Return on Intention

As more companies become familiar with the existence of social media and the success stories given at just about every conference held, it has become very common to hear “I would use Facebook / Twitter / Whatever, but I just never know what to say.” This problem was the cause for so many people posting “I like pickles” or “I had eggs for breakfast” on Twitter in the early days as they tried to figure out what to say. Often this lack of knowing what to post is a symptom of something bigger than understanding a new medium. Often its based on the organization not really understanding their uniqueness or their brand promise and how it fits into its customers lives. To put it another way, they don’t really understand where they fit into their market. If you make English Muffins, a product that hasn’t really changed in decades, what could you possibly have to post on Facebook? Plenty.

First – a little back story. I have this terrible habit of working late into the night… or morning… depending on how you look at it. After working past midnight a few times, getting up in the morning becomes a bit harder, so you sleep an extra hour to make up for the one that you worked through the night before. Now that you get up an hour later, you don’t get tired and go to bed when you used to and you have to wait an extra hour before you can go to sleep. Follow this path for a while and pretty soon you work until 3 or 4 in the morning and get up at 10:00.  This has been my life off and on for the past few years. This caused me to not eat breakfast anymore because after getting showered, dressed and ready for the day it was nearly lunch time. On days when I had meetings in the mornings and had to get up at a normal time I still couldn’t eat breakfast because it would make me feel ill, so I hadn’t had breakfast in years.

Recently I have been working to switch my waking hours back to a schedule that more closely resembles normal human times. Now, after being awake for a few hours, its breakfast time, not lunch time. This has presented me with the joy of breakfast food shopping and tasting, which has probably been way more fun than it really should have been. So now, after about a month of testing I have decided that English Muffins are better than bagels. Why? The nooks and crannies.

The crumb of an English Muffin are airy and full of little pockets that hold flavor. Every bite is a bit different as some of the little pockets are filled with butter, and others with raspberry jam. A bagel with cream cheese pretty much tastes the same in each bite, but an English Muffin is just a bit different. Bagels don’t have nooks and crannies. The crumb of a bagel is pretty smooth, which makes it more like most other breads. You can make interesting sandwiches with a bagel, but you can make all the same sandwiches with any other bread. The biggest difference between the English Muffin and just about all other breads you would eat for breakfast is the pocket filled crumb. This key differentiator not only makes the English Muffin a unique looking morning snack, but it also makes the taste and experience of the Muffin a unique one with the butter or jam that fills up the pockets. The point is that the English Muffin is not just about the English Muffin, but is part of my morning experience that works in concert with other factors to bring me satisfaction. When brands can stand back and see how their products and services fit into the bigger picture of their customers lives they can see how their unique features stretch beyond themselves and influence the user. With this data, the brand can start to see a bigger picture, and thats when the ideas for what kind of conversation to have with their market start to perk up like a pot of fresh coffee.

“Thank you for calling MegaCorp. All operators are busy assisting other callers. Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line. Do not hang up. Hanging up will increase your wait time as all call are answered in the order they are received. We are experiencing a high call volume right now, so please be patient.”

As of 1999, the above is the internationally recognized sign to cancel all your appointments for the next few hours and get a cup of coffee. Nothing makes you feel like a number more than being told to wait your turn in line. This is doubly so if you are calling a governmental agency. To the government, you are a number. In the US they give it to you at birth.

Customer service is becoming one of the most important parts of an organizations success. As the name implies, it is where you service your customer. If you can’t shine there then what else is there?

In this new world, you have to be on your game. There is too much competition and conversation going on not to. 20 years ago if a front line employee of yours fell asleep in your customer’s home, only a handful of people will hear about it. It would become a running joke over turkey and stuffing every year when the extended family gets together to drink—I mean, celebrate the holidays. Your company’s embarrassing botch will only be know by about 20 people. Fast forward to now, and if the same thing happens, it gets posted on YouTube and is watched by millions of people. How’s that for brand building?

A companies success lays in its reputation. Its part of the brand. If you perform well, then all goes well. If you fail and can’t recover, the word spreads. This isn’t new. This is word of mouth. The difference is now not only can you share your experiences with friends and family, you can also share it with 1,000,000 of your closest strangers.

Building a brand is done by ensuring that the customer’s expectations and experience match. If the customer expects good service and gets it, they remember you, prefer you and will do business with you again. If the customer expects bad services and gets it, at least they will remember who you are. The world as they know it is still intact. If your customers expect good service and your technician falls asleep on the couch you get a shocked customer. Shocked customers love to share their stories. The best stories in the world start with “You’re not going to believe this!” Those stories spread fast.

In the always-on world we now live in, everyone is sharing their story with the world. A world full of potential customers. This makes getting customer service right paramount. So why do most companies fail at it?

There is a problem with the system. The internet has not only made communicating with friends and expanding networks of people simple and easy, it has made us all impatient and time-starved. The world moves faster now that it did before but most customer service plans have not. If you had a problem 15 years ago, you would call the customer service line and wait to talk to someone. If you have a problem today, you still have to call the customer service line and wait. You also have the added complexity of navigating through a convoluted telephone system just to get in line to talk to a human being. In today’s super-charged world, this process takes too long.

We don’t want to sit on hold for any amount of time. Sitting on hold slows down our day. What do we do while we wait on hold? We complain to someone else. Someone who will hear us now. We’ll tweet it, or we’ll blog about it. We will make a video and post it online. By the time its our turn to talk to a customer service representative 10,000 people have heard of our problem. Then when we explain our problem to the customer service representative who schedules an appointment for a technician to come out and look at the problem. They tell us that the service tech will be there at some time within a 4 hour window. Now half of tomorrow is gone as we wait for the technician to show up. That’s decades in internet time. So we tweet about it again. We write another blog post. Now another few thousand people hear our story, and more often than not, one of them knows how to solve the problem.

GoldCorp opened its business up to the outside world and became one of the world’s largest and most successful gold mining operations. Linux was completed by a group of mostly anonymous programmers just to make a better operating system.  Wikipedia has more data than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and it was created by a bunch of amateurs. In the new web, we can solve our own problems, and most often its faster than waiting on hold for a customer service rep. We can and we do. Then we wonder where the companies that are supposed to be there for us are. The companies we gave money to. And then we stop wondering. Then we forget about those companies.

We have become tired of waiting for everything to be run up the chain of command for approval. We have become tired of waiting for a response to be vetted by legal. We want to know where the smiling salesman we bought from went, the one that made us feel like a person. We wonder when we became a number. We wonder why we talk to robots when you call the customer service line, then we wonder if it would be faster to cancel our business with that company and solve the problem ourselves.

We stop calling customer service. We complain online, we get our problems solved online and slowly the company that used to provide our services becomes less important. Most often, the company doesn’t even know there is a problem because we stopped telling them. It’s not that we stopped talking about it, we just don’t do it the way they want us to. We do it the way we want to. The fast way. Online.

Fortunately, when the internet closes a door it opens a window.

The tools and services we all use online to live our lives are open to everyone, even the people in charge of customer service. After the Comcast fiasco with the sleeping technician, Comcast got the message. They found out how poor their customer service had become. They found out in a very public and embarrassing way, but they did find out, and then set out to fix the problem using the very tools that were used to point out the problem in the first place. If you have a problem with Comcast service or equipment, just post your problem on Twitter. Comcast will see that post and contact you. For the user, nothing has changed. They still get to complain about their service if it goes wrong, but now instead of calling the 800 number and waiting 16 internet years to talk to a person the company that is responsible for the problem will contact you. You get to keep on living your life away from the sterile hold music and constant reminders of how important your call is to the company.

If I need to call my cell phone company, and there is a long wait, they don’t tell me to get in line. They tell me to leave my name and they will call me back. It may not seem like much, but being asked for your name is a lot better than assigning you a number. The rules of customer service are changing. It’s getting better for the consumer, and will be better for the companies that decide to hear the challenge, as they start to engage with their customers. Those that don’t will get left behind. It’s all free market. Evolve to add value by the customer’s definition and live. Resist the change, and go the way of the dodo. Unfortunately, we won’t wait around for the answer. We have other things to do.

This post is part of the Cluetrainplus10 Project. This project is to celebrate the book The Cluetrain Manifesto, written by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger and what has happened in the 10 years sence it was published.  The Cluetrain Manifesto is 95 theses published to direct orginations into the new world the internet is creating. I choose “85. When we have questions we turn to each other for answers. If you didn’t have such a tight rein on “your people” maybe they’d be among the people we’d turn to.”

Twitter is a very powerful, and as of late, popular tool for the online crowd. Twitter is really nothing more that a one-to-many message service that restricts posts to 140 characters, and has been called everything from the new billboard to micro-blogging.  Twitter is used a little differently by everyone; some use it as it was originally indented, to say what you are you doing now, while others use it to post their witty comments and still others to spread links. According to Joseph Jaffe, Twitter is a giant Ponzi Scheme (there’s a Twucker born every minute). If you ask me though, it’s the single greatest thing to happen to the blogosphere so far.

Blogging has been growing at a very steep upward rate for a few years now and there are millions of bloggers out on the web creating content. Some of it doesn’t interest me at all, like photos and a daily account of the family cat (unless its a lol cat), but there are many others out there creating content that is exactly what I am interested in. The problem is that there are so many blogs, it can be hard to find all the good stuff. Additionally, I don’t want to clog up my rss reader with a bunch of blogs that only have good content for me every blue moon while the rest of the time I have to read enough of the authors post in the stream just to find out I don’t care and move on. I prefer podcasting and audio formats over text formats, its easier for me to listen than to read to absorb content, so I want my rss reader only full of the stuff I really want. I still read a lot of posts from a lot of places, but I don’t subscribe to the feed until I see repeated good stories (for me).

Twitter isn’t much different. You find people who post about all sorts of things, some I’m interested in and some I’m not. I am much more likely to follow a person on twitter that I am to subscribe to their blog feed because on twitter each message can only be 140 characters. Its much faster for me to digest the information and decide if this person is adding value. It seems like less of a commitment, I suppose.

What I really like about twitter is that most of the posts I like, and therefor most of the people follow, tend to share what they find online that they find interesting. Most often its a blog post. Twitter is allowing me to find longer form content online that I normally wouldn’t, and becuase I follow people on Tiwtter that are interested in the same things I am, most of the time the posts they provide are interesting to me. It’s almost like the interent is prequalifing content just for me.

I also enjoy the witty remarks that people post to twitter, or quotes that my twitter “friends” have heard from other people, both funny and silly, but over all, twitter is a community based content finder and filter, and the best thing to happen to the blogsophere so far.

What do you use twitter for?

By the way, if your interested, you can follow me here: @reidgivens