Church of the Customer: August 2005 archives
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August 18, 2005
Comcast in the dog house
Sing along with me now: "You're a Bitch Dog, and you've gone too far 'cause you know it don't matter anyway..."
No, it's not the Hall and Oates classic. It's the true story of a customer support center rep gone bad.
A Comcast customer representative was ticked off at Elgin, Illinois, customer LaChania Govan who kept having problems with her digital cable recording system (we all do). The rep changed LaChania's name on her account to "Bitch Dog," which showed up on her August bill.
Nice.
Incensed, the customer contacted the media. Now the story has vomited all over Comcast's recent efforts to repair its tattered customer-service reputation. Features in the Chicago Tribune, the NY Times and others are kindling to ignite the blogosphere; IceRocket currently lists 109 blog posts about the story.
In the bigger picture, this illustrates today's word-of-mouth reality. Stories are reported in the MSM, and the blogosphere accelerates the velocity by which bad news spreads. Company missteps are outed for the world to view in the blink of an eye. Preparation for crisis communications in this wired world has never been more important.
So far, it doesn't appear Comcast was very prepared. Its response: offer LaChania two months of free service (she declined) and an apologetic phone call from the VP of Customer Care. How unremarkable.
When the misguided actions of a few employees cause waves of bad word of mouth and damage the credibility of a big brand, the brand needs to muster its collective marketing creativity and unleash a make-amends response that counteracts the negative buzz, such as:
* Publicly and simply acknowledge the mistake. Perhaps a full-page ad in the Trib, or on the front page of the Comcast website. The company should simply say, "Our company made a terrible mistake toward a customer, and we are embarrassed and sorry." Remorse: What a novel concept!
* Convening a committee of unhappy customers to review the customer service procedures of Comcast, and inviting LaChania to chair the committee.
* Sending the president of Comcast Cable, Stephen Burke, to personally visit LaChania in person, armed with a gift that the company knows would be symbolically important to her.
Any of these three options (there could be dozens more) are symbolic, something our culture craves. Although it would make every corporate lawyer in the world reach for their Xanax, to make a display of contrition would be remarkable.
[Tip of the hat to Andy Sernovitz on the story. Photo courtesy of the Chicago Tribune.]
August 17, 2005
Understanding your volunteer sales force
If you are in charge of a customer reference program, here's a conference just for you.
The Customer Reference Forum is Oct. 24-25 in Boston. It focuses on helping technology firms cultivate and manage their "customer sales force." (Disclosure: I'll be keynoting at the event.)
The first event earlier this year sold out, and 83% of attendees said they would recommend the event to others. With that, the organizers aren't waiting until next year to hold a second event.
There's an early-bird discount so grab a seat now before it fills up : )
When your opinion doesn't matter
Here's an example of how not to defend your cheeky marketing campaign:
Artistic Tile, an upscale New Jersey-based tile company, gets in the face of not one but two women marketers who ding the company's ad campaign of half-dressed models and sexual puns. Sex to sell tiles to women? Makes perfect sense.
In an email exchange posted on Andrea Learned's blog, Artistic Tile's marketing VP takes issue with Andrea's critical blog post:
I understand that blogs are meant to be opinions and not journalism, but still it would have been thoughtful of you to get both sides of your story. The whole write-it-first-and-ask-questions-later approach does not in my opinion server your readers well.
Of course, Artistic Tile didn't have to launch a campaign of half-naked people selling tile if it didn't want people to talk about it. Asking a blogger to get "both sides of the story" before publishing is a rather naive assumption. Every marketer must realize and accept that blogs are the jetstream of opinions.
The full text of the email responses from the tile marketing VP to Andrea and Carole Fuller, the director of strategic marketing at Smith College, indicates that Artistic Tile spent a lot of money on that campaign by employing expensive copywriters and photographers.
The thing is, customers don't care.
Memo for the CMO
George Silverman pens a noteworthy "disturbing memo to marketers" by posing some good questions:
* What if your customers knew more about your product(s) — or, at least, the most important things about your product — than you do?
* What if customers determined the marketing, the messages, the communications, what is said about your products?
* What if your customers — not your salespeople — actually sold the product?
* What if a few cranky customers could kill your product by badmouthing it?
These realities are already true.
The question isn't "what if?"
It's "now what?"
August 15, 2005
A sneak peek at "The Big Moo"
Seth Godin wants to change the world. Again.
Building on the success of his best-selling book Purple Cow, Seth has corraled 32 writers (myself included) to create a follow-up book called The Big Moo. With essays from each of the contributing writers (like Tom Peters, Guy Kawasaki, and Mark Cuban), the book's big mission is to help organizations create a culture that consistently delivers remarkable innovations.
The "Group of 33," as Seth calls them, volunteered their essays; Seth plans to sell a million copies before the end of the year and to donate all proceeds to three worthy charities.
The book comes out in October, but how about a sneak peek? Buy galleys here for $2 and send them to change agents you know. The galleys come in batches of 50.
You can pre-order the hardcover version of the book here.
Moo!
August 10, 2005
The best of?
A gaggle of our podcasts have been remixed into a 12-minute segment by DJ Aa over at 800-CEO-READ. DJ Aa loves whimsical lounge music, so his remix makes me feel very Sammy.
August 09, 2005
Wanted: Passion. Inquire within.
My post about Tea Gschwendner's "passion wanted" sign spurred several comments and ideas among a handful of blog readers.
Lisa Haneberg wonders if HR departments are prepared to hire for passion. "Are most interviewers able to ask questions that assess attitude that would pass muster?" she asks. Good point. It's one thing for an interviewer to blithely ask candidates about their passion in general, but it's an entirely different sniff test that asks candidates to demonstrate their passion for the company's products or belief system.
Glenn points out that CRM is "much tougher" without passionate employees in place to generate positive ROI for that expensive software investment.
The Student Leaders blog jumps in with additional advice: "Do people look at you in your position and recognize someone who is passionate about their work (so much so, that it almost looks like play)?" The several times I've visited Zingerman's Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the work-as-play motif was strong. And effective.
The Genuine Idea blog says hiring for passion weaves back to hiring for shared values.
Mark Askey, a 15-year retail veteran, summed up the quest for finding passionate employees by saying, "What sort of message do you send to your potential applicants? Are you trying to find a brand champion to help drive your business to the next level?"
You may remember this November post about Container Store and how it finds passionate employees: from its database of existing customers.
In the big picture, passion is the fuel behind word of mouth.
August 07, 2005
Unlocking the Dan Brown code
Australia's The Age looks behind the marketing curtain of The Da Vinci Code as Time Warner applied that book's marketing code to bestselling book The Historian.
One surprise here: The Da Vinci Code was launched with a $500,000 television campaign. But it was backed by a massive napsterizing tactic:
Dan Brown's fourth novel was launched on March 18, 2003, backed by a $500,000 television campaign, unheard of in the book world. This built on several months of advance hype - an unprecedented 10,000 cheaply printed copies of the novel had been given to American booksellers by the end of 2002. Many of them met Dan Brown at dinners organised by TimeWarner, and Brown called hundreds of others to thank them for ordering his book.
Publishers Weekly estimated that the campaign cost Doubleday close to $US1 million ($A1.31 million), but within a week the book was No. 1 with a bullet. Although it took a year for the sales to build in Britain and Australia, where there was no special promotion, the momentum of America's mania for the book carried all before it.
My guess is that the $500,000 television ad buy was a safety valve/hedge tactic. After all, Time Warner sent 10,000 (10,000!) advance copies. The word of mouth alone on that certainly had to be very big, indeed.
The article also illustrates one of the book industry's glaring problems:
Film director Alan Parker, accustomed to Hollywood's marketing muscle, was openly aghast when he promoted his first novel in 2003. "It's rather shocking to see how they actually publish books, from a marketing point of view, which is in the dark ages," he said. "They kind of print the book, then they cross their fingers that people like yourself might write about it, and if you don't, it just stays on the shelf, but there's no budget for marketing."
Sad, but true.
August 05, 2005
More on the marketing world is flat
"For almost every writer, the number of sales they lose because people never hear of their book is far larger than the sales they'd lose because people can get it for free online," Doctorow says. "The biggest threat we face isn't piracy, it's obscurity."
-- Author Cory Doctorow, quoted in USA Today
Take the words "writer" and "book" and substitute them with your job and associated product.
August 04, 2005
The value of napsterizing your knowledge
Want a big-company example about the value of napsterizing (meaning, widely sharing) one's knowledge? A really big company example?
Walmart, number one on the Fortune 500.
Although the reference from Computerworld magazine is from 2002, it's just as valuable today.
Early on, Wal-Mart saw the value of sharing that data with suppliers, and it eventually moved that information online on its Retail Link Web site. Opening its sales and inventory databases to suppliers is what made Wal-Mart the powerhouse it is today, says Rena Granofsky, a senior partner at J.C. Williams Group Ltd., a Toronto-based retail consulting firm.
While its competition guarded sales information, Wal-Mart approached its suppliers as if they were partners, not adversaries, says Granofsky. By implementing a collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment (CPFR) program, Wal-Mart began a just-in-time inventory program that reduced carrying costs for both the retailer and its suppliers.
Considering Walmart's well-known ruthlessness on cutting prices to the absolute minimum, some might contend with the description of Walmart treating its suppliers as partners rather than adversaries.
However, I vividly recall the admiration, even joy, of a colleague who had just downloaded a fat spreadsheet of data from Walmart's extranet that allowed her to modify her company's supply-chain contribution to Walmart in about 30 minutes. Other retail outlets took days or weeks to provide her with data, which often arrived in barely legible faxes or in reams of paper reports.
It was eye-opening efficiency.
Sharing copious levels of data, knowledge or business processes with channel partners, suppliers or customers -- quickly -- can be value-building, not value-destructive.
