The CX Blog

Listen to your customers, listen to your agents. Here’s an interview with Brian Lusk of Southwest airlines–Brian authors Southwest’s blog and it’s a pretty fun site, too.

In BuzzBin’s interview, Brian told how Southwest was considering abandoning its signature open seating model and he discussed the idea on his blog; over the course of the next two days, over 700 people had commented on the blog with an overwhelming voice: don’t change the seating!

The jury’s still out at SW but the company gets major credit for checking the idea out with their actual paying customers before taking such action. There are so many channels for information exchange today, and information exchange is so rapid and vast, it’s truly mind-boggling. Companies that ignore this reality risk alienating their customer base or worse, becoming so detached that they don’t even know they’re alienating their customer base. Access to The Voice of the Customer is better than ever.
I suspect that even if SW changes their seating model, they will be able to communicate the changes effectively and minimize the damage. Even more, I suspect SW will try hard to heed the Voice of their Customers.

Jeffrey Treem over at inside the cubicle has a great entry reviewing the recent uptake in corporate settings of social-based knowledge sharing. This trend is growing rapidly and it makes sense: employees want information they can use fast, easy, and understandable –the way you’d get it if you were leaning over the cubicle I can add to this my own experience of introducing and launching wikis in corporate settings–he gets this part spot-on: adoption, the key measurement for wikis, is huge the closer you get to the front lines. The higher up the ladder, the less understanding of the technology there is.

That’s a problem, for sure, but obviously not insurmountable.