We have just finished a disastrous six month flirtation with Vonage, the voice over IP (VOIP) telephony provider. VOIP providers offer a great solution for a fast-growing business. You can run your own exchange software - Asterisk - create conference call dial-ins, allow staff in different countries to share your switchboard - all very useful. Sadly Vonage has all the characteristics of old style telephony businesses: poor quality of service, an inflexible billing structure, hidden charges (they even charge you for the privilege of closing your account) and the appearance but not the reality of good customer service. Their customer service folk are (wearily) polite but all work to a script and know too little about their business to be helpful. They mimic, but don’t replicate the experience of dealing with human beings. Welcome to the revolution, intones the announcement as you reach the automated switchboard. The announcement - a taped British voice - sounds flat, perfunctory. You are talking to a machine with a human voice. And that’s what you get.
Unlike (e.g.) the excellent and reliable Zen Internet, Vonage have no “cancel account” functionality on the web interface. (Why not?) You have to call the company. As the billing lady tried to talk me through a script designed to find out why I was leaving I felt sorry for her. Customer service, I kept saying. Price, I kept saying. She started talking about new packages that were on offer. After five minutes of this I had to cut her off. Cheez! Trying to keep a customer from quitting by making it difficult to quit! I thought this sort of thing was on the way out …
Unless they change their ways the real revolution will do damage to Vonage. This ain’t the way to grow a business.
Department store John Lewis have announced that whilst their rivals may be suffering, they are growing market share. The Nationwide building society has seen a surge of deposits recently, partly the effect of the Northern Rock collapse.
Both businesses are growing market share during a slowdown. What is it that links them? In news links Nationwide talk about the quality of their assets, John Lewis MD Andy Street is not quoted as providing a rationale.
Our research points out some common features. What both businesses have in common in terms of consumer generated conversations is that:
a) positive commentary on them tends to contain specific customer recommendations and endorsements. A customer who is complaining about his ISP takes time to say something postive about Nationwide, an entire thread on MoneySavingExpert is entitled John Lewis are bloody marvelous and backs it up with facts;
b) negative commentary involves isolated problems: someone complains about a silent call from Nationwide’s call centre; a thread that starts John Lewis sucks big time, turns into a plug for their customer service as - just as several posters predict - John Lewis deal successfully with a horrible customer service issue.
This is by no means a common feature. A PR client came to us a few days ago on behalf of a business whose online commentary was positively sulphurous. There were no positive comments whatsoever, and the negative comments included threats of legal action. The company apparently thought that it had a “reputation” issue. Our suggestion was that it had a product issue. This is an ostensibly healthy company, but I would fear for it during a recession.
The common threads linking Nationwide and John Lewis is that they seem to provide great customer service and great customer service drives positive word of mouth. Both companies Net Promoter Indices are comfortably ahead of their sector average. And they are demonstrably growing market share in a chilling market.
Has it worked? We surveyed customer commentary from before and after the new initiatives and used our net promoters methodology to find out.
The bad news is that the increased spend on customer services ($150m - on Dell’s figures) has not yet had a strong positive impact on overall sentiment. There has been a slight dropping off in the volume of negative commentary about customer service, but errors seem to be up and opposition to off-shoring has increased. The good news for Dell is that its social media initiatives have offset this, and there are signs that they may be successful in changing opinions about the company. The recent PR wins which saw Dell salvage XP for domestic customers and announce the launch of a Linux Ubuntu desktop (although they occurred after our data sample was taken) have reinforced the impression that using social media is a big customer service plus for Dell.
Internet World took place in London this week. Jonny Rosemont of Weber Shandwick has posted a nice summary of the key lessons. Here is part of it:
“Digitising is changing the world but it shouldn’t change communications strategies i.e. it is still all about giving people what they want
Consumers have to be co-opted into the marketing process, they are the new brand managers …”
This chimes with some thoughts that have been percolating in my head for a while.
Brands find it harder currently to respond to all their customers and stakeholders in ways that satisfy them.
There are three reasons for this:
a) It is now easier for the consumer to address the brand. Brands can no longer hide behind call centres and complaints procedures. Customers can discover email addresses and when they email they expect a response. When they don’t get that response, or aren’t happy with it, they can make a post on a message board, or post a hostile review, or blog.
b) It is now more difficult for the brand to address the consumer. All of the various “channels” have broken down, eroded, become one. All communications by the brand have become part of one general conversation. The comments of a tired call centre worker, or the carefully judged explanations of a chief executive briefing analysts all represent the “brand”. And they have as much, if not more currency than conventional marketing and advertising messages . It doesn’t necessarily all take place online, but 80% of it is recorded online. Worse, the relationship between the brand’s message and the consumer is mediated by the search engines, and that means that the brand’s message gets mixed up with the comments and statements of all of its other stakeholders, including the disaffected consumers mentioned above.
c) The expectations of both consumer and brand are out of whack. The consumer expects the kind of response he or she might get from the local dry-cleaner (”I’m sorry about that, we’ll clean it again”); the brand expects to be able to choke off the access of the consumer to dialogue (restricting access to call centres by ensuring wait times are long, and concealing emails and phone numbers). Neither is realistic. The consumer will have their response, but this cannot always be a one-to-one experience. The brand will have to communicate with the consumer, but will have to find ways of doing so without setting up a response centre the size of the Inland Revenue’s.
In these circumstances brands can learn much from the lessons of the early community builders online. They need to give some of the work of communicating their brand values and compiling their FAQs to the broader stakeholder group. When we set up the message boards in the early days of BBC online we discovered (copying AOL) that it works better to recruit online moderators (brand advocates and protectors) from amongst the stakeholder group (EastEnders fans, or mums with kids) than it did to use paid employees. The EastEnders or Doctor Who fans cared more about the forum and worked harder at maker it a success than the paid employees.
Similarly a Land Rover aficionado knows more about Land Rover than any product manager working for Land Rover ever will. These are the new brand champions, and the constituency who can do most to create a channel with that vast, mass amorphous group of Internet searchers and (potential) customers who are so hard to reach by conventional means. What a brand needs to do is to figure out how to get their stakeholders to do some of their communications for them, to empower them. What is the good news about the brand? What are its responses to key challenges? Brands can use the tools of social media research to learn how to identify and to speak to its key stakeholders: who are they? what messages do they respond to? what messages do they reject? If they communicate based on that understanding there is a chance that the positive message will spread.
This is an argument which is inspired by customer service, but it applies as well to investor relations, marketing communications and - perhaps most urgently - advertising.
The company Modo e Modo ( manufacturers of high-end notebooks Moleskine) were the subject of negative commentary about quality issues. Paper Bits records how they responded, apologetically, and with detailed information about how they were dealing with the issue. Classy. [via Constantin Basturea]
Blogger Vincent Ferrari wants to cancel his AOL account. He has heard horror stories that the folks there make it as difficult for you as they possibly can. So he tapes the call. The customer service guy on the other end makes it as difficult for him as he can.
Ferrari posts the story, along with an MP3 of the conversation. He describes what happened next here. Notice the huge impact of the site Digg. Overnight Ferrari has turned into the number one commentator on AOL’s customer service, with videos all over the web. (Youtube’s has been viewed 149,000 times) He receives an official apology from AOL VP of customer services. This was an isolated event, and the customer service rep has been sacked, the guy says. However, anonymous ex-AOL employees have opened a second front, telling Vincent that this is a standard process to stop AOL customers from quitting, and customer service reps are paid according to how successful they are in keeping customers with AOL. Vincent is asking one of them to go on the record.
Check out the discussion here. 181 comments and counting.
The Overture search inventory tool is one of the great little secrets of the internet. For those who have not discovered it, you can find out who is searching for what around your topic and use the information to drive your paid search choices.
We have been reviewing a particularly sulphurous quantity of consumer-generated feedback on behalf of a company which has incurred the wrath of consumers, and trying (on their behalf) to figure out what advice we should give them about managing the situation. The volume of complaints made us think it was worth looking at traffic on Overture, which captures Yahoo! searches. Fortunately it hasn’t quite got to that pitch yet.
But, intriguingly, several other companies figure in the context of the term “complaint”. Here they are in order of the most complaints. We have linked to the page you reach if you follow the link.
There are some observations one should make about this list. Big companies are more likely to figure on it than small ones. Yahoo! is going to be there, because it is Yahoo!’s website. Tech companies are more likely to figure than non tech companies. The two tech companies eBay and Yahoo! have even thought about this search and ensured that they have pages with information for customers there. eLoan complaint appears to be such a popular term that it is spammed, judging from the search results page. Pay Pal, despite being part of eBay, seem less well prepared and their number one result is Pay Pal warning which is a forum for people with cautionary tales of dealing with the company.
Vonage, Wal-mart, Cingular, Herbalife, Bank of America and McDonald’s would be well-advised to think about this search in the context of their web presence and provide customised landing pages answering the issues that consumers and journalists may wish to raise.
The Overture results on the word “complaint” point again to the undoubted lesson that if you are in customer service the search engines (Yahoo! in this case) are doing the job for you.
Charlene Li gave an interesting and wide-ranging keynote Friday morning at the New Comm Forum. She took a 30,000 feet look at social media, with particular reference to blogging, aiming her sometimes impassioned comments at a broad audience.
“Social media is all about ceding control to build the relationship with the consumer. They won’t put up with anything else, as the processing power has moved to the edge of the network, the consumer has been empowered by it.
“Look at my own situation - I can work anywhere. The rest of my team works remotely from me. I am displaced.
“What has made this possible? Cheap hardware, for one. Have you seen this $200 computer? Incredible. The impact of RSS - I don’t have to go looking for information, I can subscribe to it. It finds me. Sites like Trip advisor[travel reviews], Blogger, Wikipedia, eBay, Google and services like Bit Torrent [file sharing], the Linux operating system show this in action. Technology has moved towards the “people”.
“Like anyone, I trust recommendations from friends and family first, followed by online recommendations way ahead of other sources. Brand loyalty is declining. It is down from 59% to 54% in two years between 2002 and 2004 in Europe. It may not sound like much but 5% over two year is a major decline. The new technology has empowered communities, not institutions.”
Li mentioned as case studies some work done by Umbria about mobile pricing plans, analysing customer complaints online and using them to create a more consumer-friendly offering. She cited the website istockphoto, which derives its inventory from user-generated photos, and mentioned Burpee seeds, who have given their business a huge fillip just by shrewd use of RSS feeds of seasonal offers.
“Brands are being defined by the communities that accept them. For example on Bob Lutz’s famous GM blog, there is a Community-driven conversation about the Solstice” Li reported an exchange between commentators on the blog …
“Guy one: I can’t wait to own a Solstice: it’s a chick magnet of a car
“Guy two: What about us family guys?
“Guy one: Get rid of the kids.
“The phenomenon of Digg [tech-focussed news where the item’s prominence is driven by social bookmarks] derives from the same motive. If you are a corporation, you have to let the customers become the brand. This is what Nike ID have done with their software which lets you design your own shoes, and then encourages you to let other consumers vote for your design. Similarly with CNet, they have taken the decision to window other sites’ content
“From companies I hear from corporations a lot about the risks of ceding control - the fear that the employees and executives will say something bad: ‘We can’t have negative opinions on our site’
“But the point is that constructive criticism should be welcomed. Sure, you don’t need abusive comments, but it is better to have your brand advocates engage you directly with their constructive criticism, than have them do it behind your back. People say: ‘We’ll lose control of the brand’. I say: ‘You already lost control of the brand.’ They say: ‘People will delete the RSS feed.” I say: ‘Do you really want to send unwelcome emails, instead?’ People say: ‘We’ll get sued.’ I think those risks are easily manageable.
“So, how does your company get involved with all this? First: decide how involved you want to be with social computing. At a minimum listen to what is being said in message boards and on the blogs. Test the waters and immerse yourselves in the tools. It’s a new mindset and you are not going to get the hang of it straight away.
“Take the case of Dan Entin: he blogged that he couldn’t find his favourite deodourant (Degree Sport, as it happens). A sharp-eyed Unilever employee spotted the post got in touch, advised him on local stockists and then gave him a box of the stuff. He blogged it, naturally. That is a huge PR win for Unilever.
“I would argue that companies should focus on the relationship, not the technology. It is not so much about blogging or about podcasting … it is about the relationship with the consumer. Technologies will come and go, but the relationships will outlast them.
“For companies my advice is: start small and prove the business case. It’s a mindset: it will take some time. It took eight days to set up the small block blog. If you want to get your feet wet I would suggest that a recruitment blog is worth having. You always want to attract new talent to your company. Or at the very least ensure that your press releases are in RSS, or that when you do an earnings call you make it available as a podcast. You don’t have write new stuff necessarily. You probably have some existing speeches from executives that you can repurpose.
“The key thing to consider is to let you cusomters tell you when you are doing it right and also when you are doing it wrong. And then measure engagement, measure frequency of visit, length of stay, links. And benchmark your position before and afterwards.
“I hear about return on investment: Typepad costs me $15 a month and I have got $1m of business off it in the last year
“In conclusion: what does it all mean:
“Social computing will move into the enterprise. Wikis and blogs are perhaps even more effective internally than they are externally.
“Consumers want to create their own applications. Jeff Bezos said that Web 2.0 was all about computers talking to other computers. That makes it easier for consumers to use applications to create new applications of their own. For example you can take Google maps and overlay something else
“I predict that Community-based political systems will emerge, where people who share common views will seek out candidates to represent them.
“Finally social computing will become like air, as it becomes part of everyone’s experience, it will disappear …”
In the offline world of newspapers and broadcast soundbites there may be a good case for PRs and Customer Relations departments not to become involved in public disputes about their companies’ products or services.
Adding to the discussion with further commentary and action - however helpful, however speedy - may be used by a journalist in need of a good story to keep the issue on the boil for longer. Comment from the brand under attack can produce another good story for the press.
In a world where we can all be publishers, traditional methods don’t necessarily apply.
Unhappy customers whose complaints are not dealt with rapidly can, and do reach a wide audience - from potential customers to those who have suffered similar problems and want to talk about it. The effect can be viral, with awareness growing rapidly the longer the issues are not addressed.
In Market Sentinel’s survey of the top 50 UK grocery brands, 20 were found to have detractors in the top ten Google results, including Coca Cola, Walkers crisps, Lucozade, Mars bars and McCain oven chips.
The effect on brand can be serious - take the well-documented case of Dell as one example. Jeff Jarvis’s Dell Hell chronicle of his problems with his $1,600 laptop ‘lemon’ and Dell’s poor customer service struck a chord. Visits to his website more than doubled. The story was picked up by Business week: “The most sensitive question for the brand is this: What’s the net impact of a curious buyer stumbling into Jeff Jarvis’ nastygram?” says Intelliseek’s Pete Blackshaw. “This is where brand reputation and purchase behavior take a hit.”
Try typing Dell Hell into Google and consider the impact this might have on prospective purchasers.
To quote from Jarvis’s recent article about all this in the Media Guardian “Now consumers don’t just consume. We spit back. We have our own printing presses.”
A dignified silence from brands under attack can become a high risk strategy.
Market Sentinel is currently pitching to a large company with a prominent detractor. Two thirds of the traffic his campaigning site is getting, he says, comes from people putting the words “[product] problems” or “[product] complaints” into Google.
The company’s customer service FAQ is absent from the top ten results of this search.
This effectively means that the detractor is doing the job of customer service for the company. He is qualifying the customer service experience, and providing the answers to the consumers. This is not a healthy situation for the company concerned.
This is anecdotal evidence for something we all experience. A couple of days back I hired a Smart car. The highly-sophisticated, semi-automatic gearbox stalled and left me marooned in teeming rain in heavy traffic. The rental company couldn’t explain the problem and struggled to find me with a replacement vehicle. When I came home I put “Smart Car” gearbox problem into Google and found
Yes, it’s the unofficial FAQ - not authorised by Mercedes but highly useful and entertaining. It turns out that either I wasn’t pressing the brake, or the brake microswitch was faulty. Good for me to know, good for the rental guy to know.
Brand owners have two options to make good use of of customers (and maybe resellers) putting their problems into Google:
1) provide a highly-functional, highly indexed FAQ
2) find a way of harnessing their community of users to provide this kind of customer service (think http://share.skype.com)
This blog is mainly the work of Market Sentinel CEO Mark Rogers. We use it to review recent developments in the areas of buzz-monitoring, buzz-marketing, word of mouth, online public relations, blog marketing and related topics. Feel free to comment or email us direct
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