Reactions to story from The New York Times

• 

  Nice to get support from the Guardian

  http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/07/25/niceToGetSupport...
  130 days ago in Scripting News: 7/20/2008 · Authority: 2,091

  We're all on our own when a BigCo decides to throw its weight at us, but being a well-read blogger has its advantages, esp when a columnist at a big newspaper believes you. Thanks to Charles Arthur for the air cover. Contrast this to the NY Times piece
• 

  links for 2008-07-25

  http://jburg.typepad.com/future/2008/07/links-for-2008-07-25...
  130 days ago in Jon Burg's Future Visions · Authority: 196

  Television will be the first traditional media medium to fall Yup. It's official. Some people still think that bec of the internet, we will no longer enjoy slumping on the couch and letting our TVs do the talking. Ladies and gentleman, the future is in
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  Unclear on the Concept: People Complaining about Comcast Monitoring Social Media

  http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/unclear-on-the-concept-...
  130 days ago in I’m Not Actually a Geek · Authority: 172

  The New York Times has an article today about Comcast using social media to respond to customer complaints. Comcast is definitely at the forefront of this move to engage customers out in the wild. Comcasts efforts have previously been documented on
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  Comcast Support is Watching You Complain On Your Blog RIGHT NOW [Big Brother]

  http://gizmodo.com/5029060/comcast-support-is-watching-you-c...
  130 days ago in Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide · Authority: 22,673

  When Brandon Dilbeck wrote about how shitty his Comcast service was on his no-traffic Blogspot blog, he didn't think anyone was watching. But this guy was. And when he received an email from Comcast support that directly addressed his specific problem
• 

  Hey, Comcast...

  http://barkbarkwoofwoof.blogspot.com/2008/07/hey-comcast.htm...
  130 days ago in Bark Bark Woof Woof · Authority: 116

  Apparently Comcast is doing more than just delivering cable TV and internet service.Brandon Dilbeck, 20, a student at the University of Washington, was complaining recently on his blog, Brandon Notices, about Comcasts practice of posting ads in its
• 

  Links 7/25/08

  http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2008/07/links-72508.html
  131 days ago in naked capitalism · Authority: 628

  Griping Online? Comcast Hears You and Talks Back New York Times Economists' new research shows positive effects of minimum-wage increases PhysOrg A Turkish theater for World War III Chan Akyam, Asia Times. I have no idea how likely the author's scenario
• 

  Cant Win For Losing, I Guess

  http://msl1.mit.edu/furdlog/?p=6898
  131 days ago in FurdLog · Authority: 33

  On the other hand, when Comcast is paying attention, it *is* a little spooky: Complaining Bloggers Have a Cable Companys Ear Comcast is not the only company trying to reach out to customers online. Using the social messaging service Twitter, Southwest
• 

  CX and Micro-experiences

  http://knowledgecontact.com/blog/archives/103
  29 days ago in The CX Blog — Rounding Out the Customer Experience · Authority: 1

  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.
• 

  Customer service is the new marketing

  http://www.headlightblog.com/2008/11/customer-service-is-the...
  31 days ago in Headlight : Digital Automotive Marketing · Authority: 12

  Your brand is made up of millions of little experiences. There’s a lot of buzz these days about the value of customer experiences. The gist of it is that your brand is not what you tell consumers it is. Your brand is made up of all the millions of micro-experiences customers have with your brand. The implication is that companies not only need to attract new customers and make sales, they have to be aware of what existing customers are saying to them or about them, and be able to respond quickly, in a personalized manner. This has the potential for creating positive experiences, which contribute to brand health. One effective way companies are doing this is by providing great customer service. There is no end to the stories about angry, unhappy, dissatisfied customers (that blog about it) distressed about not receiving the support they need from customer service. And there’s nothing like bad service to damage a company’s brand. However, companies that surprise and delight customers with authentic human interactions, satisfying real or perceived needs, become beacons for best practices in customer support. Satisfied customers will communicate with their friends and loved ones, or broadcast across multiple online communities their satisfaction with a product or service, becoming brand evangelists. The flip side is that dissatisfied customers can and will widely broadcast their unhappiness with your brand, and they have the tools to do it quickly and easily. A customer service company that just happens to sell shoes … Maybe you have heard this one already. It bears repeating for those who haven’t. Zappos is an online shoe store. They call themselves a “customer service company that just happens to sell shoes” and they really do it right. In May 2007 a woman ordered several pairs of shoes for her mother, who had lost a lot of weight and none of her old shoes still fit her.  Not all of the new shoes fit her mother either, so she contacted customer service to tell them she would be returning some shoes and requested a shipping label. Weeks passed and the shoes never came back. Zappos emailed her to check on the status, as the 15-day return period had ended. The woman apologized for the delay, mentioned that her mother had died and that she would send the shoes as soon as she could. The Zappos customer service rep told her not to worry and that the company had arranged for UPS to pick up the shoes from her. She thought this was very thoughtful, especially because it broke with company policy. The next day, a large bouquet of flowers was delivered, accompanied by a condolence card from Zappos. This woman is Zaz Lamarr, who writes a personal blog called Writing, Cooking, Life. In July 2007 Lamarr posted an article entitled “I Heart Zappos” about her experience of “exceptional service from an online retailer.” That post has been viewed by millions, has generated hundreds of responses, and is now being held up regularly as a testimony to good customer service. Zappos has it baked into their DNA. So, not only did Zappos satisfy a customer, they created an evangelist. Not only that, the story is viral. Just try a search on Zappos customer service and see what you find; a perfect example of why customer service is the new marketing. Brand loyalty = revenue Great story, but what does this have to do with you? As everyone is painfully aware, fewer people are buying new cars these days. In the U.S., the average age of the car on the road is more than nine years and climbing. As a result, dealers are recognizing that there is a real opportunity for building loyalty through the service department. A recent article that appeared in Dealer Marketing Magazine noted that customers who service their vehicles at the same dealership where they made their purchase are six times more likely to buy their next car from that same retailer. Obviously, the goal is to build brand loyalty – to keep customers from taking their business to the competition or to the corner garage. One way you can differentiate your brand is to start concentrating on the customer experience. To do that you have to be where your current customers, and possibly future buyers, are and respond to them personally. Act like a concierge So how can you get some of the same magic Zappos has? According to Lane Becker of Get Satisfaction, what you need to do is act like a concierge. Acting like a concierge means putting conversations with the client at the center. It means going to where your customers are and astonishing them with personalized responses. It means cutting through red tape to solve problems. It is about building brand loyalty. At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in September, I attended a session at which Becker gave several examples of companies doing that. Although he did not give any automotive-related examples, Becker’s insights are not limited to a single consumer product category. I will relay a few of them here: 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. Companies don’t necessarily have their strategy in place for how to join the conversation, but are at least open to encouraging conversations about their brands, rather than squashing them. For example, Timbuk2, the messenger bag company, got a lot of questions on its customer service page from customers who wanted to know if a diaper bag was in the product line. There wasn’t, and the company had no plans to add one. However, a customer service rep happened to post instructions for how to modify a Timbuk2 bag to be a diaper bag, using other products and sewing it together. This spawned a large response, including other examples of how to do it yourself as well as an even greater number of requests for a diaper bag. Ultimately, Timbuk2 leveraged the user input as a sort of focus group to influence development of a diaper bag for their line. Timbuk2’s site has instructions for how to create your own diaper bag using one of the company’s cargo totes. Reduce your sphere of control to increase your sphere of influence Create customer-service splinter cells. For example, Comcast has a big problem with customer service. Many people are highly dissatisfied. The company claims to be opening or expanding almost a dozen customer call centers. But they aren’t moving fast enough for many of their dissatisfied customers, who have been venting online about poor service. Here’s what they have done about it in the past year: Starting in September 2007, Frank Eliason, then an Executive Support Manager at Comcast’s Philadelphia headquarters, took on a part-time assignment of trawling blogs for negative company references. In February Eliason became Director of Digital Care for the telecommunications firm and devoted his energy full-time to monitoring Comcast complaints on Twitter. By April a number of bloggers, including TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, had written about their experience of receiving messages from @comcastcares on Twitter and Eliason’s solo efforts were supplemented by five hires. How does it work? If you mention a problem with Comcast on Twitter, “Frank” reaches out and responds to you, acting like a concierge. He can help to resolve problems quickly and cut across regular channels to provide quality service. The Comcast Customer Connect group he oversees continues to grow – it had grown to seven by August, with plans to ramp up to a staff of 10 by yearend.  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. How fair is it that someone can get better, more personalized service if she is tech-savvy enough to use Twitter to get customer support, while everyone else waits on the phone forever to reach a real person? Is this preferential treatment for people who are more likely to be influencers? Author Shel Israel posed this question to Eliason, who replied that Comcast provides the same quality service for questions coming in from Twitter, the blogosphere, website and call center alike. “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. This is what happened: T-mobile decided to shut off SMS to Twitter. T-Mobile customers who tried to use Twitter suddenly found it wasn’t working on their phones anymore. Twitter received many complaints about the issue, but the micro-blogging service knew the problem was not on their end. Eventually, users determined what had happened and communicated it out. 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. The moral of the story? Use the tools and technologies of Web 2.0 to listen to the conversations your customers are having.  You can start doing this fairly easily by going to Twitter Search for real-time results of mentions of your brand or by setting up an alert with tweetscan and monitoring the results. Twitter Search provides real-time results for keyword searches. If you decide to do more than lurk, set up a Twitter account for your brand. However, you need to determine what type of conversations you wish to initiate. Do you want to be customer service-focused, like Frank Eliason at Comcast, or are you more interested in increasing positive brand perception? A good example of a more PR-focused effort is the work that Scott Monty has been doing for Ford.  Monty, the automaker’s new head of social media, has at least six Twitter profiles – ScottMonty, FordDriveOne, FordMustang, FordTrucks, FordDriveGreen and FordCustService . The eponymous handle is his original account, which he uses to communicate with his personal network of 3,600-plus followers and to have conversations with them about Ford and automotive-related issues, comment on social media trends and other topical subjects. The five Ford-related profiles are more recent and in various stages of readiness. Ford’s stepped-up social media efforts appear to be paying off already: Last week überblogger Robert Scoble took a test-drive of a Sync-equipped 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid and spread the word on Twitter, FriendFeed and other outlets. I should note that there appears to be a number of automaker brand name accounts on Twitter without any activity. The owners are either parking them while they develop a strategy or, in some cases, are potentially brandjack victims. So, if you think Twitter is in your future, you may want to go register the brand names you want – much like you would register the domain names you want for your website. Applications like twitrratr can be used to gage consumer mood. It isn’t perfect, but it’s interesting to look at. Also, consider opening an account with the aforementioned Get Satisfaction. This online service enables conversations with customers using that site. Before you go too far down the path, determine a strategy for how to reach out to customers online. Don’t just dash in without a plan in place. You should have a clear understanding about what your goals are, who will engage in these conversations, and how you will measure success. There is high potential for coming off as either inept or inauthentic. Take the time to set it up right. Talk to your digital agency about developing your social strategy. Educate yourself. Determine how you can make customer service the new marketing for your company. Related links: Blogs about Customer Experience; WordPress.com Brand interactions are the future (subscription required); Advertising Age, 04.22.08 Delta Skelter; Jaffe Juice, 06.04.08 Never send a human to do a machine’s job; Amber Night, 05.21.08 Dad vs. Dell. Have you been screwed by Dell?; DaddyBlogger.com, 05.04.08 Customer backlash against bad service; BusinessWeek via MSNBC.com, 02.26.08 A modest proposal to fix Dell’s customer service; News Blog on CNET.com, 05.09.08 Outrageously good customer service; Freakonomics blog on New York Times, 06.06.07 Customer service gone shockingly right; Fiendish Glee Club, 02.04.07 I heart Zappos; Writing, Cooking, Life, 07.07.07 Why Zappos pays new employees to quit – and you should too; HBR Interactive Case Study on Harvard Business School Review, 05.19.08 Zappos Twitter profile September worst auto sales month since 1993; AP via MSNBC.com, 10.01.08 Average age of cars in U.S. increases; MotorAuthority, 02.22.08 Focus on service and parts has never been greater; Dealer Marketing Magazine, 09.05.08 Corner garage vs. dealer service department; Edmunds.com, Get Satisfaction company site Customer service is the new marketing; Lane Becker and Thor Muller of Get Satisfaction’s presentation from Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, 04.24.08 Timbuk2 brand site Diaper bag hack kit; Timbuk2 Day 6: You asked for it; on Timbuk2 blog , 04.09.08 Comcast cares on Twitter; Conversation Agent, 05.01.08 All a-Twitter about Comcast’s Twitter Guy (registration required); Media Post; 04.28.2008 Comcast, Twitter and the chicken (trust me, I have a point); TechCrunch, 04.06.08 Griping online? Comcast hears and talks back; New York Times, 07.25.08 T-Mobile turns off Twitter?; TechCrunch, 12.14.07 Twitter Search Tweetscan ScottMonty Twitter profile FordDriveOne Twitter profile FordMustang Twitter profile FordTrucks Twitter profile FordDriveGreen Twitter profile FordCustService Twitter profile Robert Scoble status update on Twitter; 10.29.08 Robert Scoble message posted on FriendFeed; 10.29.08 Twitrratr Image credits: Core Values image appears courtesy of Zappos.com Diaper Bag Hack Kit image appears courtesy of Timbuk2 Ford Fusion Hybrid keyword search results image appears courtesy of Twitter Search
• 

  Getting the house in order

  http://brianbaggett.com/?p=538
  31 days ago in brian baggett dot com · Authority: 1

  Wendie is now a full-time pharmacist and the time has now come to start furnishing the house. It’s been pretty spartan since we moved in back in June since Wendie had to study for her boards. Now that she’s done, we’re getting underway on at least furnishing the main level. We’ve had some design help and we think we’re getting things to look as they should. There is a lead time on most of the stuff we’ve ordered. Once things get set up, I’ll be posting some pictures to Flickr. The basement continues to evolve. Hopefully this week I’ll be motivated to straighten up down there. My entertainment area down there is starting to shapeup. I got a 52″ Sony 1080p HDTV, a Sony AV receiver, some Sony center and rear surround speakers, a Sony subwoofer, Sony bookshelf speakers, and an additional but  different set of Sony bookshelf speakers. All that coupled with the PS3 for Blu-Ray is going to finally give me a decent home theater experience. 1080p + Dolby True HD w 7.1 == nerdvana. Right now, I have no real place to sit. Still debating on getting either a couch or actual home theater seating.  Wendie and I are planning to remodel the basement in February to turn it into an actual home theater.  I picked up the newly restored Godfather trilogy on Blu-Ray and can’t wait to check it out. I’m also getting my TV service turned back on. I had a nasty billing snafu with DirecTV back in the spring and one with Comcast this summer that was Internet service related. I was loathe to do business with either company if I didn’t have to so that pretty much left me going with Dish Network. I was fine with this but since we’re tying up a lot of resources in furnishing the house, I decided to go with the cheaper option … at least for now.  That would be Comcast. Since I’ve never been a subscriber of their television service, I got the digital premier with 2 movie channels (Starz & HBO) for six months at a nice price. Of course, the HD access is extra … though I don’t know why. Every TV sold is an HDTV now … shouldn’t HD service be standard? Some interesting things I learned about Comcast: The pricing you get on the web is better than the pricing you get when you call. I put my package together online then called the 800 number to finish the order. The rep advised me she couldn’t give me the same pricing on the phone as I got on the web and that I should finish my order on the web. Seriously.  Their policy of extra HD cost versus extra outlet is confusing. If I have two HDTV’s in my house, why do I have to pay $7 for the first HD box, $5.99 for the privilege of having an extra outlet, then another $7 a month for the second TV? Or do I? Even the rep wasn’t sure. Their online ordering system stinks. Back in May when I signed up for Internet service, it got my billing address and service address wrong which had Comcast sending me to collections for bills I never received and it took an act of Frank to fix it. This time, I called to amend my order after it was placed and had the rep read off what I signed up for. Of course, they didn’t get the order right. What’s truly annoying is I wanted to start using TiVo again. Since I went the cable route and not the satellite route, I can … but then I lose the ability to use ON DEMAND and I have to go to the trouble of getting Comcast out to install CableCards. So even though I have a nice HD TiVo picked out at Weaknees, I’m going to give the Motorola Comcast DVR a spin since I’d rather spend the money on the house and if I decide to go the satellite route at some point, the TiVo would be useless to me. New camera Wendie and I picked up a new digital camera. I sat on the fence for months … I wanted a DSLR but I knew Wendie didn’t want something too complicated. We settled on the Casio EXILIM 10.1 MP camera. I picked up an additional battery, an AC power inverter for the car, and a 16 GB SDHC. We took a lot of pictures while at her brother Jeff’s house in Knoxville a few weeks ago and I’ll have those up on Flickr soon. Rediscovering the classics: MST3K I used to watch MST3K back in the day but hadn’t seen it in years. This week, the 20th Anniversary Edition collection was released on DVD. I recommend it. The packaging sucks … the DVD’s are practically vacuum-sealed into the tin and the Crow T. Robot figurine was just as hard to get out. I also picked up the previously-long-out-of-print DVD of the theatrical feature that was also recently rereleased. The other DVD’s are ridiculously overpriced, but I hear you can find VHS quality transfers on the Internet if you know where to look.

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