential Service (or Support) blogs

– User groups (discussions among users)
– Problem resolution
– Publication of new features / updates

Any others anyone can think of?

From the “timely!” department…as this post was being put together, also saw that there is a new set of thoughts on Creating Customer Evangelists that may merit a deeper look.

(from Fredrik Wackå, via Ross); and,

(from Church of the Customer, via Nova)

What About Our Relationship?

More voices chiming forth on what really matters in Sales Effectiveness. Are you ready for this? It’s all about…relationships (you know, people getting along together), not technology.

Aberdeen’s Chris Selland has put out a new report on sales effectiveness that shows that collaboration is key. A good point to note is:

“The report also found that it is often lesser-known technologies — such as social networking, incentive management, ‘point of close’ tools and marketing process enablers — which have the greatest impact on sales effectiveness.”

Addtionally, today Denis Pombriant answers the question “What’s Next In CRM?” and again…surprise!…it’s not about technology.

“Although a lot of progress has been made in CRM, the technology suite
is still largely a transaction-oriented one. As I have said before, current CRM does a great job of helping management but not necessarily a very good job of building the customer relationship.”

Bingo.

(BTW…bonus points to the first person who knows what cult classic the phrase “What About Our Relationship?!?!!” came from…)