Demand Satisfaction!

Jonathan went toe-to-toe with one of Plaxo’s senior managers this week, and it got pretty heated. Jonathan hit his mark, but I have to admit the whole exchange made me uncomfortable. Plaxo is a tired as a target. Rikk Carey (their Executive VP) is clearly quite competent running operations and engineering over there, but he’s clumsy in his company’s defense, and on the subject of customer service this just wasn’t a fair fight.

What made this a particularly uneasy interaction to watch was the personal nature of the exchange. I can understand why Carey freaked out when Jonathan called him out so publicly. There’s nothing so unsettling as feeling like you’ve lost control of your own public identity. I wrote about this last year in a post called “Vengeance is so Easy on the Web“:

There’s no filter between a person’s experience of a subject, them writing it straight onto their blog, and the search crawlers munching it down for prominent display on the next search for the subject’s name…You never know when you’ll wake up and discover you’ve been attacked in the most public of ways…The fear of public and lasting retribution has the potential to keep us all on our best behavior.

Carey was trying to address this issue in his comments, but he came off as defensive and strident. This was partially due to a tic in his writing style (he jumps between finger wagging, to sarcasm, to self-deprecation with alarming speed), but it also revealed a lack of understanding of the medium. Defensiveness with customers always inflames the situation.

Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, totally gets this. He’s quoted in this month’s Wired:

“I honestly believe that if Redfin were stripped absolutely bare for all the world to see, naked and humiliated in the sunlight, more people would do business with us.”

Kelman’s radical approach might seem to invite the kind of customer retaliation that is so often damaging. But most organizations don’t realize how fragile their online identities are anyway. Reputation is, for many, the first page of Google results for their name. Yelp is demonstrating to many local businesses just who has the balance of power here–its customer review pages for restaurants usually appear above the official sites in search results. This is leaving these businesses at a loss for how to respond. Do they ignore it? Do they defend their business as themselves? Do they defend themselves through fake customer identities? Is there even a way to embrace the customer feedback (good or bad) in a way that’s net positive for the business?

We’re thinking a lot about these questions, because Satisfaction (our upcoming service) is designed to answer them.

One thing we know is that the answer is not to shut down customers. One of our long-time readers, Kat, was recently frustrated in her dealings with CrunchGear. Her issue is interesting only in its relative triviality–CrunchGear ran a writing contest (Laptop Horror Stories contest) but didn’t enforce its own word count limit with submissions, creating an unfair competition. Kat sent the editor John Biggs a note pointing this out, and she felt that his curt response (”unfortunately, a lot of the entrants don’t write as elegantly as you. If you’d like to add a bit more to your story, I can repost it.”) made her feel dismissed and patronized.

I could pick on John’s missed opportunity to address Kat’s real issue, that CrunchGear didn’t do what it said it was going to do. But what is interesting is that Kat was so annoyed by this minor infraction that she reached out to the Consumerist and then Demand Satisfaction to get her story out. She has her own blog, too, but she wanted (and gained) an amplifier for her complaint.

This is the Internet-empowered customer in action. With a wee bit of practice (and some new tools–hint, hint), companies can learn to harness negative public feedback to increase loyalty and win new users. Again, from Wired:

Transparency is a judo move. Your customers are going to poke around in your business anyway, and your workers are going to blab about internal info - so why not make it work for you by turning everyone into a partner in the process and inviting them to do so?

UPDATE: Kat just informed me that John Biggs emailed her: “I’m sorry if you felt I was condescending. I’m under a lot of pressure to maintain the site and keep things moving so I don’t have a lot of time to be warm and friendly, which is something I need to work on. I apologize.”

Good on John for his straightforward apology and for providing a window into the pressures that impede his grace under fire. We can all relate to that kind of pressure, and knowing what’s going on helps those of us on the outside to not misread slow or curt responses.