Customers are talking: @comcastcares - not just conversation

I recently spent some time with Frank Eliason, known to the Twitter community as @comcastcares. Frank has become a minor internet celebrity in the last year because of the work he and his team do resolving problems for unhappy Comcast customers who tweet or blog their frustration with Comcast.

His work is fascinating to me because Comcast is a gigantic, engineering-driven company and one which you wouldn't have expected to embrace a "customers are talking" approach.

I think there are two reasons Frank and his team stand out. One is novelty. There aren't a lot of companies who have prominent profiles on Twitter (Dell and Zappos are two others). That won't last, of course, as more and more companies jump on board.

The second reason is more sustainable. The term "conversation" is everywhere in social media. It's all about the conversation. Not for users of products and services. When they talk about products and services and companies on Twitter, it's not just to have a conversation. In many cases, it is to highlight a problem.

The Comcastcares team doesn't just engage in conversation. They solve problems. Here's an example (for readability, these tweets are ordered from earliest to latest--the opposite of how you would read them on Twitter):













The biggest reason for me Frank and his team succeed is that they are customer-service and tech-support people, not PR people. Frank in particular has years of call-center experience, and therefore is able to skillfully engage with unhappy customers, listen, and, best of all, get them a quick resolution. In other words, your company can say it's serious about social media, but actually using it to help people is better than the best messaging in the world.

Did you see from the example above that this problem was reported in the hour before the Super Bowl and was resolved before kickoff?

Stop reacting, and start listening, to customer online feedback

I generally like this post from Matt Rhodes, my fellow Futurelabber ("How to react if somebody writes about your brand online"), but I have a bone to pick with the premise.

One of the biggest mistakes marketers are making in social media now is focusing on reacting. They are taking lessons learned from political campaigns and applying them to their relationships to the public. It's a misfit. Political campaigns are adversarial. If your relationship with the public is that way, you have bigger problems than what people say about you on Twitter.

Reacting as strategy is a last, desperate attempt to deploy the marketer's favorite tool, "messaging," into a connected marketplace. As Doc Searls wrote, "There is no market for your messages."

Rather than a futile tit-for-tat, your post to my counterpost competition to establish the preeminence of a company's message in the networked marketplace, how about listening to what customers are saying, and taking it to heart? Thinking about it, perhaps? And, if warranted, a respectful, measured contribution to the dialogue? It can be done. Ask Comcast, and Dell, for starters.

It's time for the "Numerati" to step back

I've been reading the book "Einstein's Mistakes" by Hans Ohanian and though it's been a lot different from my expectations (I was looking for mistake stories and through 150 pages haven't found many) it has proved useful in spurring some thoughts.

One such thought has been the consequences of the growth of science and logical thinking. The first part of "Einstein's Mistakes" describes the roles of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell and others in setting the stage for Einstein's relativity theories. What this brief physics history reinforced to me was the gradual rise to preeminence of logic and mathematics in the processes of human thought--at the expense of philosophy, sociology, anthropology.

Interestingly, even in these legendary clear thinkers there was the all-too-human urge to self-protect and rationalize. Notable was Galileo's effort, according to Ohanian, to fudge the numbers so that his calculations would match what he knew to be correct about the heavens.

Next on my list to read (around "War and Peace") is Stephen Baker's "The Numerati." I find I come to this book with loads of prejudgments. From the press and the jacket copy, the book celebrates the numerization of our thinking. Which I believe is mostly bad news.

This kind of number-worship has brought us financial risk mitigation that paradoxically increased risk, created AAA-rated bonds which were actually of junk status, and any number of other examples of solid financial and numerical logic that under examination simply failed the common-sense test. In other words, a hedge fund that studied human nature might have made a lot of money these last few years.

To me, "The Numerati" is behind the times. We've seen the apotheosis of the logical/mathematical revolution, and it ain't pretty.

It's time to put numbers into their context, and begin to shift more investment to understanding people, how they think, feel and relate to one another. This is where the money will be in the future, and this is what society needs now.

As Dave Snowden writes, "It's not that social computing has created some completely new form of human interaction, what it has done is to enable conversations across barriers and boundaries. We can now be a global tribe (or rather tribes), if we can make the changes that the technology permits."

Tags:
reading list, logic, thinking, social media

Is there redeeming value in online ranting?

I don't visit the online reader forums of my local paper, The Patriot-News, that often. But when I do, I'm always shocked, sometimes appalled, and occasionally depressed by the venom and anger that reside there.

Recently, a flood of comments accompanied the news that Anita Smith, the CEO of local insurer Capital Blue Cross for the last several years, and the star of its TV ad campaign, had resigned. A brief sample of the comments that readers posted (you can read the entire list at the link above):

I've always heard she's a complete and total witch who would step on her own mother's back to get what she wants!

I'm not sure how she got the job in the first place with a Bachelor's Degree from St. Joe's??????????
I really couldn't believe it when I discovered that fact! UNREAL

Thank goodness we won't be subjected to those awful commercials of hers anymore!! I had to mute the TV and look away every time I saw her smug mug dancing around on my TV. Seeing them in HD made it even more difficult to suppress the gag reflex.

It's about time she got canned. She should have never had the job in the first place.... and sure they could have picked a worse picture of her. There are some out there..really bad ones.. from before she spent lots of premium payers dollars getting herself a complete makeover.

Now, if only Mary Sammons would follow suit, maybe Rite Aid could get out of the toilet.

It's difficult to find redeeming value in this name-calling, envy, schadenfreude and misogyny. My first reaction was to ask, "Can't we be a bit more civilized? Can't the editors do something to elevate the dialogue?" But as I've thought more about it, I think we should leave the forums just as they are.

While forum entries are frequently presumptions, value judgments or downright fabrications, even the most objectionable ones are essentially true.

What I mean is this: they are true to the teller. The writer of a forum item believes what he or she is writing, believes it enough to sit down at a computer and type it and hit "enter." Given that, of what use is censorship? Removing the item or preventing its telling in the first place will not change the opinion of those who would write about it in the first place. There are themes, moreover, within the comments, that are important to appreciate: that there is great anger at people who lead our companies, that many don't accept women in executive roles, that people are hurting in general.

In other words, the forum entries show us the world as it is, as opposed to the world as we would wish it to be.

And, even among the vitriol and hate displayed in the forum, legitimate questions were raised, such as: how much did Capital Blue Cross spend in advertising, and how much should a non-profit insurer spend for image advertising? Those questions spawned off some interesting reporting in the Patriot-News.

These posts must have been painful for Anita Smith and her family and friends, if they paid any attention to them (hopefully they ignored them). But that's the price of prominence: you will be treated unfairly by people who don't know you at all. When people feel threatened, uncertain, or at risk (like now), they will lash out at those who caused (or who've sidestepped) their difficulties.

And I'd rather know what people are really thinking than be able to pretend that we as a society have grown past those thoughts, even if they're unpleasant.

(Disclosure: this blog is available as part of the Patriot-News' pennlive.com)

Tags:
social media, newspapers, Patriot-News

Corporate Change #4 - don't leave engaging with the outside to marketing/PR

In the prior post in this series, I talked about galvanizing the will to change through "bringing the outside in"--learning what customers, the press, influencers--really anyone--thinks about the company, its products, its marketplace, industry, etc.

To which a reasonable person might ask: "Isn't that my marketing department's job?" Especially with newer tools like blogs, wikis, Twitter, etc., marketing is taking the lead in engaging with the "groundswell."


While marketing has a significant role to play, they cannot own this function, any more than finance can own any decision that has to do with dollars and cents--it's too big, too comprehensive and too important to be limited to one group. Here are several reasons why:


Marketing is obsessed with brands & messages. Brands and messages are relentlessly positive--who buys a negative message? But learning comes from both positive and negative stories. There are threats as well as opportunities. Marketing is asked to convey messages, not to understand the world in all its messiness and complexity.

PR is asked to get positive stories out there, and to counter negative perceptions--not to learn or to inform the company. True dialogue involves listening--even when the conversation is negative or you don't agree with it--and trying to find lessons in that. Perception is reality, and PR tries to change perception--what we're talking about here is, by contrast, understanding reality.


The view of both is too limited. Different parts of the organization have different things to learn from the outside. Operations needs to learn new ways of working. Product management needs to understand how customers actually use products. HR needs to know how the workforce is evolving. Groupthink is also less likely when a diverse group of people is examining the world--with more likelihood that sound actions, and commitment to achieve them, will result.

Comcast's experiment with Twitter-based customer service (see example here of "Groundswell" co-author Charlene Li Tweeting for help and Comcast responding) works because the Comcast guy is trying to solve a customer problem, not deliver a message. If Charlene ends up feeling better about Comcast, it is a side effect, not the intent, of the action. The tech is also in a position to learn deeply about this customer situation and, I'm certain, to disseminate the learning to colleagues.

Imagine this fictional Twitter dialogue if Charlene had to engage with marketing instead of with a real tech (I've reversed it for readability. In real Twitter, the newest message is on top):

charleneli: @comcastmktg My connection keeps going in and out, happens every few months. Comcast Cust service has no idea why. Any way to escalate?

comcastmktg: @charleneli That's hard to believe. Comcast has the highest network reliability in the industry.

charleneli: @comcastmktg Yeah, fine. Can you help me with my question?

comcastmktg @charleneli Of course. One more thing. Did you know we have twice as many HD channels as DirecTV?

charleneli: @comcastmktg What? Who are you? Can you get me to someone who can help me?

comcastmktg @charleneli Right away. Please email help@comcast.com and you'll get a response within 24-48 hours. Have you heard about our community service initiatives?

charleneli: @comcastmktg Aaargh!

Coming next: what is the role of consultants (written by an actual consultant!) in bringing the outside in?

Prior posts in this series:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 5
Reading list:
Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
John Kotter, "A Sense of Urgency"
Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff, "Groundswell"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication, social media

Time to start listening to front-line employees

I have a colleague who runs a small outsourced contact center in the Pacific Northwest. I told him of my project to find and use stories from call centers to get more useful customer input. He said, "It's a great idea, but nobody listens to the reps."

Then, as I wrote about last week, a bank that is renowned as a great place to work told me that an idea to have tellers share via internal blogs customer interactions they found interesting was a non-starter: "We just put into place a policy to limit the access our employees have to the internet."

Well, it's time to start listening to the reps. It's time to let tellers blog about what they experience.

We generally accept that having happy employees at the front lines can help revenues, because happy employees convey good feelings to the customers they meet, making those customers feel better about who they're buying from, etc.

But it's now clear that in addition to courtesy and helpfulness, front-line employees also know more about what customers want, what they like and don't like, how they feel about the company, than anyone else. Because "the reps" hear it, every day, direct and unfiltered.

Back in the day, the only way an executive could access this insight would be to visit stores and talk to employees and customers him/herself. This still happens. But with cheap, ubiquitous data-sharing technology like blogs, RSS, wikis, social sites, etc., there's nothing standing in the way of systematically gathering and immersing oneself in detailed, rich information about customer interactions--even if you're the CEO.

And don't you think getting the chance to communicate, and being listened to, might increase the job satisfation of the front-liners?

An executive at a large US insurer told me that at their quarterly management meetings they listen to selected recordings of customer calls. "It's always a shock when you hear what customers say directly. We're so far removed from the customer."

Precisely.

Related post:
Enterprise use of 2.0 collides with restrictive access policies

Tags:
narrative, social media, blogging, learning, customer relationships, customer service, knowledge, knowledge management

There's a web2.0 hammer for lots of business nails

I was talking to a prospect today and they mentioned that their recent expansion had created an entire new level of people involved in their business. In other words, their staff now was communicating with end-clients through an array of agents and contractors, which had not been the case as much in the past. This raised the concern with them that they would not hear stories, both good and bad, from the front lines, and that they would struggle to communicate out to those end-clients.

After they finished speaking, I offhandedly said, "Have you thought of starting a social network where your clients, agents and contractors could all contribute?" Their kind of business has some strong unifying factors and a social network, to me, was a natural step to aid in the kind of communication they wanted.

They grabbed right onto the idea. It brought to mind Josh Bernoff's ("Groundswell") recent statement that few will make a business out of providing web2.0 tools to consumers, but many companies will thrive if they can create tools for use inside businesses.

And in today's business world, there are opportunities to use these tools to greatly improve information flow, collaboration and idea generation. Here are some thoughts:

wikis...for group collaboration
social networks...for communicating with customers/partners
blogs and RSS...for communicating and listening to the broader industry or world at large
social bookmarking...for sharing interesting ideas
microblogging...to create a feeling of a virtual workspace

There are countless other possible examples. Andrew McAfee has an interesting take, where he assigns tools based on the strength of people's ties. He also usefully points out that these tools work best when structures are allowed to emerge from the interaction of the participants, rather than being imposed by some authority.

(Picture by gerard79 via stock.xchng)

Related post:
Dell's web2.0 efforts pay off

Tags:
social media, information technology, web2.0, collaboration, communication,

Dell's web2.0 efforts pay off

Dell has taken a beating in the marketplace (both the commercial marketplace and the reputation marketplace) over the past few years. When founder Michael Dell took the reins again, you had to wonder whether his presence back in the CEO chair would really mean something, or would Dell slip into permanent stall mode like so many PC makers of the past (remember Gateway?).

So it's notable that Dell has distinguished itself among consumer electronics companies for embracing the capabilities of web 2.0 to engage with customers and influencers. According to the excellent new book "Groundswell," by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Dell used a PR crisis created by a blogger to jump-start its participation in social media, by 2006 was monitoring blog posts on the company, proactively seeking out problems and responding to posts, if necessary reaching out to users with technical support.

That effort has expanded to include sensing problems by monitoring Twitter (as well as using Twitter to communicate with end-users and others).

Today's Wall Street Journal points out that Dell has mastered the art of energizing the "groundswell" to build publicity for its products:

Dell Inc. hit a viral-PR home run last week when photos of a not-yet-released computer -- a candy-red miniature laptop -- swept across the Internet, creating excitement in advance of the release.

The buzz wasn't an accident: It was the payoff from a year-long effort by Dell to engage more directly with bloggers and others who write about the company online....

Engaging with blogs isn't just a defensive move. It has also changed the way the company promotes its products. Chief Executive Michael Dell brought the buzz-generating candy-red computer to The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference with the goal of showing it off to some of the bloggers in attendance.

A writer from Gizmodo, a popular gadget blog, saw the new computer and snapped a few pictures, which he posted on the Internet. The company then posted some official pictures on its own blog, and the story took on a life of its own. Dell's blog post says Gizmodo "caught" Michael Dell with the new computer.

I own a Dell computer, a beige minitower from the old days. It's a nice, boring computer. Dell's efforts in web 2.0, however, are the opposite of boring.


Related posts:
Is your marketing department confused about web 2.0? ("Groundswell")
Twitter and "Every Minute Accounted For"
Companies stall because they don't listen to customers

Tags:
social media, information technology, web2.0, marketing, blogging, communication, Wall Street Journal