Customers Are Redefining What Intimacy Is
By Louis ColumbusIt’s good to question assumptions about your customer base from time to time and test them just to make sure they are still accurate. One of the strongest lessons learned from the Internet is just how much many manufacturers don’t know about our own channels, customers, pricing, and products. The Internet’s immediate ability to deliver feedback is showing many assumptions about nearly every customer-facing aspect of a business to be incomplete at best.
Quit Ignoring Independent Content
The many forms of independent content spawned by the Internet need to be mined for the true voice of your customers. These independent forms of content include the following:
- Blogs
- Calls to customer support centers
- Message Boards
- Traditional voice of the customer programs including e-mail traffic and aggregating customer service e-mails
- USENET
- Websites
- Wiki and Interactive Presence Efforts mostly by B2C companies
You’ll find a love/hate relationship between your customers and your company you may never known of before. Anchoring the one extreme are the raving fans – those that just can’t say enough good about your products – like Apple iPod owners for example who create their own podcasts of how to get more out of their iPods. That’s love.
More often than not it’s to tell the world how angry they are. Consider the impact Jeff Jarvis has made on Dell’s policies on blogging. He’s been successful in getting Dell to at least pay attention to blogs now – quite a change from earlier in the summer when he was ignored. You can read about the entire situation here. Be sure to read Shankar Gupta’s summary here as well.
Posted by LOUISCOLUMBUS on August 24, 2005 at 01:42 PM in Customer Dialogue | Permalink
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