I follow quite a few of the "new media guys" and they often come up with great insights that I can keep in my deep back pocket when looking at the enterprise2.0. Darren Herman is one of these guys, but I was a little surprised to see that one of his "habits" is to leave the phone on silent and only check it a few times a day. The interruptions are just too disruptive. If people really want to find him, and get in contact, they have to be "creative". I think Darren may be a maven in this respect (i.e. early social media adopter), but it does point to a central question: "if it's important, the request will find me".
It's a variation of Tim Ferriss's "let small bad things happen", because you don't need to manage every little thing. What is really happening here though is that Darren is screening his calls, and (from the outside) this has some embedded rules:
- if your caller ID announces you, I can choose to take call or not
- I have voice mail, so you can choose to leave a message or not
- I can choose to call in, and action as I wish.
- If important, there are other "hard to find" / "insider routes" to finding me.
eh hum. Small point. It's the little things that really drive customers mad. If you don't find a way, and have a system for ensuring that the small things don't get picked up on quickly, you are going to lose some of our customer good will.
Speaking of small things, Rob Patterson over on the FastForward blog points our attention to the corporate use of Twitter over at Zappos. They have a directory of all the employee Twitter-streams, that way employees can connect with each other, and connect with customers. It's leading edge for certain. But then GetSatisfaction use Summize to bring the twitter and social media back to the place where people are seeking to make contact with others around this complaint or praise. Zappos wants you to call them, you will develop some relationship with them, and ultimately buy more (their growth is stellar). At VoiceSage we think that how you handle the "exceptions" is a real opportunity to create customer satisfaction value.
And then I put out a Twitter saying what a great idea this corporate twitter directory was. And the CEO of Zappos "added a follow" , i.e. "we're listening".
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2 comments:
I dig the idea of a corporate Twitter directory. But even at a startup- Twitter is many times viewed as a social media toy rather than what it is.
One of the many things it is - a networking tool. For me it fits in with LinkedIn and Facebook as a way to keep in touch with people and find new people who I share common interests with.
Khyle, one of the fundamental differences, which you are pointing to, is that of "community trumps brand", i.e. we should enable customer service to be customer community? (just an idea!)
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