The CX Blog

Your brand and all the buzz around it is made up of a zillion micro-experiences–that’s Customer Service as the new Marketing in action.  With all virtual channels open 24/7, enabling conversations about your company to happen globally all the time, the actual experience of your company trumps what you say about your company.  Seth Godin has been hammering this home for a few years now, and a growing number of companies are finally getting it.

Last spring, Ad Age’s David Armano discussed this concept of micro-experiences, and the proposal that traditional marketing is brand 1.0: Our product is what we say it is.  He uses Google as the poster-child of Brand 2.0,:

Ever wonder how on Earth Google went from a technology company to one of the world’s most recognizable and successful brands? Was it the whimsical brightly colored logo? How about the ads? Wait, Google really doesn’t advertise all that much — do they?

Brand Google was built on a lot of different things. If brand 1.0 was Coke, built on a solid foundation of marketing, then brand 2.0 is more like Google, built on an ecosystem of experience and natural word of mouth referrals.

A few days ago, Katie Paries continued this discussion on the Razorfish blog with her post Customer Service is the New Marketing. She makes some good points about how to approach this sea change, and while the hard work of really navigating this new frontier is still very much in its early days, she uses Zappos as the benchmark for how its done, T-mobile for how its not done, Comcast for how to breathe new life into battered CX brand and overall has some good thoughts to add to the mix:

Listen and communicate. Put conversations at the center.
Don’t kill conversation by blocking out customers. Friction-free conversation is the new norm in Web 2.0 – except when it comes to talking to companies.

Reduce your sphere of control to increase your sphere of influence
Create customer-service splinter cells.  How does it work?  The Comcast Customer Connect group …continues to grow. It functions as an “early warning system” for Comcast customer service issues and is starting to get good press for this effort. This team is  changing minds about Comcast and changing Comcast’s idea of itself.

Frank Eliason says: “My goal is [to] change the perception individual customers who may have had a bad experience or reinforce the positive opinion of anyone who has a good experience.  I have one real goal, and it is a common start to conversations:  ‘Can I help?’  That to me is what it is all about.

Smash the silos
Cut through boundaries. The overlapping of products and services we experience today are complex. You have a Nokia phone and a T-Mobile account and use Twitter. When things go wrong, who do you contact? When you try to call any of these companies individually you get the “it’s not our problem” runaround….Once customers learned that T-Mobile was the culprit, they flooded the company’s call centers and forced the carrier’s hand to start working with Twitter and reinstate SMS.

The benefit of working this way is that these communications are an early warning signal from related apps. Network support can occur across ecosystems, and customers don’t need to necessarily know which company to call.

Love that last one. What comes clear in all of these discussions that are swirling around the truism that “Your company is what your customers say it is” is that the discussion of your interactions with your customers is already happening.  Our job now is to figure out the best, most effective ways to listen and respond.