The CX Blog

Here’s a fantastic post by Hog Blog about consumer anarchy–she’s focused mainly on how consumers have taken companies by storm via the internet and are in control of the brand now, which makes life a whole lot more interesting. The buzz is not created by the company anymore, it’s created by the consumer online, live, right now.

(thanks for the comment, sorry Sally!)

Some companies are seeing this trend and doing what comes naturally: taking control by “creating” their own online buzz: flogs, phony vids, etc. They might as well shoot themselves now before word gets out.

This same thing has happened in the support industry within these companies. Customers are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore–and once they get a taste of shared experience, the stories become iconographic. Take Jeff Jarvis and Dell Hell. If you want an idea of how the voice of the customer is really working in the blogosphere, possibly behind your back and without you knowing, go to google and search on “customer service hell” and see what you get. For an even more intimate appraisal, check the blog postings. It’s scary out there, especially if you’re a company trying to get around this new reality.

What to do? As Blog Hog contends, embrace the anarchy, welcome all this transparency right into the living room of your overall strategy. As she says, “how do you look in a beret?”

In the customer support arena, this would mean allowing customers a direct line into how you run your tech help, for example. Do they have more information about your products than your outsourced front-line? Well, let them help you build your knowledge base and design your communication channels–they really do know what they need and want. Let them tell you what matters to them–after all, who’s the customer here? Above all else, show them you’re listening and then–really–let them talk, open the front door and let them in. Just like brand buzz, customers have a lot to say about what they need from you–the right answers at the right time.

And then, what do you get from all that? If you’re smart, you get an enormous amount of information to help you rebuild your self-help, your knowledge base, your training program, your reporting, your recognition…well, every aspect of your operations, realigned for…you guessed it: the customer.