social customer Archives - Page 4 of 12

November 9, 2005

Heavens To Marketroid!

Steve Hall asks, what if there was a “Customer Conversations Department?” Hall:

“I’d…suggest the creation of an entirely new discipline headed by a director of customer/consumer conversation/dialog. The sole responsibility if this person/department would be to converse and listen to the consumers with no interest in selling product.

This is not achieved though doing surveys or hosting focus groups or through agency account planning efforts. It is achieved by talking to customers/consumers as one would if they were discussing a product at a cookout or dinner party. This is not stuff that can be rolled up neatly into a spreadsheet of a PowerPoint presentation. This is roll-the-sleeves-up, get-dirty-with-the-customer conversation.”

I.love.it. But it shouldn’t be a “department.” It may need to start that way, but ultimately every person within an organization who comes in contact with a customer:

Marketing
Sales
Customer Support
Product Marketing
Delivery
Executives
etc.

needs to feel this way. Why? Because, customers don’t interact with a silo’d “department.” And every customer has the ability to talk about his or her experience with the company via these crazy, newfangled blog thingers…regardless of which department was involved in the interaction.

Tom Hespos runs with this idea. Hespos:

“I think we can agree that comparatively few companies have made any sort of investment in opening and continuing meaningful dialogue with their customers online. We’ve got the broadcast model to thank for that. As you know, when you’re holding a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. When folks are out there praising or panning a product or brand, corporations tend to look at the problem as a mass marketing problem. In reality, most of the panning can be dealt with effectively by empowering somebody to join the conversation, actually listen, and take the feedback to the company for incorporation. Most of the praise can be greatly amplified in the same way.”

and Doc pushes it further:

“This is a provocative proposition. What Tom’s talking about here is going way beyond the rogue Scoble, or even the hundreds (thousands?) inside companies like Microsoft and Sun. We’re talking here about changing marketing’s function (or a large part of it) from messaging to conversation.”

(Be sure to check out the spot-on comment from Mike Taht, which has a couple of great thoughts on what out-of-work marketers can put on their cardboard signs.)

This is the right direction. There are a few fundamental things that need to occur to keep this snowball rolling, however.

Per the comments from the others above, execs in organizations from the smallest to the largest need to get whupped upside the head with the clue mackerel, and understand what’s happening here.

Folks on the front lines need to get out of the “transactional” mindset, and start thinking about conversations, and relationships and communities.

Systems need to change. Existing (so-called) customer relationship management systems don’t get us there. Actually, I take that back. CRM systems could get us there, if the individuals using them started thinking about using the systems as tools to track persistent conversations over time (note: link is a PDF), as opposed to being tools that sales management uses to know how soon they need to warn Wall Street that they’re going to miss their quarter. (Don’t even get me started on the whole “living life one quarter at a time” mindset thing. Grrr.)

And, finally, from the “do-ocracy” side of things, we, as customers, need to be rationally vocal when we are treated poorly (or ignored). As customers, we need to continue to let our service providers know when they are screwing up, through all means available. They can’t listen if we don’t talk, and write, and start voting with our wallets when they blow it.

So, my question to you…what do we need to do next to keep this going?

Links, all in one tidy place:

Steve Hall: Brands Need ‘Consumer Conversation Department’
Tom Hespos: A Hypothetical “Conversation Department”
Doc Searls: Talking marketing

Related posts from The Social Customer Manifesto:

March 21, 2005: Customer Conversation Management
March 30, 2005: Holding Up Your End Of The Conversation
April 4, 2005: Persistent Conversations And Relationships

October 19, 2005

Who’s Listens To Blogs? Andreesen, Bradbury, Rhodes, Sifry, Wyman…

Alex Barnett pulls together a definitive Cluetrain / “markets are conversations” post.

Example one from Alex:

“The first of the three events this week is to do with splogs – spam via RSS feeds and blogs. I posted about my experience of the problem and called out:

“Question to the feed search engine folks…(David Sifry, Blake Rhodes, ~~Bill~~ Bob Wyman are you listening?)…how do we stop this? Can we? It can’t be good for your business if this kind of thing takes off, can it?”

Within 24 hours David, Blake and Bob each posted a comment on my blog, acknowledging the industry-wide issue and confirming their companies’ commitment to solving the problem.”

Ok, cool. But all the folks above are in the blog business, so maybe it’s not that surprising. Which leads to example 2…Alex wonders…what the heck does “Ning” do?

Alex: “I speculated on a couple of revenue models and wrote, tongue-in-cheek…’Good question…Marc Andreessen might but hasn’t share the biz-plan me yet. Are you there Marc?'”

A few hours later, what does he find? A comment from Andreesen.

“Alex — your description of what we are trying to do is very well said. It’s an experiment, but those are the goals.

We are going to see if we can generate enough revenue through a blend of advertising (like Google, Yahoo, etc.) and premium services to be able to support what we are doing, including the free developer accounts.”

Brilliant. The third? Alex notes a functional deficiency in FeedDemon, “The file can’t be exported (OPML, would be nice Nick?…anything!)” What does he find two days later in his comments from Nick Bradbury?

“Just wanted to let you know that I’ve added OPML export of the reports to the next build of FeedDemon – expect to see this in RC2.”

It’s so easy for a company to do this. Set up an RSS feed to listen. Listen to it. If a customer has a question or concern, take the few seconds required to answer it on their turf. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Scratch that. It’s not easy for a “company” to do this. It’s so easy for a person to do this. Companies (despite their legal existence as “entities”) really can’t do anything on their own. They don’t walk. They don’t talk. They don’t bathe. They can’t communicate.

People communicate. That’s where relationships happen. Between people.

(hat tip: Kevin Briody)

September 22, 2005

American Airlines, YACTW (Yet Another Clue-Train-Wreck)

Jake McKee has flown over 415,000 miles on American. Platinum status. Uber-loyal. Has flown them when other options were cheaper, in the belief that at some point in the future when he needed flexibility, they’d be able to provide it.

Nope, they hosed him. Here’s how (letter reprinted from http://www.communityguy.com ):

“My name is Jake McKee. I’m a highly loyal AA member (#80E04C2) since 11/18/98. I’ve acquired 415,000 miles. My AA number is one of the few numbers other than my wife’s birthday and my social security number that I actually know by heart. I typically spend anywhere from $10K-$30K USD/year with AA. I travel all over North America, and have used AA to fly to Europe a number of times this year.

I’ve encourage many to fly AA, and skipped cheaper tickets. With my status, I believed that if I had problems AA would treat me right.

After a call to American to redeem miles for a ticket, I’ve decided that my loyalty has been clearly misplaced. The cause is outlined below:

I booked an award ticket, and was told by the rep that I could pay the fees up to the day of the flight without fees. I called in to settle the fees and was told there was an extra $50 charge becausee I was under 21 days. After talking to a supervisor (who knew my status), I was told the fee was required, regardless of what the orginal sales agent told me. The supervisor said that knowing my status, I should know the policies. I said “so basically you’re punishing me for having flown a lot with you”, she said “If you’d like to think about it that way”.

She made $50 off of me, she effectively lost tens of thousands of dollars. United Airlines has assured me that my status would transfer.

This letter is an offer to save my business. I will be blogging this experience at communityguy.com

Jake McKee”

He’s also running a contest over there. Place your bets on when/if AA will get back to him…

September 20, 2005

Information Is Social

Outsell has just published their 2006 Information Industry Outlook report (free reg. req’d), which is chock-full of great findings on how individuals and enterprises are using information their day-to-day and business lives. One of the headlines that jumped out of the report: Information is Social and Peer-to-Peer. Outsell:

“Now, instead of looking ‘up’ to oracles, users are looking sideways – to peers and to social contexts on the Internet, where published information is instantly unveiled, vetted, praised, condemned, corrected, and altered through the ‘wisdom of the masses.'”

This subsection of the report goes on to note the following items as evidence:

The increasing reliance on colleagues and peers as a source of information
Blogs and other social publishing media are becoming a key resource for knowledge workers
The emergence of open models in scientific publishing
Instant verification (or refutation) of news and peer reaction to events
Credibility derives from scrutiny of peers
Youth are sharing and remixing information and will continue to do so (and adults do, too)
Information intermediaries are still relevant in order to relieve users from the information glut

The points above are from pp. 10-11 of the report, which runs about 30 pages.

August 23, 2005

Ten Things To Do While Waiting For Dell Tech Support

Crushing Jory for this one, big time.

10 Things to Do/Places to Visit while waiting for Dell Technical Support.

Brilliant. A few excerpts:

#2: “Get all of the unpleasantness over in one fell swoop is my philosophy. While you wait for Dell Customer Support, call up Sprint and try to negotiate out of the lifetime contract you inadvertently entered into when you reduced your minutes; return those obligatory calls to relatives.”

and

#7: “Have a Dell Customer Support party. Invite over others who are on hold. You don’t have to go through this alone!” (here ya go: the DellHell IRC channel – ed.)

By the way, Jory’s mom Joy just started a blog as well…The Joy Of Six.

August 22, 2005

From Transactions To Community

Have been road-testing this model over the past few months, most recently with the fine folks from Blue Marble Marketing, and would love your feedback as well.

The interactions between customers and vendors are in a state of flux, and, as best as I can tell, are moving up through the levels shown in the graphic to the right. These are as follows:

The Transaction stage: At this point, both customer and vendor are thinking of their interaction as a “one shot” deal. The vendor’s trying to sell something, the customer is going to buy something, and that’s it. Historical knowlege of the other party, as well as the potential for future interactions, is not even really part of the equation. At least in most “traditional” markets, most organizations are still mired at the “transactional” level. Push, push, push…the vendor creates a product, markets it, spins it, and tries to reap as much short-term profit as possible. It’s a “one size fits all” type of interaction, and if the customer doesn’t like it, he or she can go elsewhere. And customers will.

The challenge in going from “Transaction” to “Conversation”: You need to stop talking, and listen.

The Conversation stage: This is the first realization from the vendor’s perspective that, huh, whatta-ya-know, customers might have some opinions and beneficial input into the process of doing business. Everything from features (both pro and con) to terms to future direction of the organization are things on which the customer may have an opinion. The vendor starts to listen, and starts to create a dialogue, at least for some period of time. The conversation may take place around a particular transaction (i.e. the customer and vendor work together to collaboratively “discover” all the aspects of a particular transaction), or the two parties may be exchanging information and each go off on their own afterward.

The challenge in going from “Conversation” to “Relationship”: You need to stop thinking in terms of “making this quarter’s numbers” and start thinking about how you can contribute to the conversation over weeks, months, years.

The Relationship stage: Conversations are good, very good, in fact. However, managing them over time takes effort, again, on the part of both parties. First off, participation in a conversation over time requires commitment. Commitment to follow up and execute on agreements that have been made, commitment to continue to contribute to each others’ well-being, commitment to work shoulder-to-shoulder (as opposed to confrontationally across a contract) when challenges emerge (and they will). A big part of building relationships is committing to having a long-term memory, as well as a long-term future view. There are a few folks who are eidetic; the rest of us need to have processes and systems in place to augement our feeble crania. Everyone is different, and what works for one person may not work for another. But regardless of the mechanism that is used (be it a bazillion dollar software package or a set of 3×5 notecards), having some way of recalling past conversations and their associated commitments, and noting what future commitments are in place, are all required components.

The relationship level is where things start to get really, really interesting. Customers aid in designing products with a vendor. Vendors do things for a community without (necessarily) expecting an immediate quid pro quo in the form of a sale (but believe that doing the right thing now will make everyone better off down the line). Loyalty, customer satisfaction, and not incidentally profits, start to blossom.

The challenge in going from “Relationship” to “Community”: You need to give up control, and trust your customers.

The Community stage: Major tectonics come into play when moving from relationships to community. First and foremost, everything discussed up until now is primarily pair-wise, that is, it occurs between two parties (for this discussion, primarily between a particular customer and a particular vendor). However at the community level, the partitions between sections of the walled garden fall away, and everyone starts to connect with everyone else. For an organization trying to make a buck (pound, yen, yuan, etc.), its role changes markedly at this point. Hopefully, when exiting from the “transactional” view of the world, this evolution already took place, and the vendor organization realized that it cannot dictate the conversation. At the community stage, vendors need to realize that they need to step back even further, and in many cases may not be participating in a some conversations at all (but certainly better be listening to them).

(Another great view on the “community” level of this, from Lee LeFever.)

At the community stage, the role of the vendor changes to that of enabler, providing the venue where great things happen and solutions get created. Perhaps the vendor is providing infrastructure, or knowledge, or support, or expertise, but…whatever is being provided…it’s just a part of the whole picture. In many cases, the customers in a community will be aiding each other (think forums, think user groups, think collaborative development). The vendors that will excel at this stage of the game will be the ones with enough confidence to act as gracious hosts, providing the rich soil where the important ideas grow.

Note: A huge thank you to Doc, for this loamy conversation, from which this thinking has sprouted.

(And I’m afraid I’ve just sown an entire field of perennial gardening puns…)