The CX Blog

I was thinking this weekend, as my partner attempted yet again to move her group of professional phone channels (3 different yet linked accounts) into one long-term commitment with ATT that included an iPhone, about how often Marketing/Sales and Customer Service seem to be playing on different teams.

Fortunately, I think we’re seeing light at the end of the tunnel and no, it’s not a train.  It’s social media–but I’ll get to that in a second.

ATT’s service department has been nothing but excellent, at least in the appearance of helpfulness, all along–kudos to them.  ATT’s sales channel, however, is another story.  Every time she’s had tried to make this change, which represents a business based long term commitment to them, she’s been stymied by small print hurdles for existing customers.  Of her three lines, one is an ATT line, and that puts her in the “We don’t give a hoot about you” class.  Too bad, that.

This last encounter–ooooh, we were so close!–was the worst.  We’d talked the whole project over with ATT CS first, they’d started the process on their end and directed us to the store downtown where we could get her iphone activated and begin the other moving pieces.  Yay! After a month, we were almost there!

But it wasn’t to be.  We found out that existing customers have to pay the full iPhone price of $500 which, while it did not diminish her desire for the phone, did feel like a slap in the face of an excellent customer willing to move her entire business over to ATT.  If she were only just somebody off the street with no credit history, no profession, nothing, she could get the phone for $299.  But since she’s a good customer, she can go ahead and pay more.

I’ve read a lot about the issue of ATT’s having existing customers subsidize ATT’s market expansion, but nothing that indicates ATT is listening. The whole thing has been a lesson in hot-potato management–Customer Service says one thing, Sales says another, and the customer is left holding said potato.

So back to that light at the end of the tunnel–Social Media.  Recently Blake Cahill (of Visible Technologies) noted in a great post on social media, laced with the same optimism that I’m feeling, “that Companies and social media are on a collision course—with positive benefits.”  He goes on to say:

Organizations are just now beginning to understand the need to integrate these perception periscopes into their existing BI and measurement platforms, building cultures and structures to move on the actionable intelligence quickly.

I’ve got a Twitter search running on ATT that lets me see who’s talking about ATT and why.  I’ve also got one on Clearwire, for previously discussed reasons.  I’ve got the simplest single thing anyone can do right now on any company out there–a Google Alert–on ATT as well that lets me know just how big the community of pissed off existing customers is, and it’s big.

The fact that I can listen to what’s being said about any company, join in the conversation, add more bits of data, and be part of the kind of Dell Hell wave that changed Dell’s thinking over the course of a few painful years, tells me that Change is Coming.  Yes, we can!  (By the way, filed under Taking the Bull by the Horns, anybody notice that Dell itself has a site called Dell Hell.  It does.)

But hang on, because the process of listening to customers, of opening up your own channels and interacting more directly and quickly with customers, adding real value instead of more blurbs–that process is going to be scarier than the advent of Company Blogs–and for most companies, that was pretty scary.

Again, I point to Comcast, a company that while plagued with its own set of problems, has taken a truly pioneering step in allowing Marketing and Service to become One in its Twitter persona, featuring Frank Eliason. ComcastCares is the face of the future, and I cannot wait to help usher this new era in.

Here’s the key: Many view Twitter and other social media apps as potentially killer marketing channels, an awesome way to craft your message and make it cool.  But we all know that the key to successful social network marketing is making the channel valuable to the customer.  One of the most valuable things you can do for a customer–and one thing they’ll never forget if you do right, and never forgive if you do wrong–is fix their problems.  Show you’re listening–and listen. As Cahill notes above, you can best show you’re listening by making the data actionable.

So, my forecast for the new year: the best meet-up a customer could imagine, Marketing and Service, together at last under the spreading canopy of Social Media (read to the end of this article on corp use of social media for an example of this very thing).