Empathetic Customer Service vs Sucky Customer Service
Of course, even if Dell was active in the blogosphere, who's to say that they would not follow The Pathology of Business Bullshit.
Empathetic Customer Service
Life is customer service Jeff Jarvis, Buzz Machine has a post on Craig Newmark (Craigslist) that gets to the heart of why customer service sucks in most organizations.
Craig: Unfortunately, in contemporary corporate culture, customer service is often an afterthought, given lip service only. This seems to be part of the general dysfunction of large organizations. As a company accumulates power and money, the people who are skilled at corporate politics take control of it. Customer service never seems to be highly prized by people with those skills. Maybe it’s because they lack empathy.
Sucky Customer Services
Jeff follows up in another post, Dell Hell: One of many postscripts is his personal story about Dell Computer's bad customer service and what the fallout is for Dell.
Ellen Finkelstein writes passionately about Knowledge Management With Blogs and RSS
I’m appalled at the current state of document and knowledge management in many organizations today. E-mail is the most commonly used system — and of course, it doesn’t work at all. People who aren’t on the e-mail’s TO list don’t get the e-mail and don’t know what’s happening. E-mails are bandied about discussing several versions of policies or documents, and a week later, no one knows which e-mail includes the final version. Employees who enter the organization even one day later, have no idea what the policies or decisions are, and no way to find out, except by word of mouth — which is extremely unreliable.
Unbelievable!
Amazing But True...Customer Feedback Rarely Gets Fed Back Paul Greenberg,
I was reading an article - a good, if a bit dry one - on customer feedback that was published on the Customer Management Community (CMC) site this morning called "Customer Experience - The Voice of the Customer" by Jennifer Kirby (you'll have to register) and I found out something that was sort of mindblowing. Here's the quote from Jennifer's article:
95% of companies collect feedback
50% brief staff on its contents,
30% use it,
5% bother to tell the customer what action they took.
Prime causes of this sorry state are poor cross functional collaboration and lack of information culture. But the main culprit is the disparate sources of feedback with no overall owner, plan or use. (See Squeezing more value from marketing information - by Professor Robert Shaw, City of London Business school)"
...lack of information culture. Our so-called meme used to be, Intelligently cultivating ideas.
How To Look BRILLIANT (with little effort) from Don the Idea Guy - The Idea Department on duct tape marketing, has a great story about Jack Canfield's "The Success Principles". I'll let Don tell it, go ahead, read it, I'll wait.