The fact that the North American economy is driven by consumers should not be news to anyone. When consumer confidence dropped slightly in October, the Dow Jones Industrial average sank by almost half a percent in sympathy. The mall is our universe, our firmament studded with the plastic of credit cards.
Despite the incredible amount of economic clout we all collectively wield, until recently consumers were relatively powerless. News of inferior products or services spread slowly because issues had to reach a critical mass before being picked up by the mainstream media -- spectacularly awful and multitudinous things had to happen first. Remember the 80s, when giant soft drink bottles started exploding and lodging hunks of glass in tracheas? How many months and incidents passed before awareness to become high enough for the story to be picked up and the containers recalled?
Then came the Internet. Or, more properly, then came broadband. Those months turned into days and sometimes just hours. The availability of high-speed Internet access is directly linked to the widespread adoption of things like blogs and sites like YouTube Inc. and Facebook , all Web-based "Web 2.0" or "social media" communications tools that allow people to create and post content and share it with anyone else who is online -- instantly.
These channels have given individual consumers audible voices for the first time by democratizing the distribution of information (i.e., you no longer needed a radio or TV station, just a computer and a modem, to tell the world what you had for lunch). Even though these voices are small, they’re networked, which means they can quickly grow into a single big, loud one.
Noise is one thing, but what about credibility? These words (our words) have a lot of authority with other consumers. A Nielsen Global Survey released in October showed that 66 percent of North Americans consider blogs and other forms of user-generated content (UGC) as reliable sources, and, most significantly, that 78 percent trust personal recommendations, or "word of mouth." Drivers for the use of social media include the desire to communicate and form relationships with other, like-minded individuals. Web 2.0 has therefore been described as "word of mouth on steroids."
Negative is the new positive
Probably one of the best known examples of the power of this swelling chorus of consumer-generated content is the now-famous "Dell Hell" blog, written by Jeff Jarvis. Annoyed at the performance of the new computer he had purchased and that his subsequent customer service experiences were less than adequate, Jarvis started blogging his frustrations in 2005.
Thousands joined in his song of complaint, and Dell Hell posts soon dominated Dell-related Google search results, damaging the firm’s brand and reputation significantly. In an open letter, Jarvis eventually called on Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL) to pay attention to what their customers were saying and start participating in the online conversation.
CEO Michael Dell appeared to take Jarvis’s advice. Over the next 18 months, the company launched a blog and a collaborative site called Dell IdeaStorm that encourages consumers to provide the company with feedback. The business intelligence gathered as a result of engaging in a dialogue with its consumers has helped Dell improve its customer service process (obviously a great source of dissatisfaction) and also provided valuable insight into product development and other opportunities for innovation that would never have come to the company’s attention otherwise.
Coming full circle, the whole saga was summarized in a recent article, written by Jarvis, in which be praised the firm for undertaking a fundamental shift in the way it relates to and works with its customers.
If Dell had not had such a negative experience, would the firm have been motivated to set up these programs? Probably not, meaning the opportunities and potential for competitive advantage generated by actually listening to its customers would likely never have materialized, or it would have been been reaped by the competition instead.
The economy has always been consumer-driven, but social media has flattened the communications playing field. Not only can the biggest companies in the world tap into what their customers are saying, but more importantly, we can also hear each other.
I am alarmed about the credibility given to internet content. It is little more than junk mail, for the most part. I am observing that some services , such as fact checking services are surveying political information. Even this is information is based on statistics. Why would any information be more correct than good intentionsof the writer? Most of the internet is useless gossip disguised as opinion and information. Perhaps this has value to spin profits?
Science teaches us to posit a thesis and test it. To create value for our companies we should test the employee need for youtube etc. mMaybe our understanding will improve of our customer needs but maybe not. Better to try and estimate the Return On Investment than continue to support the wasted hours ( and i admit to wasting some of those hours too). Employees need legitimate ways to take a break from work, not the guilty hidden computer screens or the trp to the candy machine. People work better that way. However, the US work ethic is is one of the last strengths the US has to compete with less well paid staff overseas. Focus on doing what we are paid for is essential to the economy, not what we feel like doing.
Perhaps this is a social effect of te economy focus on the young who cannot vote for good reason.
Your article is superb! The “Dell Hell” blog is one of the best examples of how social media has empowered the consumer. But let’s take a look at the flip side.
Now that companies see the light and are starting to embrace online feedback from customers (sometimes under duress), they should be considering additional ways they can take advantage of this leveled “communications playing field.”
From their perspective, businesses will use the feedback to adjust a service to address consumer complaints or fix a product that’s falling short of customers’ needs.
But shouldn't companies go further than that? Is it a smart idea for companies to push the envelope on social media feedback and use it to either up sell other products to customers or get them excited about new products?
A company like Mattel, which has been forced to recall toys several times in the last four months, could use what ever advice you can offer.
Hey, experiences - you raise some excellent points - and I think one of the keys to how companies approach this is evident in your language, in the term "customer voice management". Firms should not be thinking about how to "manage" the voices of their customers, rather they should be thinking about "listening" to them, and participating in a legitimate two-way conversation.
Of course this can seem impossible when you are an enormous firm and the conversations endless, but an excellent tactic can be to equip your workforce with guidelines for digital participation that are specific to and address the realities of your business (liability, compliance, etc.). Train and deputize your staff to act as your ambassadors/eyes and ears, which they likely already are - but without guidance or an ability to feed the info they gather back up the food chain - and let them be the first line of engagement with your marketplace online as well as offline.
Customer voice sites can , potentially, reach a large number of people across many markets and that too very quickly. Thus the traditional approach of getting a PR company "to fix the problem " does not work. But I am not sure most companies know how to tackle customer feedback on such a large scale.
My observations point to these key issues :
1. A lot of companies don't really know what to do with this "internet feedback thing". Until recently the feedback came on the company site and not much seemed to happen. In most cases, there was an auto-response sent to the customer which effectively did not say anything. The time taken to revert with a real response was way too long. Moreover, a large majority of companies dont have formal tools to track internet feedback and beyond that , not enough processes to close the loop.
2. For every Dell Idea Storm, there are more failures simply because the company is again seeking to listen a lot less .
3. Some of the issues that get discussed , on customer voice sites . potentially can raise some very tough questions. There is, still a possibility. that despite best efforts corporate silos ensure no real movement forward.
4. It is not just customers who can write on service and product issues. Employees do also write on blogs or other customer voice sites. That itself has its own set of challenges.
So perhaps we could bring forth some best points on customer voice management for a company.
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