This interview is with Gina Bianchini, the founder and CEO of Ning. At Customer Service is the New Marketing, Gina will be on the Customer Service as Community, Community as Customer Service Panel.

I was first exposed to social networking when I started using the web in 1994. I got my first “real” dose of social networking in 2003 when I started using Friendster. At Ning, we define social networking very broadly to include all the different ways people want to connect with each other. If fact, when we started Ning, we were looking to what people were doing with eBay, Craigslist, Classmates.com, forums, etc. for what we wanted to create.

I like to think that community aligns well with customer service because there is essentially no difference between the two. Ensuring that the people using your service are happy or at least clear in the deal they are making with you when they use what you offer is the most important thing you can to do in our little corner of the world. If you don’t make that a priority, I’m not sure how you are going to be
successful.

We are all about community at Ning. We enable anyone to create their own social networks for anything. The people creating social networks on Ning, our Network Creators, are our most important constituent. We hopefully put our money where our mouth is in terms of being responsive and giving them the best service we can.

My day usually starts when I roll out of bed, check email to ensure that nothing blew up while I was asleep, and then go to the office. From the office, my only priority is ensuring that we’re putting out a great service and that we’re working on ways to make it even great-er-er. This is usually influenced by what our Network Creators are telling us they want.

As told to Douglas Hanna

There is still time to register for Customer Service is the Marketing, which takes place this upcoming Monday, February 4. Head over to the web site and you can attend this tremendous networking and learning opportunity.

Addressing Your Customer Service Challenges
Led by Douglas Hanna

When customer service consultant and writer Douglas Hanna starts a conversation about customer service, he usually asks “what are your challenges?” This question never fails to start an interesting conversation relating to the particular challenges that various organizations of all shapes and sizes face on a day-to-day basis.

The most interesting aspect of the question, though, is how similar many companies’ answers are. A surprising amount of companies encounter the same challenges – challenges relating to growth, personnel, communication, etc., but often address them in different ways.

During his workshop, Douglas will ask you (and the other participants at the table) to write down the challenges you’re facing and trying to address. Then, the table will look at these challenges, examine the similarities and differences, and of course, work to come up with possible solutions.

Douglas is a Principal at Service Untitled, where he also writes a blog on customer service and the customer service experience every weekday.

Satisfaction Beyond the Transaction: Investing in customer support is as important as getting sales
Led by Chris Heuer

Many companies still believe that getting to the sale is the only thing that matters, treating customer support as a cost rather than an investment.  The truth is, an educated customer that is getting maximum satisfaction from your product or service is your most valuable marketing asset.

While working with the US Mint in 1999, Chris Heuer developed the foundations for what he calls The Communications Strategy, a simple to use framework for organizing the information people need to know within The Customer Experience Lifecycle.

Join Chris and other conference participants to explore why this is important, how it can increase profitability and how these strategies can be applied to your specific situation.

Chris is a Principal with The Conversation Group.

During lunch at Customer Service is the New Marketing, there will be six workshops that summit attendees can participate in. Each workshop is led by an expert in his or her field and focuses on a different topic.

Over the next week or so, we’ll be posting summaries of each of the workshops so you can make a decision about which two you’d like to attend. The first summary is below.

Best Practices for Community Managers
Led by Jeremiah Owywang

The role of the Community manager is a glorious one, the chance to interact with members, and build a better world.  Sadly, so many communities run into the ground from poor interaction, bad management, or not listening to those who are really in charge  – the customers. 

Join Jeremiah Owyang, former Community Manager at Hitachi Data Systems and now Forrester Analyst as he kicks off a discussion around Community best practices, and common pitfalls to avoid and conquer. 

In this interactive workshop, everyone will have a say in sharing their ideas, learning from each other, as we dive into what makes communities thrive and fail.

Jeremiah is a Web Strategist and Senior Analyst, Social Computing at Forrester Research.

Of course, we all face plenty of challenges.  A major challenge for all of us at Virgin Management and one that keeps me awake at night is how to keep the unique Virgin look and feel as we continue to grow and diversify.  Virgin is a very diverse group of companies, united around a simple goal of being the consumer champion. We’re in everything from airlines to online gambling, from healthcare to bridal wear – in 29 countries around the world. How do we maintain the essence of Virgin, but still deliver a differentiated service in each territory and industry sector? Maintaining and keeping alive the core values can get overlooked, and that is where I can support the businesses – through shared learning from the rest of the group.

Virgin Management is not so much of a traditional head office as a guiding and supporting function for the group. Each business runs their own show and we trust them to represent the name of Virgin. But where the group really benefits is the fact that most issues and challenges have been faced by someone within the group around the world. We can learn form each other and avoid repeating the same mistakes!

An obvious challenge is working with third parties and suppliers to deliver our service. It would be fair to say that not every business values it’s customers in the same way as Virgin does, and finding the right partner is the first big step to getting it right. Building the relationship and educating a partner to think outside the box and see the value of going the extra mile for a customer is a big challenge, no matter where in the world our businesses are located!

For example, in some of our businesses we outsource our call centre function. We bring the Virgin marketing and customer service together and choose smart partnerships with business who are equally expert in their field and take the time to help them learn the Virgin way of valuing and loving our customers.

One final point to note is that making mistakes is a tough but acceptable part of our culture. It is how we learn and has helped us continually evolve what we do and how we do it. You shouldn’t hide mistakes, but hold them up so you can learn from them and make it better in the future.

This excerpt from a conversation with Michael is just one of the many things you may hear and learn about at Customer Service is the New Marketing. Be sure to check out the web site for more information on the full speaker line up and how to purchase a ticket.

Michael Murphy is the Group Brand Manager for Customer Service at Virgin. Michael’s featured talk at Customer Service is the New Marketing is “Virgin’s Crown Jewel: Customer Service, across 200 Companies and 29 Countries.”

I started out 15 years ago “in the trenches”, working at a 24 hour call centre for Visa globally handling lost and fraud travellers’ cheques claims.  That first role touching customers and dealing with different people in different languages got me hooked – I intend to never lose contact with that, as to me, it’s the most critical part of a business.

I moved on to work across many industries, invariably supporting customers in multi-lingual environments and usually 24 by 7 operations.  Moving up the ladder, I headed to Citibank, Exodus, and Accenture over time. I worked briefly in the USA, the Netherlands and France.  With the need for a new challenge, I moved to South Africa where I took up my first role with Virgin.

I started working for Virgin in a small office in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa.  I met the newly appointed COO at Virgin Mobile South Africa for an interview at his house.  I sat in shorts and t-shirt in the COO’s back garden, holding a beer in one hand and his young child on my knee and I realised that people and their lives outside work were an important part of the people at work. Virgin Mobile South Africa had only just been formed a couple of months earlier, and on arrival at the office on my first day, it was straight down to mapping the end to end Customer Experience with the Chief Customer Officer (once the Team got used to my British accent). 

Once you know what your customer journey looks like, you avoid the bad habit of building the processes around system and people constraints. You put the customer first to ensure a differentiated experience.  Whilst I understood the whole Virgin way, applying that in a new country and understanding what Virgin meant to the South African consumer was a great learning experience for me.  Right from the recruiting stage – where we made sure every candidate had a brilliant experience as well as a thorough interview- to the less than typical board meetings – including one where we had Coco the Clown paint the faces of all the executive team – we built an exceptional customer experience which resulted in a lot of changes in the South African mobile market (as we do everywhere we go) and we handpicked some exceptional people to deliver this. 

Virgin people aren’t always the typical choices, they often don’t fit a mould, but what they all show is passion for customers and a creative flair to make a difference.

After a couple of years, I was ready for a fresh challenge and moved back to the UK to take on a new role as head of customer service for Virgin Group.  In this role I help the new business to set it up right, support existing business as they grow and evolve, own the global benchmarking of our standards around customer service and drive the global customer service strategy for the group.

I’m not often in the office and my day often starts out with a train or plane journey. I try to spend as much of my time as I can with the businesses, meeting with all layers of the business from the front line to the board room. 

I run a lot of workshops, forums, brain storming and best practice sharing sessions, because my role is to help the businesses to continue to improve the customer experience.  It’s great to share the good stuff that we have done around the group, but equally rewarding to listen and learn from each business.  In every business I visit, whatever the challenges and opportunities, the best part is time with the front line people. No matter where they are or what they’re doing, they represent the face and the voice of Virgin and they are the ones who truly make the Virgin difference.

I love my job because we do make a difference. The people who work at Virgin never lose their passion and spark.   As I spend time with each business, I gather together some of the stories of how we love our customers – we call them Goldfish Stories. These are actual events that happened, which show how we fixed things when it had all gone wrong, or how we thought outside the box to find a customer solution.

It’s not enough to have great service and innovative products, you’ve got to love what you do, and only then can you deliver the sort of service that Virgin customers have come to expect. It is that notion that ends up making the biggest difference to our customers.

As told to Douglas Hanna.

Tickets are still on sale to Customer Service is the New Marketing. The one day summit in San Francisco is going to be taking place on February 4, 2008. Check out the web site for a full speaker lineup, schedule, and more information.

At Customer Service is the New Marketing, Tara will be on the Customer Service as Community, Community as Customer Service panel.

Customer service ties into marketing because it is much easier to re-sell (or upsell to) an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Having poor customer service is like running your heater on high while leaving your windows wide open. The more money you put into keeping your existing customers happy, the less you will have to put into finding new ones.

Not only are all of your existing customers your most valuable customers, they are your future most valuable customers. Treat them that way and they will not only continue to be your most valuable customers, but they may even help you find many new valuable customers. Good word of mouth is hard to come by, but bad word of mouth is hard to shake.

How community ties into marketing and customer service is also interesting because customers love to share their experiences with one another. If someone has experienced awful customer service, this story will spread like wildfire through various communities through word of mouth. If someone has experienced amazing customer service, this story will also spread like wildfire. Which stories do you want shared in online communities?

The power of community is underestimated because it isn’t as visible or measurable as ’sticky eyeballs’, but it is more real. Social Capital, the value of the relationships one grows, has always been a strong driver of Financial Capital, but it is only recently, through the visibility and influential power of customer communities that companies are seeing the impact of SC on FC. As people move more and more online to do their research when it comes to purchasing decisions, this will impact the bottom line of companies more and more. It is advisable to plan for this growth today.

I get to work with amazingly smart, turned on, passionate, driven people everyday through my community involvement. Even after all of these years, I am constantly amazed and thankful for so many good, giving people, who will do everything they can to make the world a better place to live in. And they do this because it is their community and they know we all benefit from this positive action.

As told to Douglas Hanna.

Remember that today is your last day to take advantage of early bird pricing. If you want to take advantage of the $295 registration price, head over to the web site and register today.

This is the second interview with a speaker/panelist that will be at Customer Service is the New Marketing in February of 2008. Today’s interview is with Patti Roll, who is officially the Director of Community Sourcing and eCommerce with the hip bag company Timbuk2. She will be on the Customer Service as Community, Community as Customer Service panel at CSTINM.

We’ve been making custom messenger bags in San Francisco since 1989. That’s pretty unique. In the late 90’s we developed our first web-based custom bag builder and we became part of Adobe’s dog and pony show for Flash. They’d project the bag builder on a big conference screen, design a bag and drop it in the cart. We’d get the order, build the bag in our manufacturing facility and send it to the conference by bike courier. Very cool and not much different than how it all happens today.

I got involved with Timbuk2 when I was a buyer at a bike shop in Palo Alto called Wheelsmith. During that time, my Timbuk2 service contact was this cat named Anthony. Any time I called to place a bag order there was a 50/50 chance that Anthony was in a good mood. A few years later, I was hired as a dealer service rep at Timbuk2 and the very same Anthony was my trainer. Back in 1998, all six of us office folks sat directly above the sewing floor. It was noisy as hell and we had our company meetings in the founder’s bedroom, which was adjacent to the “office”. Messenger bags were becoming cool and we were trying to keep up with demand. It was a great time to be with the company. I came back to Timbuk2 in February 2007 when Perry Klebahn joined as CEO. The office has more people and a conference room that doesn’t double as a bedroom, but the vision for the brand is sharper than ever.

Customer service is important to us because we’re committed to creating a profoundly personal experience for our terrific customers. Whether it’s the custom bag they designed, the packaging that was included, or the voice in the order confirmation – the stories they tell are what keep the Timbuk2 brand meaningful and relevant. With the evolution of social networks, these “word of mouth” stories have amplification like never before and are the purest form of marketing simply because they are unsolicited and based on personal experience.

I really think I have the coolest job because the Timbuk2 offices are walking distance from my house in the Mission, San Francisco and every morning I spot at least 5 people with Timbuk2 bags heading to their own offices. It isn’t uncommon for me to head downstairs from the office to give at least one weekly impromptu tour of our manufacturing facility – a real treat for folks who’ve never seen how we make a Timbuk2 bag.

I have a long history with Timbuk2. Back when we were small it was easy to make our customers happy because they walked through the door on Treat Street and talked to us every day. We’re bigger now and are blessed that the Internet provides a new “front door.” It allows us to stay close and transparent to our ever-growing customer base.

As told to Douglas Hanna.

Remember that the last day to take advantage of Early Bird pricing ($295) for Customer Service is the New Marketing is December 31. After that, the price goes up to $495. Now is the time to act if you want to take advantage of the lower pricing. As always, all the details can be found here.

Alex Frankel is the author of “Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee.” In writing his book, Alex took an unusual approach. Instead of interviewing people about what it was like to work at companies, he got jobs at those companies himself. In the interview below, he tells us about his experience and thoughts on customer service.

I got started working as a journalist more than a decade ago. When I was about 17, I met a guy who had worked as a UPS driver and he told me all about that job. He told me specifically about how much he had been analyzed and examined by some scientists sent from corporate headquarters: they had measured things like how long it took him to walk an average package to someone’s front door from his truck. The level to which they cared about such things intrigued me and from then on I knew I had to work for UPS some day, and to live the brand. One December I applied, and was hired.

The idea to write Punching In came after I had worked that hectic December delivering packages. I grew more interested in applying to work at other large retailers and service companies so that I could compare and contrast. I wanted to get a hands-on sense of what it would be like to be trained to be a caring, loyal employee by a company that had a stake in winning me over.

I went in with a feeling that all the frontline jobs I was applying to were jobs that essentially drew from the same talent pool, but I was completely wrong. Someone who elects to work at Starbucks is a very different person from someone who gets hired and stays on for ten years at UPS. There’s a self-selection process in play that I had not understood and that surprised me greatly.

Frontline employees are the face of many companies, they are the people who work directly with customers. When someone walks in off the street and into a Starbucks café or an Apple Store, that first impression they have after meeting an employee will create an idea in their head about what the company is all about. Now, more than ever, people are increasingly a strong strategic weapon companies use to attract customers, people are often more important than the service or product a company is selling.

In recent years, many companies have realized how critical their people are in terms of presenting a cohesive experience for customers. These days you see more companies that have happy, excited, and friendly workers in the critical customer-facing and welcoming positions and this is a direct result of new efforts by companies to ensure a higher level of service.

Working in that environment is interesting because by wearing the uniforms and undergoing the training you find yourself slipping into a new way of thinking and working. I went to work in a busy Starbucks in San Francisco and had an interesting experience a few weeks in. We were slammed, with a line of customers flowing out the front door. Sporting a green apron, I was in charge of ringing people up on the cash register. I motored for hours under duress but it was not until I was on my way home from work that I remembered that I didn’t actually work there, that I was in fact an undercover reporter. I had fully merged into the job at hand. Until you “live the brand,” as I did, you are really taking other people’s word for how they feel.

You cannot apprehend what it feels like to work a certain job unless you are wearing the uniform and living by the rules of a given employer. The subtle, or not so subtle, changes you feel when you put on a uniform and undergo training are extremely informative. For example, the feelings I had when I first changed into a brown UPS uniform and gazed at my reflection in the locker-room mirror were the kind of feelings you could not replicate by simply interviewing UPS workers about their jobs. (I tried doing so.) Subtle shifts are simply not apparent unless you are trying to be extremely observant, as I was.

Customer service means different things at different companies. I found workplaces where the employees work harder and do a better job because of the thinking that has gone into creating a great place for them to work. I think companies should be much more creative in their approaches and do things in a unique way instead of following consensus ways of operating. The Container Store hires great employees by using a totally original means of interviewing prospective employees. Similarly, Apple’s stores do a great job in training newly hired employees by offering a truly thorough and engaging process.

If you can attract customers to work for your company who arrive as fans of the company before they even start work, you are in good shape. If you don’t have a fan base like Apple does, the next best thing is to match a corporate culture as close as you can to the type of people who will end up working at your company or stores. Enterprise Rent-A-Car is filled with hard charging young achiever types and training is catered to that group specifically.

As told to Douglas Hanna.

Remember that there is still time to register for Customer Service is the New Marketing at the early bird price of $295. All the details can be found here.

The schedule is now almost completely filled out and we’ve gotten an excellent line up of speakers confirmed and ready to go.

Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad and a Vice President at Best Buy has been confirmed as our fourth speaker. Robert finishes up a speaker line up that also consists of Alex Frankel (Author, “Punching In“), Michael Murphy, Group Brand Manager for Customer Service at Virgin, and Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.

Our panels on the subjects of Scaling Customer Service and Community as Customer Service have participants from leading companies like Rackspace, Timbuk2, Flickr, and Automattic. Plus, we just added new lunchtime workshops covering topics such as Open Source Tools for Customer Service, Marketing in a Relationship Economy, and Best Practices for Online Communities, to name just a few.

We’ve been working to put together a conference that’s outside the usual technology-centric ones, with a real focus on discussing ways in which genuinely connecting with your customers can bring value to your business.

There’s still time left before the end of the month to register for the early bird price of $295. Visit the summit site for more details and registration info. Hope you can join us!