The Social Customer Manifesto

Would The Last Customer Service Person Out Of Round Rock Please Turn Off The Lights?

As threatened, Dell has shut down their non-technical Customer Service Forums. The little locks on all the threads really punctuates the message, don't you think?

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All About DELL - The Social Customer Manifesto Podcast 7JUL2005

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Welcome iTunes subscribers! Today's conversation topics include thoughts on Dell's current customer service and support woes, news on the shuttering of a portion of Dell's online customer community, and (unrelated to Dell) some upcoming conferences where I hope we can get together in person.

Dell "support" stories

The original Jeff Jarvis post: Dell Hell (more here, here, here, here, here, etc.)
Steve Rubel's post (with the now-infamous "A-lister" comment)
Technorati tracking
Blogpulse tracking
Blog Business Summit is running a Dell ClueWatch
Forbes: Dell Slashing Customer Service [Costs]
Jory puts Dell on the CSL

Motherboard Chronicles (brilliant writing, in 7 parts...highly recommended)

Dell to terminate their Community Forums tomorrow, July 8

Dell Customer Support Forum (link likely to be inactive after 8JUL2005)

SocialCustomer: I may have missed this in another thread, but has Dell given a reason *why* they are shuttering the non-technical customer service boards?

rickmktg: No reason was stated. One can conclude that Dell continues it's business focus combined with reducing its expenses. The moderators were expenses. The support and help they gave wasn't measured, and therefore to the big corporation has no value. And with the India support willing to take the calls real cheap and recommend formatting for every solution, all is well in the Dell corporate world...

Why is Dell killing the forums, after being open for years?

Let's go straight to Dell and ask, shall we?

Welcome to Dell Chat. Please wait for an available agent. You will be notified when your chat is accepted by an agent.
The session has been accepted.
{Pooja 12:29:21 PM} Thank you for contacting Dell Customer Care chat. My name is Pooja, how may I assist you today?
{CFC 12:29:58 PM} Hi. I noticed that it appears the Dell Customer Service forums are being retired tomorrow. I was wondering why?
{Pooja 12:30:46 PM} Please give me a moment to review your question.
{Pooja 12:32:54 PM} Christopher, as of now there is no information in this regard.
{CFC 12:33:18 PM} Any idea of who within Dell might have the answer?
{Pooja 12:33:27 PM} May I know from where did you get this information?
{CFC 12:33:53 PM} Sure. Let me find the URL.
{Pooja 12:34:10 PM} All right Christopher.
{CFC 12:34:21 PM} link
{CFC 12:34:38 PM} "The Customer Service boards on the Dell Community Forum will be retiring at 3:30pm this Friday, July 8th. Customer Service FAQs will still be available to help answer your questions. If you need further assistance, you may contact our customer service team via Chat or e-mail for any non-technical issue you may have. Thank you."
{Pooja 12:36:08 PM} Christopher, I did go through the URL you provided me. Please allow me 4-5 minutes so that I can provide you with further information in this regard.
{CFC 12:36:39 PM} Thank you. I'll wait.
{Pooja 12:41:02 PM} Thank you for your time.
{Pooja 12:41:55 PM} Christopher, we are closing the Customer Service boards on the Dell Community Forum for the time being as there certain updates which needs to be taken care of.
{CFC 12:42:31 PM} I see. When are they expected to be available again?
{Pooja 12:42:41 PM} Once the board starts the function again their would be a notification on the web site.
{CFC 12:42:59 PM} Do you have a list of the updates that are being made?
{Pooja 12:43:25 PM} No Christopher.
{CFC 12:43:38 PM} Ok. Thank you for your help.
{Pooja 12:43:40 PM} Meanwhile, you may contact our customer service team via Chat or e-mail for any non-technical issue you may have.
{Pooja 12:43:45 PM} You are welcome.

In Other News: Upcoming Conferences

AlwaysOn (July 19-21, Palo Alto CA)
BlogHer (July 30, Santa Clara CA)
GO! (Sept. 18-20, Leesburg VA)

Blood and Turnips

Chuck Salter has decided to end his relationship with Ameritrade. He informs them of this decision. What do they do? Do they try to make things right? Do they try to learn from the experience? Negative.

Instead, they decide to levy a "termination fee," against him, virtually ensuring that he'll never want to do business with them again.

When a customer finally makes up his or her mind to leave, especially from a situation where there is some degree of history between the parties, is it ever a snap decision? Possibly, but more likely there's been a series of incremental dissatisfactions that have lead up to the final decsion. Ameritrade should using this opportunity to examine the failure in the relationship, and learn from it, and try to keep the line of communication open. But no, instead they're trying to extract that final transaction in a desperate attempt to maximize short-term profit.

(hat tip: businesspundit)

Discussing Haystack

Chris Selland takes a look at Haystack, and has an initial reaction:

"For some, clearly this is an idea that makes sense. The type of engaged customer...and forward-thinking executive...should find the idea hugely appealing."

He also asks a couple of great questions about Haystack, regarding "who's going to pay?" and "what if the customer doesn't want to be engaged in this process?"

Valid points, all, which we've tried to address. The conversation is happening here. C'mon over...

Mmmm...Dogfood. Introducing "Haystack."

(Please note: Haystack links in this post have been updated since the original posting, in order to point to currently correct sites.)

If you look over to the right, you see the Social Customer Manifesto. It's all about putting the customer in charge. REALLY putting the customer in charge. So, we've built something that lets customers take a significant step, and allows them to explicitly define and state the types of relationships they want with their service providers. Most significantly, this gives a customer the power to navigate profiles of individuals in an organization and choose with whom they want to work, as well the ability to be matched with individuals within the selling organization based on similarity of their backgrounds and interests.

We're calling it "Haystack."

What's been broken with so-called "Customer Relationship Management" systems so far is that, well, they don't really focus that much on the customer, do they? Under the rubric of "CRM," there have been three primary classes of systems: sales force automation, customer service and call center automation, and marketing automation. All of these look at the world from the seller's point of view. And all of them focus on how the vendor can crank more customers through a particular process in a given unit of time. They don't necessarily help to truly build relationships between individuals. In fact, they are more likely to commodify it.

There has been a considerable amount of research done in this area, and there in an increasing body of data that suggests that building this kind of "enterprise social network" has measurable benefit for both customers and vendors alike. Perhaps the cornerstone of recent work in this area was done by Lichtenthal and Tellefsen, and is called "Toward a Theory of Buyer-Seller Similarity."

"These findings suggest that internal similarity [perceptions, attitudes, and values] can increase a business buyer’s willingness to trust a salesperson and follow the salesperson’s guidance, and therefore, increase the industrial salesperson’s effectiveness. In contrast, the literature also indicates that, under most circumstances, observable similarity [physical attributes and behavior] will exert a negligible influence on a business buyer’s perceptions or a salesperson’s effectiveness. Thus, the key finding is that it is more important for buyers and sellers to 'think alike' than 'look alike'."

(n.b. The Lichtenthal and Tellefsen paper has an outstanding reference list that significantly confirms their findings.)

In a nutshell, here's how Haystack works:

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In addition to trying this out ourselves, we're starting to have some great conversations with folks like Collective Intelligence and Seedwiki about how this idea can grow.

Similarly to how Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are developing their book, Naked Conversations, out in the open, we are following a similar path with Haystack. We want customer feedback. We NEED customer feedback. (And we don't want people to think we suck.)

Why we're doing this? I think Peppers said it best here:

“Companies are faced with commoditized products. They're faced with well-informed consumers who are bidding them against the competitors and are less loyal. The only real defense is creating a relationship with customers.”

To date, there just haven't been tools like this aimed at the enterprise, that take this idea of creating real relationships between individuals and providing a means for customers to explicitly state their case, and determine with whom they want to do business at a real, interpersonal, non-synthetic level. So, we built one.

Naturally, a blog just for feedback about Haystack has been set up, and it is located here: Haystack Feedback Loop

[update] The Cerado Haystack Forum can be found here.

In particular, we'd love thoughts on:

• Business Feedback
  
• Technical Feedback
  
• And, of course, (eeek!) bugs

This is going to be fun. Acorns. Oaks.

Thinking About The Customer

Two great posts from Paul Greenberg at the PGreenblog, relating events during and after last week's CustomerThink conference in Santa Cruz.

Paul writes, eloquently, about "the need to create the collaborative environment and tools to give the customer control over his own experience with the company." (He also uses the word "betwixt" in the same post, which is reason enough to read it.) This really is the core, isn't it? The core of relationships, of blogging, of podcasting, of all the different changes that are afoot with respect to social media, all relate to the fact that "control" by a company over a customer's experience is an illusion. Ultimately, it's the customer who is going to make the decisions...and the company that gives that flexibility in control to the customer will have an advantage over the one that doesn't.

He also writes:

"Each person I meet has a story, a dream, an aspiration or twenty, a life, and just a complex sort of goodness and I don't know, something very attractive about them as human beings. Sometimes I as well as I'm sure every single person reading this and those not reading it, tend to box them in to whatever they 'do.' 'Paul is a CRM expert with a book,' for example. That's fine, but don't you actually want to know more about many of those people?"

So well put. The "positioning," the "brand," the "story," may pique initial interest. But it's the messy, complex depth and reality of the individuals involved that builds the relationship.

Lie La Lie

Asking only workman's wages
I come looking for a job
But I get no offers,
Just a come-on from the whores on Seventh Avenue
I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there
Lie la lie
Lie la lie lie lie la lie, lie la lie
- Simon and Garfunkel, The Boxer

Indulge me in this hypothetical situation. Someone you've never met before, with whom you have no prior relationship, comes up to you and says "Hi, I'm going to lie to you, and you should pay me for the privilege." What would you do? What would you say?

I'm betting you'd put your hand on your wallet (in order to make sure it's still there), and you'd tell them to take a hike.

That's the same kind of squicky feeling I get the more I hear about the new Seth Godin book, All Marketers Are Liars. The most troubling quote I've seen so far from the book:

"Tell a story that is memorable and remarkable and worth listening to. Seduce your customers, because that’s exactly what they want you to do. That requires ruthless selectivity and creative storytelling—in other words, lying."

I am continually stunned by this unbelievable disrespect for customers (who, by the way, Godin continues to refer to as consumers). Mindless automatons we must all be, interested only in entertainment, yearning for fanciful yarns that induce us to shell out cash. This assumes all customers are homogeneous with respect to a need and that a great "story" will be the trigger that induces them to buy. I just don't think this is the situation.

Although Godin seems to find "case studies" (term used loosely) and has retrofit them to fit his needs, the trend is going the other way. Away from homogeneity. Out into the long tail. The trend is toward uniqueness and connections and relationships. It's not about finding the best common self-deception that consumers (errg, I get the willies just typing that word) have, and trying to mimic it.

Good customers, thinking customers, create their own connections, and their own histories. Customers engaged in a community create their own stories, based on shared experiences.

Say you do follow the "liars" advice, and create a great story to catch a market. When that "story" changes to catch the next fad (as it must), what happens to the customer who bought into the original façade? What is your response? "Screw 'em, time to ship more product, time to come up with a new story and catch the next big thing." How will that customer feel when the façade is pulled back, when he or she gets to roll around to the back of the lot, and sees that the town was two-dimensional? How long will that relationship last?

I guess I'm not the only one who has a dissenting opinion on this, um, story. Publisher's Weekly had this to say:

"Readers will likely find the book's practical advice as rudderless as its ethical principles."

In the "liars" world, how do you measure success? The "liars" approach forces one to measure success from the seller's point of view. For focusing on the customer's actual results immediately breaks the illusion.

Others talking:

Tom Guarriello: "But, am I the only one who thinks that this "lying" business muddies more than it clarifies?"

Johnnie Moore: "An awful lot of storytelling is done after the event. Stories rationalise action."

Peter Caputa: "...the Marketing Messiah for scribbling oft-borrowed common sense marketing lessons down in story form."

Ed Brenegar: "So, what then is at the crux of this interaction? It is the relationship between two people. Or one person and a lot of individuals collectively. We are not telling stories in the aether. We are telling them in a specific social, physical, relational, personal context."

In Search Of Failure

"I often felt there might be more to be gained by studying business failures than business successes. In my business, we try to study where people go astray, and why things don't work...Albert Einstein said 'Invert, always invert, in mathematics and physics,' and it's a very good idea in business, too. Start out with failure, and then engineer its removal." - Warren Buffett

Just tripped across the above-quoted sentiment and it just resonated. Am (still) reading Reichheld's The Loyalty Effect, and have just embarked into what is, so far, the best chapter I've read in a business book in a long time. It's entitled "In Search Of Failure."

Why don't more folks take Buffett's approach, and examine failures (both business and personal) more aggressively? Two reasons (says Reichheld):

• Fear
• Incapacity

Examining failure is culturally taboo. It means that "something went wrong...and talking about it might make me look bad."

Get over it. Things happen. (Remember Windows 2.1?) Only by examining where things went wrong, can a business figure out what not to do the next time around.

This is of critical import with respect to customers.

• Did the customer defect? If you don't have a process in place to analyze that defection (an indictment of the organization's inability to meet the customer's needs), how can you prevent the next defection?
• Did the prospect choose a competitor over your organization? Talk to them, and find out why. That way, the next time a similar opportunity comes up, you won't make the same mistakes again.

We're currently working on a large win/loss analysis project for a client. And...surprise...better conversations are actually taking place with the losses than with the wins. Better insight. More candid conversations (hey, the deal's already lost...why beat around the bush?).

This approach is applicable not only to the win/loss process, but product development as well. We're currently working on some new things (watch this space!) and, far and away, we're learning more from the constructive, critical feedback we're getting from customers than from the attaboy's.

The bottom line? Listen to the customer. Embrace the failures when they happen. Learn from them. Make things better.

Ow, That's My Foot I Just Shot

Another great nugget from Fastlane from the post referenced here:

"My wife and I have had our share of issues with different dealerships. During our last purchase, in 2001, we were ready to close the deal on a Trailblazer. The salesman was great. However, before we could close we had to talk to the warranty salesperson. She would not take no for an answer. Good thing too. She convinced us that the vehicle was of such poor quality that it would require a $1000+ extended warranty. In fact, she was so convincing that we decided against the purchase and walked out of the dealership." (emphasis added)

Heh. Oops.

Internal, External Business Conversations

Hugh writes a great post about why business blogs can help organizations improve customer connections. (Updated to later illustrate that the concept is relevant in intra-organizational discussions as well.) The metaphor is that there is a membrane that surrounds every organization, and that membrane impedes real information flow and, with it, learning. The nugget:

Hugh: "The more porous your membrane ("x"), the easier it is for the internal conversation to inform the external conversation, and vice versa."

In other words, if there is alignment, or "equilibrium," between what's happening inside the organization and what's happening in the customer base, both sets of stakeholders will be better off. Customers will be getting what they want, and organizations will have happy customers. And, presumably, reasonable profits.

This triggered four thoughts:

• The theory above sounds a lot like this.
  
• For this to work, it can't just be "conversation," it has be the RIGHT conversation.
  
• There is a flow to this. Flow 1 is "out to in."
  
• There is a second flow to this. Flow 2 is "in to out."

So, first off, this sounds a lot like thermodynamics. I had to go look up the thermo stuff to put this post together, and then it made my head hurt (again, like it did mumblysomethingsomething years ago, the first time I saw it in school), so I closed that page quickly. But, I think a way to characterize this model is through paraphrasing that law into something like this:

"Insight spontaneously disperses from being localized to becoming spread out if it is not hindered."

Insight is good. Knowledge is good. Knowledge of real customer needs can help an organization do the right thing for the market. Knowledge of what a supplier is doing can help a customer make better decisions.

Another way of putting this...communication in this way changes the game from being zero-sum to being collaborative. Things tend toward zero-sum when information is withheld, and power and manipulation come into play. This changes that.

Moving onto the second point above, the idea of "conversation" needs some clarity. We've come to use the word "conversation" as shorthand for "folks who 'get it,' and want to work collaboratively, and want to share information, etc." However, all conversations are not the same. More importantly, all conversations are not equal.

For this model to work, some conversational structure may need to be in place. If customers are clamoring for something (let's say, a fad-ish feature in a product that may have long-term detrimental effects), the company can react in two ways. In the first case, the company can listen to those customers blindly, and deliver exactly what they want. In the second case, the company could try to explain some of the shortcomings of following that approach, and try to reach a middle ground where both parties agree, that results in a longer-term positive outcome for both sides.

Both cases reach equilibrium, but they are certainly not equal conversations.

Which brings us to points three and four above, the flows. There will be an increasingly strong "out-to-in" flow if a company is not meeting the current needs of its customers. If there is a flood of feedback going across that membrane from out-to-in, and nothing is being done about it, there is a sure bet that at some point in the future that organization will be in trouble. However, if that out-to-in flow is moderate and steady and is responded to with an equal in-to-out flow of information about how the company is responding, you can bet the company is marching ahead in step with where its customers are going.

The "in-to-out" flow, on the other hand, is a quite interesting one. Assuming the in-to-out flow is information-rich (and not a flood of the same-ol'-B.S.), the company is providing some insight and novel ideas to the marketplace. This is good. However, similar to the example above, if this flow gets too strong, the company may be outrunning its customers, and providing products or services that require change the market can't yet absorb or isn't ready for yet (see the Apple Newton for an example). In this case, the company should take a step back and perhaps slow down a notch and listen to what's coming back in from the outside.

Food for thought.

Others commenting on this:

Lee LeFever
BlogSpotting (Heather Green)
Fredrik Wackå
Scoble