citizen Evangelist

Seth Godin responded to an earlier post by Joel Spolsky on the Customer Service. Now… unbeknownst to either of these guys is the fact that they are elite members of a team known as my virtual mentors. They have consistently demonstrated over the years that they are worthy of such an esteemed position…

That said, I’m some dissappointed in their posts on this topic.

Note the wikipedia definition of Customer Service:

Customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase.

In each case, Seth & Joel talk about Customer Service as being isolated to after a purchase. They also reference this as a lowly role that requires a career path and a escalation proces.

See.. that begins to speak at the heart of the problem here. Customer service is servicing the customer. It is the core of what business is and always will be about. It is not a lowly position, it is the only responsibility of an organization. Service the customer and the customer will compensate.

Last fall, I came across a box which really opened my eyes on what’s going on: Noise, by Bart Kosko, shows how it is often difficult to differentiate the signal from the noise, and that often times, the signal in one situation is noise in another. And yes, I realize my characterization of this makes it sound much more esoteric than it is. Consider this: There are too many things that can go wrong and do go wrong before, during, and after the purchase by a customer. In order to reduce the “noise” from the customer, organizations place “resistors” and “transformers” between the customer and the brain in the company. The job of these circuits is to suppress bad signal / noise and to route boost good signals.

The problem: they are disconnected from the brain, and this latency creates its own noise.

I won’t spend a great deal of time droning on because this topic is more than worthy of a book (and has been, many times over). But, I’ll leave you with this one thought: a real life mentor of mine has always taught me that the most important way to structure the organization is this:

Customer
People dealing directly with the customer
People building products / services for the customer
Management of people/processes
Board of Directors

Shouldn’t we all attempt to structure ourselves around the customer?  Once again, Kathy Sierra  (another wonderful vitual mentor) asks the right question:  Who’s wagging who?

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Now, that’s an interesting concept: “customers possess actual rights.”  It’s a sad thing that a company with as many positive attributes as JetBlue would need to react to a congressional intervention in order to construct their own commitment to customers.  The Bill of Rights the company published was far less than I hoped it would be.  There is no heart in the words.. and only minimalistic commitments that any reasonable customer would expect.

A few examples:

Opening statement:  JetBlue Airways exists to provide superior service in every aspect of our customer’s air travel experience. In order to reaffirm this commitment, we set forth this Bill of Rights for our customers.  These Rights will always be subject to the highest level of safety and security for our customers and crewmembers. 

This sounds pretty good.  Superior Service is a good aspirational goal.  What I read after that found its standard at “expected” service.  A far cry from superior.

Cancellations: All customers whose flight is cancelled by JetBlue will, at the customer’s option, receive a full refund or reaccommodation on a future JetBlue flight at no additional charge or fare.

Uhh … perhaps I’m missing something, but I would natually assume that if you’re going to cancel my flight, you’ll either return my money to me or make sure I can get where I need to go.  Failure to do so would be… fraud??

Ground Delays:  For customers who experience a Ground Delay for more than 5 hours, JetBlue will take necessary action so that customers may deplane.

The next time I have to spend more than 5 hours on a plane on a tarmac is the last time I’ll ever fly your airline.  Why not be more accomodating and set the standard at half that time?  And don’t feed me any rhetoric about costs.  Your costs are largely variable and you’re bound to suffer more if you don’t fill your seats.  I can guarentee that my customer lifetime value combined with my willingness to speak negatively about your services will have a far more significant impact that deplaning.  Think about it.

Now.. its unfair of me not to point out a few of the positive stances.  JetBlue does make a commitmentto compensate for certain issues.

Involuntary denial of boarding = $1,000
Departure delay of 1 to 2 hours = $25 voucher
Departure delay of 2 to 4 hours = $50 voucher
Departure delay of 4 to 6 hours = 1 way ticket voucher
Departure delay of +6 = Round trip ticket voucher
Ground delay of 30 to 60 minutes at arrival = $25 voucher
Ground delay of 1 to 2 hours at arrival = $100 voucher
Ground delay of 2 to 3 hours at arrival = 1 way ticket voucher
Ground delay of +3 at arrival = Round trip ticket voucher
Ground delay of 3 to 4 hours = $100 voucher
Ground delay of +4 hours = customer’s round trip ticket value

The only real problem with this: money doesn’t show me that you appreciate my business.  It doesn’t communicate that I’m important.  It puts my mind in a place where money becomes a lever to be used to get things done.  You want to earn my trust?  Don’t delay.  If you do, be sincere and let me know what is going on.  Provide me with information on when I can expect get on my way.  But, most importantly, find something to comfort me during this time of anxiety.  I’m guessing here, but I don’t think I can use those cash vouchers at the restuarant there in the midway… or at the bar.  If I can’t find a way to relax, I’m going to carry that anxiety on to the plane with me and it will add to the negativity felt by all of the passengers.

C’mon guys.  I have higher expectations of you than this.

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I’ve worked on a little handout to help convey my convictions and illustrate the power of the Collaboration Revolution. I do owe credit to Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba for many of their thoughts over the years.  I’ve included a few of the points they made with some of my thoughts.

I also used photos from iStockphoto to pull off the appearance.  I’m certain that I probably need to attribute them in the document as well.

In any event, I hope that you find this useful.

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In Pyromarketing Greg Stielstra discusses the power metaphors have provided him in the process of trying to understand marketing and what actually takes place in the market. While reading this section, I couldn’t help but think about the number of metaphors I’ve heard used over the years.

The ones that I particularly had trouble relating to this time around were the one’s I’ve heard used for sales people for years. “Hunters & Farmers” In the rare case you haven’t heard this used before, a hunter is the type of sales person who goes out and hunts big game customers. The farmer on the other hand, deals with customers by getting them to graze on new products and services.

A hunter’s job is to kill. A sales person’s job is to close deals. This metaphor gets really close to communicating that a sales person’s job is to kill the customer. I’ve seen plenty of sales incentive plans that were creating an environment of hate…

A farmer’s job is to get the animals fat so they can be milked, sheared, or slaughtered. Again, this does not lend itself to ‘relationship’ oriented images.

What’s particularly interesting to me is the power of images and the words which invoke that imagery. In “What The Bleep Do We Know” we’re exposed to the power certain words have at a metaphysical level. When our sales cultures are oriented to thinking like and acting like hunters and farmers, we’re not creating an environment where customers endear themselves to the organization. We need to look at our customers as citizens within a capitalist community. It is our responsibility to do what it takes for them to elect to do business with us again. Thinking about and treating our customers like animals is just stupid.

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A good citizen is well read. Here’s what I’m consuming today:

Assumptions have a sell by date - Creating Passionate Users
We can’t expect to innovate new products, services, techniques, etc. without challenging our assumptions. Have some of your assumptions “gone off”? How frequently are you checking? In other words, do you have a plan in place for regularly sniffing the milk? I swear that half my battles at Sun were about questioning assumptions… many of which had been around long enough to be science fair projects.

[Citizen Evangelist: What I think is even more challenging are the hidden assumptions that permiate throughout the team. Ever been in one of those situations where it sounded like everyone was talking about the same thing but it was pretty obvious that no one was on the same page??]

Going mobile against T-Mobile - Church of the Customer
A year ago, “Dell Hell” was the rant of an angry Dell customer that eventually spread across the Web. We found out later that “Dell Hell” was a leading indicator of bigger problems at the computer manufacturer, which eventually dedicated $100 million to rebuilding its customer service operation.

[Citizen Evangelist: Its amazing what lenghts folks will go to in order to make you hear something when it is important to them. Silly T-Mobile. If their actions were not perceived as overtly abusive, they wouldn’t receive this type of abuse from their current and former customers.]

Good enough - Seth GodinSo, just about everything that can be improved, is being improved. If you define “improved” to mean more features, more buttons, more choices, more power, more cost.[Citizen Evangelist:Seth, I love your writing, but you gotta give me some context here. There are lots of moving parts here. Let’s take music for a moment. Its features are words, sounds, & rhythm. There are 26 letters in the alphabet. 8 notes in an octive, and really only a few variations in rhythm. Since music has been around throughout civilization, mathematically, we should have created all the music that have ever can be written has been written, right? After all, there are only so many different combinations of those elements. Features and functionality can be good enough as long as the exeperience that one has or associates with those tangibles are new. Even beer has only 4 primary ingredients: water, hops, barley (and specialty grains), and yeast.. but each ingrediant has its own variations. At the end of the day, its the experiences we associate with the beer that makes it special. Especially with the mainstream varieties offered in the US.]

Guy Kawasaki and Unstructured Data- The Post Money ValueI got asked the other day why our firm invested in Nstein. In reading Guy’s post, there was an excellent example of the great unwashed, unstructured data problem out there.What the general feeling about (for example) Dell is a fairly simple exercise. Look for burning laptops, screaming people on tech support hold, and employees crying about the evaporation of their stock. Dell sucks or other such comments get picked up and added to the “Houston, we’ve got a problem” pile when all the Dell corporate types dig through the data about what the world is saying with respect to Dell.

[Citizen Evangelist: I love how we all try to solve problems from the context that is most familiar. NStein defines the problem as a “Search” issue and that through technology we can improve our service to customers (and of course, profitability) by scouring the web with another search engine in order to find and understand unstructured data. Wouldn’t it just make more sense to treat customers better, provide them with an easy channel to provide feedback, and actually act upon that feedback? You don’t have to “search” for data if they are bringing it to you.]

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