“I was talking with a friend recently that works the customer service phones for the company she is with. She mentioned that her company expects her to solve any customer’s problem in three minutes or less. That sounds like a policy created by someone trying to save a few bucks while thousands of potential sales walk down the street to the nearest competitor.”
“Hi there! I’m Lane Becker, formerly of Adaptive Path and Measure Map, and now one of the co-founders of Satisfaction. We started Satisfaction to help companies and customers find better ways to interact. A good company’s customers have always been more than just something to “support,” but historically that’s been the main channel through which they’ve been able to communicate. Now, thanks to the internet, customers have a lot more to say, and smart companies know they need to listen — and even (gasp!) engage. We’re building Satisfaction because we see the possibilities for collaboration between companies and customers expanding like never before, to the benefit of both parties, and we want to create new tools to encourage and foster this activity.” (Thanks a.wholelottanothing.org!)
“Liberty Mutual dropped his home soon after he canceled his auto policy.”
“In case you’re wondering where I’ve been all day, the answer is a plane. Based on that statement, and the title of this post, the logical conclusion might be that I’ve been delayed. That conclusion, however, would be false. I actually arrived in Boston well ahead of schedule (by my standards, anyhow, as we were only a couple of minutes behind). My problem with United is instead its propensity to nickel and dime customers.”
“The purpose of this project is to document experiences — both good and bad — presented by the millions of EULAs (End User Licensing Agreements) as they are both designed and encountered, knowingly or otherwise. This project will only last 8 weeks or so as an academic endeavor, however, this site is designed with the hopes of fostering discussion, suggestion, exposition and implementation of EULAs (electronic and otherwise) in an effort to help define, describe and mediate the nature of agreements in the digital age.”
“Open the case of your mobile (cell) phone. Do you see a round white sticker, similar to that in the first photo below? This is a water damage sticker, which changes colour if moisture gets into this bit of the phone, and will be used to void your warranty if your phone stops working for any reason… As a designer, I would much prefer to look at the problem as ‘How can we improve the sealing of phones so that water ingress is no longer a major problem?’ than ‘How can we design something to cover our backs and shift all the blame onto the user for our design fault?’” (Thanks kottke.org!)
Guy Kawasaki interviews young people about technology. (Thanks Waxy!)
“Why do so many companies treat potential users so much better than existing users? Think about it. The brochure is a thing of beauty, while the user manual is a thing of boredom. The brochure gets the big budget while the manual gets the big index. What if we stopped making the docs we give away for free SO much nicer than the ones the user paid for? What if instead of seducing potential users to buy, we seduced existing users to learn?”
“When we started Sharpcast, for some unfathomable reason, I decided we needed a fax number… A couple of years and a few hundred dollars later, I finally recently had the good sense to cancel my still virgin eFax account. Little did I know what I was in for. eFax’s corporate motto seems to be inspired by the Eagle’s song, Hotel California: You can sign up any time you want, but you can never leave.”
“Even if you buy into all of this (and you should, the respected IT industry analyst firm Gartner thinks that all revenue generating lines of business should have a Web 2.0 architecture by 2008), extrapolating this into concrete techniques can be difficult. And so along the ways of my other popular lists of how to apply Web 2.0, here is a short list of ways to apply Web 2.0 to building fuller, richer customer relationships…”
“We email. We wiki. We blog. We IM. We convince ourselves that as long as we can write well, these are all good forms of communication. Perhaps in some ways even better, since we’re not distracted (blinded, biased, seduced) by the person’s physical presence. And we are wrong. According to the neuroscientists, anyway. I’ve just come back from a couple of days at the Conference on World Affairs, and attended a couple of different presentations where Dr. Thomas Lewis spoke. He has a particular interest in neurobiology (including the neurobiology of love), and what the brain does and does not want and need. One of the key points he made was that we are fooling ourselves into thinking that text is even half as effective as face-to-face at communicating a message.”
“Lest we leave you unable to eat food at all, we present this letter from John Pepper, the CEO of Boston’s Boloco restaurants (formerly ‘The Wrap’), which is the very model of how to handle a customer complaint, even when a company isn’t going to be able to address the specific complaint. It was sent to us by the pleased recipient.”
“…featuring news and information about everything that has anything to do with Customer Relationship Management.”
“It’s not that users are lying (usually), it’s just that they don’t know what they want when they don’t know what’s possible. Very few consumers in the early nineties asked for a handheld organizer that forced the user to learn a special alphabet, yet the Palm Pilot was a runaway success. And as the Slashdot example shows, very few hipsters in 2001 thought that an undersized, overpriced MP3 player was worth a second glance…”
“Happy customers are good, but profitable customers are much better. In this article, professor and Balanced Scorecard guru Robert S. Kaplan introduces BSC Customer Profitability Metrics.”
