What do busted computers laptops and broken guitars have in common? The answer…broken customer feedback and busted support channels.
When Jeff Jarvis complained about his Dell computer in the infamous “Dell Hell” blog posts and when Dave Carroll chose songwriting over suing United Airlines with his wildly viral “United Breaks Guitars”, they gave the companies ample warning that they planned to talk. They were subsequently ignored and then proceeded to unleash a storm of negative sentiment that significantly impacted both companies’ reputations and bottom lines.
In Dave Carroll’s case, he spent nine months contacting United Airlines, including talking to flight attendants and gate agents the very day the issue occurred. His last exchange with the company, before he created the now-famous video that potentially dropped United’s stock price by 10%, was with a Mrs. Irlweg who said “United would not be taking any responsibility for what had happened and that that would be the last email on the matter.”
In Jeff Jarvis’ case, he was so dissatisfied with the performance of his laptop and with the service, or lack thereof, that came with it, that he unleashed a storm of negative sentiment through his Dell Hell series of posts on his blog.
When I’ve chatted with folks about these examples, the conversation often revolves around dealing with the storm. Responding is an important topic, but, in my view, the big opportunity is to prevent the storm in the first place. Why wait? You probably already know what the busted computers or broken guitars are in your organization. Your biggest detractors are already talking to you. They are using every available channel, which sadly, are often silo’d from one another.
Your job as a S.P.I.C.Y. leader within your organization is to get ahead of the busted computers and broken guitars and break down the silos. In Part 1, let’s spend time on how to connect the customer feedback silos in a way that’s meaningful to your organization and your customers. Parts 2 and 3, coming soon, will be about what to do with the feedback once you’ve got it.
Part 1: Connecting Customer Feedback
- Audit your existing “voice of customer” channels: How many are there? What are they capturing? Who’s monitoring them and what’s being done about the feedback? Are they survey-based only or are there data analytics and social web monitoring included as well?
- Map your customers’ end-to-end experience: When I was a S.P.I.C.Y. leader myself at Intuit, I was part of a cross-functional team that mapped the experience from the moment a small business owner lost the ability to get business done to the moment she got back to business. We also identified the key “moments of truth” in that experience – which things really mattered to the customer not just which ones mattered to us – by using our own data first and then interviewing customer to validate the moments or adjust them based on the interviews.
- Overlay the moments of truth with the feedback channel audit: Where are the gaps? Where do the channels overlap? What feedback has come through to show how you’re doing against the key moments of truth for the customer?
- Establish a baseline of customer experience and priorities to improve: Based on the audit, mapping and overlay work, you’ll likely have a clear picture for where you’re doing well on customer experience and where you need to improve. From the baseline, in alignment with your company’s objectives, you’ll want to create measurable priorities to improve the experience.
- Establish a regular process for reporting: You’ll have a couple of levels of reporting. You’ll have ground level, emerging issues reporting that is much more real-time. You’ll also want a report-out that should go as high as you can in your organization where hard, longer-term decisions can be made. In some cases, decisions can be made quickly that have a big impact on customer experience, like Southwest Airlines going back to black & white text on their online boarding passes based on customer feedback about the cost of printing in full color. In other cases, the decisions are harder and more complex.
You’re probably asking…now that I’ve done the heavy lifting of connecting the feedback, what next? Part 2 in the series will cover how to measure the value of customer feedback and Part 3 will cover closing the loop on the feedback, even in heavily regulated industries.
I’d love hear more from all of you. How are you connecting customer feedback channels today? What’s working? What’s not?
Great post, Kira. This was a big point of discussion at Community 2.0, with Nestle's recent kerfuffle being front and center. Nestle's poor response was only a small part of the problem; I'd argue that their failure to be prepared for the customer anger and issues raised on their FB page was a much bigger one.
Comment by steve_alter — May 7, 2010 @ 11:53 am
Steve,
Yep – it's really easy to point at what someone should do in crisis, but the harder work is avoiding it in the first place. I am real sure that more than a few folks at Nestle knew what their issues were, but, often, those folks and the ones who “own” social are silo'd even from each other.
Comment by Kira Wampler — May 7, 2010 @ 12:28 pm
Kira,
Excellent post, especially the outline of your implementation model. It definitely rings true and I see it in practice myself. There are a lot of challenges to be overcome, and I'm looking forward to parts 2 & 3 to see how you tackle them. One of the challenges I see is that knowing about something is just the first step -taking appropriate action, and taking action quickly can be a challenge. I see this in two flavors:
First, it seems that if something is “known” and there is already some internal activity going on, it can be easy for something to be dismissed or put in a “monitor mode”. Why duplicate effort? Just wait for the meeting on the subject next week, or until a related project completes next month, next quarter. What's missing is the question that asks whether or not the present actions are enough and will happen fast enough based on the telemetry data from the various listening posts.
The second challenge is early warning. Social media is great at helping spot the first few puffs of smoke before the flames really start. But, ironically, in many management systems, these early alerts lack the statistical weight of all the other competiting and sometimes off-setting data. As a result, many management systems lead to behavior to wait and see rather than invest for change now. The investment for change being seen as a known cost against some less defined future benefit or cost which may or may not happen.
Comment by Mark — May 19, 2010 @ 6:46 am
Thanks Mark – really appreciate your comment. I think your point re: let's keep pushing off the issue is so spot on. In part 2, I (will) talk about how to value customer feedback in a way that resonates with finance, operations and business leaders so you can move the org along more quickly.
For early warning, we actually had a weekly emerging issues meeting across several channels that had direct customer contact, including folks from my team. That way, we could raise up early warning signals to the right team. And, in a low-tech fashion, we also had a social emergency email list that we used when something was really on fire, and folks on that included key people in legal, PR, finance, etc who were already responsible for being on call in case we needed urgent help.
Comment by Kira Wampler — May 19, 2010 @ 11:56 pm