Let Them Complain-And Then Share the Story!

I was attempting a tortuous twist on the misquoted and misattributed "qu'ils mangent de la brioche" for this post, and settled for "Let Them Complain." For years, I have remarked to friends and family, that we seem to increasingly inhabit, reward and cultivate a culture of whining, complaining, lawsuits and general dissatisfaction seeking remedy or simply voice. In my years as a customer consultant, strategist, sales person, etc., I have had numerous opportunities to take courses, get coaching, be "trained" in listening skills, overcoming objections, "getting to yes", ad infinitum/nauseum and have come to the conclusion that there are some people who simply will not be satisfied, no matter what. When I overlay this conclusion with my musings on the increasing ability that our customers have to instantly and globally voice their complaints, I've been suggesting social media and networking strategies and risk assessments as critical components of our customer conversation business practices. The plethora of social medial applications that are available at literally everyone's fingertips are being accessed almost as a virtual running commentary to everyday experience with products and solutions. [The Tweetdeck search that I created around "worst customer service" for my last blog post updates so often I insist virtual whirls of smoke curl from the borders of its column!] So I started thinking if some people are going to complain no matter how diligent our efforts at solving their issue are; no proactive our social media strategy; empowered our front-line customer service personnel; comprehensive our customer relationship net may be: WHY NOT JUST LET THEM COMPLAIN AND PUBLISH IT? What if, after exhausting our best efforts for mutual resolution, we detailed in our blogs, Tweets, Facebook "customer spotlights" the exact nature of our worst customer service complaint; the steps we took to resolve it AND the ultimate dissatisfactory end?

Negative Customer Reference Recruitment-Really

Many of us spend a lot of money, time, and energy recruiting customer references that are willing to participate in case studies, press releases, talk to prospects, or record interviews and testimonials on our behalf telling everybody how wonderful we are. We record this precious evidence any way we can; devise comprehensive ways of cataloging, searching for and representing this proof that we are what we say we are and deliver our solutions and services better than any body else. Our entire focus in the customer reference practice has been the careful cultivation of the positive reference while our customer support/service teams have been attempting to fill the pipeline with current customers that may be eligible for this consideration. What I am proposing is that we utilize the same infrastructure that is in place for identifying and promoting the positive experience reported by our customers to the occasional negative, argumentative, "nothing will make me happy but a full refund" client. Why am I suggesting this? Here are some high level reasons:

• It should be part of our on-going customer support assessment to collect information about our customers' negative as well as positive experience.
  
• We need to know where the gaps are in our service.
  
• It is interesting.
  
• It may provide much needed comic relief: Consumer complaint to Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines
  

In light of my continued urging that we consider participation in the broader social media and networking customer conversations that are happening about us and around us, considering proactively publishing a negative customer reference makes sense for some additional strategic reasons. The likelihood that a person who is a chronic complainer will publicly and more vehemently report their experience outside of our 1-800 Call Us environment seems to be gaining nuclear steam. If you have implemented even the "listen" pieces of my suggested social media strategies, you have begun to analyze the customer conversation about your brand, solutions, competitors and general business environment. Hopefully, the conversation is dominated by those suggesting that our products and solutions are considered by others and we have invited those individuals to share the same story again and again. What if we applied the same principles of watchfulness and intervention to the "Worst Customer Experience with Our Brand" TweetDeck Column? What if we invited @IHATEYOU to record the reasons why they were dissatisfied with us, tell their side of the story, and offered to publish it on our website? What if we retweeted them and AGREED that we had messed up. What if we told them that we didn't care if they said that they would never use us again, that we just wanted to be honest with our customers and prospective customers and share that we didn't always perform perfectly? Maybe the following things could happen:

• Best Case-They return as a customer because they are so shocked; or their deep psychological need to just vent has been satisfied.
  
• We truly practice the principles of transparency that the SMN world has been preaching.
  
• We avoid the ennui that we may inadvertently be introducing by publishing too many positive customer references.
  
• We demonstrate, through the voice of our customers, that we really do do anything that we say we will to try and resolve their issues.
  
• "Exposing" ourselves first drastically reduces the tabloid-like effect of our customer's self-filmed and self-published FLIP MINO diatribe against us.
  

Maybe the old 1940's political slog, "If you can't beat em; join em" applies here. My extremely scientific (J read Google) research into the reasons why people complain basically returned the following:

Complaining. Everyone complains, although clearly some people complain more than others. Even though complaining has negative connotations associated with it, there must be some benefit to complaining or people would not do it so often. Very little research within psychology has examined complaining. Robin M. Kowalski

So my bottom line for this post is:

• We don't understand why some customers will complain no matter what but they will
  
• Social media affords everybody the ability to complain much more "loudly", for longer, and to a "ginormous" audience
  
• Worst case, poking a little bit of public fun at ourselves can't hurt anything other than our pride……right?

Regards until next time,

Lisa

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• Jason Baer: The Customer Chasm. Are You Creating a Social Media Divide? (mpdailyfix.com)

Are we “listening” to or merely “hearing” our customers?

As frequently annoying as my English major history is to my co-workers and friends, it sometimes directs me to nuances in our communication and presentation that although possibly nit-picky to others, at minimum provide me with fodder for blog posts. As I was contemplating some fine-tuning of a social media and networking strategy and the implications of our corporate presence in the wild world of Twitter, it occurs to me that I have been suggesting that an option for many B2B first steps into the SMN world is to "hear" what their customers and others are saying, when I really mean we should be "listening" to them. As a common practice and in our customer relationship and support efforts, we use these words interchangeably when by any definition (you can check me) they really are quite different and depending upon which word we choose as the foundation of our strategy, may have very different ramifications for our success.

Briefly, (I won't bore you with etymology or origin), Merriam-Webster Online offers that the word "hearing" is suggestive of the process and biology by which our ears receive and transmit sound. "Listening" on the other hand, intimates a higher-level neural process of interpretation. If we have a loss of "hearing", we cannot process the stimuli of audio waves; if we lose the ability to "listen", in this context, I suggest that we are missing some key messages that our customers, prospects, and others are trying to transmit. As a direction for our participation in social media and networks and our customer conversation overall, this is a key difference.

I have been writing quite a bit about "listening" to the conversation of our customers, competitors, prospects, and general audience in the SMN world a way to assess perception of our solutions, begin to respond more interactively with various audiences, and fine-tune our messages and products. As B2B's are struggling with whether they should participate in the SMN universe or not and as they do, how they should measure the success of this effort, I think we often get trapped in the numbers game of "how many mentions" "how many followers" "how many leads" "how many prospects" "how many negative v. positives tweets" etc., etc., etc. While these are valuable metrics, I believe that they only provide a slice of the customer conversational dynamic. To me, the true appeal of interacting with audiences in ways other than through "Contact us" forms on websites, is that Twitter, Facebook, etc. afford us with a deeper level of information and idea exchange that is repeatable across many demographics and platforms. Instead of just counting the web hits on our new feature release page, we can assess the tone of the conversation about the release; compare different threads from tech-Twibes to Facebook Fan groups, to closed-user communities, to general user population groups. Conversation in this fashion provides us with a much richer picture of the reaction of our audience and we are using the SAME collateral, potentially, as we would in a static post on our website. I don't think this is as subtle of a distinction as it may appear and it is one of the many reasons I am so passionate about the potential of social media and networking in the B2B world; it imbues our professional conversations with a deeper and more compelling meaning and hopefully, casts the net of relationship possibilities wider.

In a broader sense, I think that the difference between "hearing" conversations about our solutions and "listening" to them can inform our customer support, sales, and roadmap strategies in much more intelligent fashion. I am not discounting the relevance of assessing the number of clients who want us to produce a webinar about the use of one feature v. another in our product sets, but I think that we may be much better informed, prepared, and relevant to their needs if we understand their various use models or proposed implementations of the feature in which they express interest. To me, this is the difference between "hearing" what they want and "listening" to it. Listening to the dialogue around us implies that we are prepared to engage in attentive and respectful conversations. We will ask intelligent questions. We will have some level of information about the other party's interests and demographic and we will reflect that in our responses and questions back to them. We will invite other resources and people to the conversation, as appropriate. We will NOT monopolize the conversation. And most importantly, we will not assume that people have any interest in what we are saying until they indicate so, so we will not continue to go on and on to the same people when it is clear that they are looking for any way to excuse themselves from the conversations, up to and including leaving the room and "blocking" us.

 

Does all of this sound like basic interpersonal etiquette? As I have suggested before, the principles for success in social media and networking conversations are founded in the manners with which most of us were schooled. Be nice; raise your hand; wait your turn; ask about the other person's interests and hobbies; say please and thank you, etc., etc., etc.

As always, my warmest regards,

 

 

Merriam-Webster Online

Hearing:

1 a: the process, function, or power of perceiving sound ; specifically
: the special sense by which noises and tones are received as stimuli
b:
earshot2 a: opportunity to be heard, to present one's side of a case, or to be generally known or appreciated
b (1): a listening to arguments
(2): a preliminary examination in criminal procedure
c: a session (as of a legislative committee) in which testimony is taken from witnesses3chiefly dialect
: a piece of news

Listening:

1
: to pay attention to sound <listen to music>
2
: to hear something with thoughtful attention : give consideration <listen to a plea>
3
: to be alert to catch an expected sound <listen for his step>

Twitter Time-Out or Mom, I’m really not Call/Email/IM Screening You

I was put in Twitter/Email/Blackberry/IM/ etc. time-out this weekend both due to some slow connectivity issues and preparation for a trip to Peru (more on that on another blog J). As I reentered the 24/7 world to which I am rabidly addicted this morning, I was musing about the evolution of technology over my lifespan and how it has molded my expectations of my ability to instantly connect with those around me or vice versa. I did not have to walk three miles in the snow to get to school, though I did walk, and I did not carry a cell phone with me in case something happened along the way. Our home phone did not even have an answering machine, much less voice mail. If I called one of my friends, and the phone was busy, I called back later. This was the norm. At the time, it did not seem unusual at all to have to wait for a response to a question, more pointedly, to have to wait to even ask the question. In a relatively short (I'm am NOT going to tell you my age but let's say that it's less than five and more than three decades), I have come to demand instant gratification in terms of my ability to communicate, respond, have questions answered and problems solved. In turn, I have set up an expectation, both professionally and personally, that I can be reached pretty much 24/7. I believe the first time I responded to a work email at 7:00 pm on a Friday, I place one virtual foot on the slippery slope toward disappointing my friends and colleagues when I do not/cannot answer their queries or assist them immediately at any time. Friends, this is the world in which we live today. I'm sure that soc-anthrop majors of the future and psychologists of today will dine out on this for years, but the internet and its accompanying social media and networking applications have led a majority of us to share the unwritten mutual agreement that we are ONLINE NOW! I am working on the ramifications of this in my personal/professional life, but in keeping with the theme of this blog, I'd like to share some thoughts for this reality in the B2B customer relationship world. Again, as companies are making the decision to join the Twitterverse (e al), host online customer service chats, and respond to comments on blogs, a majority of their assessment should be devoted to the infrastructure, messaging and preparation necessary for their participation to be effective and not backfire. The rapidity with which our failure to answer the expectations of our audience will be repeated is virtually unrecoverable in today's world. Whether we like it or not, when we join our customers in the social media and networking world, we have signed on to some terms in an implicit, universal, and new culture SLA:

The Terms:

1. We are here when you are: Joining social media and networking applications and groups seems to imply that we are all conversing at the same time. We need to carefully consider the phrasing in our profiles regarding our intent for participating and responding to Tweets, comments, and queries.
   
2. We will respond when you reach out to us: Our hours of customer service and turn-around time cannot be explicit enough. Fair or not, if we decide to participate in certain networks that are designed to facilitate 24/7 conversation and information exchange, we should be prepared to respond 24/7
   
3. We will update our content and our information regularly: the social media and networking world is defined by refreshed, updated, responsorial content, not by static .pdf files.
   
4. If your server/connection/pc is not down ours isn't/aren't either: Our network issues are NOT shared by our customers. If our email, server connection, etc. goes down, and we have chosen to participate in the SMN world, our back-up infrastructure must reflect the culture of that world.
   
5. We are always in the same time zone as you are: 24/7 participation and membership means across all time zones. If I am a global business, then I necessarily must build a support infrastructure that reflects this.
   
6. We are who we say we are: I am increasingly running across B2B social media and networking participants who seem to have jumped on the bandwagon rather haphazardly. The links and profiles point to third-party service providers or content host sites rather than any real place to exchange information, thoughts, questions, or customer service problems.
   

As a last thought, I'll share a story about my current attempt to locate an external hard drive that I ordered early this month. For the time being, I will keep the company name anonymous, as those of you who have been reading my Tweets, blog posts, etc., know how quickly I believe our current 24/7 virtual culture can negatively impact a company's reputation and I am reluctant to do that….yet. I became concerned about not receiving the new hard drive on Thursday of last week. I pulled up my internet receipt, only to find that the email message did not include any customer service contact information or instructions about what to do in case of a problem. I went to the company's website and found an 800 number. I called the 800 number and found no customer service options in their tree. After pressing "1" for support, I left a message in "Nicole's" voice mail. I called back and pressed "2" for sales, and got "Nicole's" voice mail. I sent an email to the alias on the receipt. I did not receive an email back. I filled out a form on the website via the "contact us" option. I received an auto-generated email saying that my information had been received. I DM'd the Twitter profile, and have received no response.

Without belaboring the point any longer, my "implied" SLA with this vendor is that since they are internet-order only, I should receive a response to at least one of these attempts to contact them. And yes, the charge for the new toy has been run……

 

As always, my best.

 

 

 

Why Do Psychic Fairs Advertise? And Your Customers Don’t Have ESP

I have always been somewhat bemused when I hear radio ads or see billboards for Psychic Fairs. My assumption is that at minimum, those who are exhibiting their "skills" don't need to be solicited to participate as they should "see" any upcoming events pertinent to their genre and those who are interested may also have an "inside" track on this type of event. In the B2B customer relationship world, on the other hand, communication and engagement with our prospects has always been a critical activity and the world of marketing is obviously predicated on finding the secret sauce that will entice participants to join our events, review our materials, and participate in discussions with us.

In my continued exploration and curiosity around the SMN explosion, however, I am seeing a clear demarcation between those companies who are taking a shotgun approach to communication, advertisement and marketing in a misguided attempt to not miss the "boat" and those companies who are assuming that their clients are active participants in communities and social media sites and they can engage strictly as observers or rely on virtual word-of-mouth that is the foundation of these mechanisms to drive customers and prospects to their more formal websites and material. As I have stressed in previous posts, I think these positions on either end of the conversational spectrum are both indicative of our failure to establish a strategy for SMN participation prior to implementing our interaction and our confusion and still trepidation about how we should play in this sandbox. In short, our customers still do not have ESP and it is an inherent responsibility to let them know that we are "out there." I might go so far as to suggest that it is hugely presumptuous and egotistical to adopt a "field of dreams" approach to our social media and networking implementation. Just as we have used traditional email campaigns, newsletters and other methods for updating clients and prospects about new features, websites, conferences, etc., we need to adopt a similar approach to evangelizing about our entry into the world of on-line communities and profiles. I think a customized social media assessment or audit is appropriate on a company by company basis, but here are a few starter steps that I might suggest once you have decided to enter the Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, social soup:

1. Add links to your new corporate profiles, Twitter addresses, community invitations to your website.
   
2. Include announcements of your presence and a statement of your objective in newsletters, email campaigns, blogs, etc.
   
3. Invite current clients to participate by launching a "membership drive".
   
4. Interview reference clients from any beta tests you have done with new support infrastructures or forums that have utilized social networking and publish the interviews.
   
5. Survey your clients about their participation in social networks and include their corporate Linkedin profile addresses, Twitter accounts, blog addresses, etc. in your CRM or SFA database.
   
6. Use some of the embedded communication functionality in the social network applications to evangelize and spread the word.
   
7. Ask your employees (particularly your sales, marketing and support personnel) to comb their contacts, connections, and friends for presence in social networks.
   
8. Rinse and repeat often as the growth statistics are exponential and profiles and accounts in the SMN world change far more often than email addresses.
   

I hope these "top of brain" initial thoughts are helpful; at minimum interesting.