nic-oliver.com

How do you respond to criticism? Are you aware how important an issue it is for businesses? Traditionally, businesses have been accustomed to communicating business to business and business to customer.  But the Social Media tools have opened up a third communication channel for businesses – customer to customer, which means that criticism is bound to be voiced. This presents companies and individuals with dynamite – it can be used positively or it can blow up in your face!

Let’s look at a recent of someone getting it badly wrong and the consequences. Many people have heard of and read copyblogger.com; it’s a site containing lots of helpful advice and articles about writing. I always read the posts there and particularly enjoy the ones written by it’s owner, Brian Clark. Recently, Brian developed a WordPress plug-in called Scribe SEO. It’s a monthly-fee based subscription service that analyses blog articles against keywords and offers advice for optimising those articles for SEO purposes. Because of Brian’s reputation and the authority of copyblogger.com, it’s bound to be successful.

A review of Scribe SEO appeared on Lis Sowerbutts’ site where Lis questioned the usefulness of the service and the price. Unfortunately, although the article concluded that the service is not a scam, the meta-description suggested otherwise. Brian Clark appeared on the site and was very heavy handed in the way he dealt with the situation, and with Lis, ultimately threatening to sue!

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the review, what is interesting is to read the comments that were posted after Brian’s intervention. It is clear that he has lost the support of a number of people, not because of his product, but because of his mis-handling of the situation. In addition, because of his links with some other high-profile bloggers through another on-line venture, some posters wanted to distance themselves from those bloggers, tarnishing them with guilt by association.

I’m not taking sides – I read Lis’s blog and I’m also a subscriber to Brian’s plug-in and the service it offers. I felt it only fair to try it so that I have an informed opinion.

But there’s an important lesson to be learned: no matter how fair or otherwise you feel criticism to be, you have to be so careful how you deal with it. Word travels very quickly on the internet amd it’s extremely difficult to take back words once they’ve been written. It also hardly ever pays to threaten to sue someone, which Brian threatened to do; presumably a knee-jerk reaction from his training as a lawyer

It will be very interesting to see how Brian Clark deals with this! One thing is clear – he will have to work very hard to rescue the situation.

Just for something completely different, and for a bit of fun, key customer service questions in a 90sec video – 9 key questions that should be at the core of any customer service and customer care strategy.

Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed it!

Many organisations fail to see the importance of becoming involved in social media. Some don’t see the relevance of it, others hide behind “we don’t have the resources” but whatever the reason for not becoming involved, it’s dangerous.

Traditionally, businesses focused on two communication channels: Business to business and business to customer. Social Media creates a powerful third channel: Customer to Customer.

Facebook, Twitter, and any number of blogs and online forums, allow customers to disclose and discuss their experiences with companies. And potential customers are relying more and more on testimonials and feedback from previous customers before buying. Ebay probably couldn’t exist without the buyer and seller feedback system.

Can companies afford to remain in ignorance about what customers and others are saying about them? Those dialogues about their organisation are happening – it’s a great source of information. The key questions are how to access that information and how to make use of it. In the context of customer service, a strategy needs to consider at least the following:

how to respond to negative feedback;
how to engage customers, and potential customers, in meaningful dialogue and who is responsible for those conversations;
how to respond to mobile platforms. It’s not just a matter of making their web site mobile friendly; customers with iphones can now go into a retail outlet, take a photo of a product, upload it and receive price comparison data and user feedback of product and of that retailer;

The problem appears to me to be that many social media consultants seem still to be at a stage where they are fascinated with the tools for their own sake whereas consideration of their application is in its infancy. Alan Stevens has written a useful article here about questions to use to try to establish the credibility of a social media consultant. The list provides a pragmatic approach to opening up a conversation, which then needs to dig deeper into the issues I’ve set out above. And I’ll bet that I’ve overlooked some key areas of a customer service/care strategy, so please, add your ideas!

The great news is that so many of the skills that the new breed of social media writers are discussing on-line and in their books are in fact – nothing new!

The core skills that they describe for businesses are the same that Jay Abraham wrote about in the 80s (marketing), and that many of us were teaching in the 70s and 80s (marketing, sales, customer care and customer service).

And the what they describe as the key people, and communication, skills, behaviours and attitudes are the same as Andrew Carnegie was writing about in the mid 1800s and bear a strong resemblance to what St Paul wrote here.

Which is all great news for those of us who went to school before electronic calculators! It means if we embraced the skills 20 or 30 years ago, we are at the cutting edge today!

Why?

Because the challenge for the on-line, social network world is not to define new skills that make ours redundant. Rather, it is how to harness the new technology so that those skills may shine. It is also to overturn the trend of the last 10 years, where so many people involved in marketing, sales and customer service have forgotten how to engage with people.

Many people have read the books of Seth Godin, Penny Power, Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan and others and have dismissed them as either being the emperor’s new clothes reincarnate or as “same old, same old”, but to do so is to miss the point. None of them is saying that the behaviours and skills that they describe are new.

What they are saying is that the combination of those skills and behaviours with the latest networking technology will create a powerful new paradigm from which individuals and organisations may profit.

How do you see this unfolding during the next decade?

Enjoy the remainder of 2009

Nic

I recently signed up for motor insurance on-line; everything was done on-line, no telephone calls for the company. I duly received a hard copy of the policy documents.

The company needed a document from my pervious insurer and asked me to get it sent to them. I asked the prevous insurere who said they’d sort it out.

I then spent three months working mostly abroad; when I returned to the UK, the company had cancelled my insurance as they had not received the document from my previous insurer. Going through the post, they had sent me two reminders before doing so.

This is a company that prides itself on doing business on-line, dealing directly with the customer and not using price comparison sites. Yet not once did they send me an e-mail to say that there was a problem! And yet they had sent me all of the policy details by e-mail before sending me the hard copy. Had they sent me an e-mail explaining that there was still a problem, I could have resolved the situation no matter which country I was in.

There are several issue here:

1. It shows a lack of appreciation of the realities of the new business world, where peopll are abroad much more than in the past.

2. It shows a lack of understanding of how to use technology to enhance customer service and customer care.

3. It shows an odd approach to technology; the customer uses it to contact the supplier but the supplier doesn’t use it to contact the customer. Whatever happened to 2 way communication?

4. To cancel someone’s car insurance and to not notify them by all possible means leaves the customer at risk of driving without insurance, without knowing about it. Dangerous and reckless by the supplier and leaves the customer exposed to prosecution.

It will be interesting to see how they respond to this, but based on past experience it will either be:’our policy is to only contact the customer through the post’ or ‘our process don’t allow us to contact the customer by e-mail’, which is essentially saying the same thing!

I believe that the companies that will thrive in the new decade will be those who use the technology available to them to enhance the customer’s experience. This will be a challenge to large organisations who are going to have to make some major changes if they are not to be caught out by leaner, hungrier competitors who understand how to use the technology!

When business first started using websites, the sites were very basic and content was king. Then as the technology evolved rapidly, sites became technology driven as developers tried to outdo each other and show their mastery of the technology. The end result was that whilst the sites may have looked great and were fulled to the brim with clever uses of the available technology, content was pushed into the background and navigating the sites was often non-intuitive and difficult.

Things are changing again – one of the key challenge now is for businesses to stop focusing on the technology and to focus onthe business benefits you can achieve with the technology.

This has to happen if businesses are to put the customer back into customer service. ( For the sake of this article I understand customer care to be a subset of customer service). At a macro level, organisations need to examine every point in their day-to-day operation where interaction takes place with the customer. They need to ask themselves whether their channels of communication and their processes are self-serving or customer focused. Hiding terms and conditions in the small print is unacceptable; transparency is the “new” buzzword.

I say “new” because I remember running customer service workshops in the mid-90s and saying the same thing! The current challenge is to make sure that our enthusiasm for the opportunities offered by social media technology doesn’t get in the way of our ability to deliver high standards of customer service.

At a micro level, staff need to understand that a heart motivated by self-interest views the world in terms of ‘give a little, take a lot’. They will be more focused on their job security, their pay, their next break rather than on the customer.

Senior management need to understand that that unless they treat their staff in the way they want staff to treat customers, high standards of customer service won’t happen! It’s a challenge but the organisations that get this right will be the ones that thrive in the next decade.

.. give you good customer service. Let me explain

I travel overseas a lot for work, and have found that there is good and bad service in most countries, except one; I have never encountered bad customer service in Japan.

What I have found is that whatever the country, if I smile and engage the other person in eye contact, it does make a difference, even in supposedly hostile places. Last year, Mathilda and I went into a large supermarket on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The last time she had been there, the area was mixed race. She didn’t know that since then, it had become an area where white people are not known to be welcome.

As soon as we got in there, we realised that we were the only white people in the supermarket. It was too late to turn around so we just walked confidently, heads up, smiling and saying hgi to anyone whose eyes caught ours. Not only did we have no trouble, the checkout girl looked at what we were buying, asked if we were having a braii (BBQ), and asked if she could come.

When we got back to her folks house, they thought we had been crazy to shop where we had!

You can often create a good customer service experience by displaying the kind of behaviour you hope to receive in return!

I’ve just come back from spending 2 weeks in one of my favourite countries: Japan.

And I have to say that standards of service there are so much higher than in the UK – shop staff are more friendly and helpful, more prepared to take responsibility for the customer’s needs, the streets are cleaner, queues move quicker etc. And it got me to wondering: whatever happened to the concept of customer service in the UK and most of Europe?

Far from the customer being at the centre of things, the customer is often forced to conform to the supplier’s processes, processes that are more often than not managed by people who have forgotten how to smile,  forgotten what courtesy is and forgotten that the customer is king.

What do we need to do to match the Japanese for efficiency, courtesy and standards? What do we need to do to get staff at all levels to take ownership of what they do, to take pride in what they do and to place the customer back at the center of what they do?