March 3, 2008

Tuesday = Tacos

Attention taco lovers: Tuesday is your day.

Join us next Tuesday, March 11 — high noon — at SXSW, in Austin Texas.

We’ll be munching on (free!) breakfast tacos and talking about exactly what it is we’re up to at Get Satisfaction.

We’ll be right next to the convention center, and we have bona fide conversations for you to join:

* 12-12:30: Breakfast tacos! (Salsa!)

* 12:30-1:15pm: Get to Know Get Satisfaction: A Primer. All the ways companies are using Get Satisfaction to reinvent customer service and build community. We’ll have some current company users on hand to talk about their own experiences with Get Satisfaction.

* 1:30-2:15pm: The Secrets of Managing Customer Communities. The tough problems around community management — and the easy solutions. Our community management team talks about building and maintaining the Get Satisfaction community, with an eye toward helping your company get started building your own community.

* 2:30-3pm: Of OAuth and APIs: Integrating Get Satisfaction on Your Site. Your customers can hop from your site to ours. We tell you how. Specifically, we’ll cover OAuth, a new third-party protocol that makes it (relatively) easy to give your users instant access to Get Satisfaction without the need to create another account.

Come, listen, participate, and be part of the breakfast taco community.

PureVolume Ranch
323 E. 2nd Street
Austin, Texas 78701
Map it

You can RSVP right here.

Can’t wait to hear exactly which different types of tacos are on the menu? Contact lane [at] get satisfaction [dot] com.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in company, customer service, community, Tips and tricks, hospitality, conferences, appearances, Satisfaction, SXSW, tacos | Comments (2)
February 5, 2008

Notes from the Summit

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“Customer Service is the New Marketing” — What a zany idea.

Well, not so crazy judging by the number of people who showed up for Get Satisfaction’s first Summit yesterday. The San Francisco Weather Gods startled everyone by punching the “Rain” button that had been stuck and depressed for the last few weeks. With our eyes now opened by sunshine (and ten or twelve cups of coffee), a packed crowd sat down to see if anything innovative is going on in customer service.

Boy, is there.

At the conference, I was chatting with Kathy Badertscher, of the DIY online book publisher Blurb, and she remarked that she had taken more notes at this Summit than she’d taken at any other conference in recent memory. She’s not the only one. Here are a few of the best blog posts and comments I’ve seen so far about what went on yesterday at the “Customer Service is the New Marketing” Summit:

On the Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That! blog, Andy Sernovitz put together not one, not two, but three lists of great ideas he heard at the conference. That’s 38 great ideas! Bravo, Andy. These are real, actionable ideas.

Brian Solis, host of the “How to Listen to the Market and How to Engage Customers Online” workshop, put together a compilation of the tools that were talked about throughout the day. These are the online Web services you can use to open your ears and eyes to the things customers and bloggers are saying about you online. If you still haven’t started using these kinds of tools, drop what you’re doing right now and get yourself set up.

Ross Mayfield gives his impressions of Robert Stephens’ tongue-in-cheek (and very laugh-out-loud) “Marketing is a Tax You Pay for Being Unremarkable” presentation, which included the history of the Geek Squad.

On the Web Strategy blog, Jeremiah Owyang puts forward his findings from the Online Community Best Practices workshop he hosted. These are things you can utilize as best practices and benefits/cost analyses as you figure out how you’re going to incorporate and grow a real community.

If you want some wonderfully detailed and business-savvy coverage, Christine Herron’s take on the Summit’s main events are where to look. She writes down nearly every percentage and statistic mentioned — very impressive.

Jon Silvers’ Blog Bites Man blog has some well-rounded thoughts on what he considered “probably the most riveting presentation” at the Summit: the speech by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. I can attest that everyone was as impressed by Tony’s humble and unassuming style as they were by his insight. “Creating the right culture is what keeps Tony up at night,” writes Silvers. “Not sales, not merchandising, not operations… culture. To address culture, everyone in the company — whether you’re in sales, service, or merchandising — everyone, gets five weeks of training. It includes immersion in the culture, core values, customer service, warehouse, and more.”

Five weeks! Now, that is impressive.

I was personally impressed that all of the speeches, panels, workshops were bursting with witty and telling observations. These are the exact same kind of interactions companies are trying to foster by marrying customer service and community. No one took themselves too seriously yesterday, but it seemed like everyone got something seriously useful out of the Summit.

Well done, community.

If you were there, thanks for attending! If you missed it, we’ll have video of the presentations posted in the coming weeks, which I’ll try to roll out as it gets edited. Flickr pics of the event are also available here.

And, of course, thanks again to our very generous sponsors, Joyent, VentureBeat, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Web 2.0 Expo!

By Eric Suesz | Posted in customer service, community, hospitality, conferences | Comments (1)
August 20, 2007

The magic scoreboard

Courtesy of the Washington Monthly, this is an unforgettable image of one of the earliest call centers. It’s a scan of an ad from the October 1958 copy of Newsweek, and the copy (obscured here) reads:

This “magic scoreboard” makes it possible for the Hilton Reservation Offices listed below to give you, while you are still on the phone, complete reservation information at any of the 33 Hilton Hotels around the world. You will receive an immediate verbal reply on your reservation request, and a written confirmation will be mailed the same day.

There are some informative comments below the post. For instance, the “magic scoreboard” showed rates and availability to the operators, and was called the “rack”. This is the origin of the term “rack rate,” which means the base room rate.

My favorite part is the young woman carrying the vase of carnations across the workroom.

By Thor Muller | Posted in customer service, hospitality, Asides | Comments (5)
May 2, 2007

Genius bars for everything

Genius Bar by rachly

Thanks to a nasty sinus infection, I had the ill fortune of ending up at the urgent care center at my local hospital last weekend. I wasn’t at all surprised when it took me more than two and a half hours to be seen by the doctor for five minutes and get my prescriptions written. It wasn’t surprising to me because I’m all too acquainted with the U.S. health care system.

These hours were mostly spent waiting sitting in uncomfortable chairs, in a seemingly unventilated room with two dozen patients with unknown infections, and bad daytime television blaring overhead. Then there were the multiple interrogations by administrators working to get me in the queue, process my insurance and document my conditions.

The whole process seemed downright medieval. I couldn’t help but fantasize how Apple would re-engineer the clinic. I’m sure they’d allow us to pre-process ourselves online (either from home or in the lobby), filling in our own insurance information and description of symptoms from a point-and-click interface. We’d get an approximate time-slot rather than waiting around for hours. Perhaps the doctors would see patients in a space-efficient set-up that kept them maximally engaged at all times–standing at a bar, with patients sitting on stools across from them. (Alright, this last part is ridiculous given strict health privacy laws, but still the simplicity of it is appealing).

I must admit that this isn’t the first time I’ve overlaid the Genius Bar solution onto a crappy customer experience problem. But why is it that the Genius Bar concept is so attractive a solution? It may be because the concept is based on the hospitality industry, in particular the concierge services offered by fine hotels. It’s not just that there are knowledgeable staff ready to fully engage with everyone with a problem–clinics have them, too–it’s that the environment and philosophy seem to be perfectly aligned with the interests of customers. Danny Meyer, the restaurateur behind Union Square Cafe and others, recently talked about the magic of hospitality at the Good Experience Live (”GEL”) conference. Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path provides the highlight:

There was a time, not too long ago, when all you needed to do was deliver Quality, and you’d succeed (see: Total Quality Management). Then when everyone offered the same quality, service was important. Now, however, the differentiator is hospitality, which Danny defined as that feeling that the people you are doing business with are “on your side.” (A firm that excels in service could still not be on your side.)

Yes, that’s the difference! Apple behaves as if it’s on my side, at least at the Genius Bar. It also explains well why doctor visits remain such unsatisfying experiences. No matter the bedside manner of individual doctors, the system itself handles patients as entities to be managed and potential liabilities to be mitigated. Thus waiting rooms feel like quarantines. But let’s be honest, it’s no easy task to be on the side of both patients and insurance companies at the same time, let alone hospital boards, pharmaceutical companies and lord knows what other interests. Let’s just agree that it makes perfect sense they’d opt to remain agnostic on the whole issue of sides.

By Thor Muller | Posted in philosophy, case studies, hospitality | Comments (4)
February 28, 2007

Be opinionated, dammit

WaiterToday’s New Rule for Customer Service is…be opinionated. In any relationship nothing breeds trust like “being real,” and this is never truer than when people aren’t expecting it, such as in the cruel world of commerce. This means that sometimes the best way to build a lasting customer relationship is to talk smack about your own product–when it’s deserved. By drawing attention to the bad as well as the good you demonstrate that you and your customers are in this together. In the past week we’ve seen this work well for Jetblue (admitting to terrible follow-through), New Balance (dissing its apparel business) and 37Signals (critiquing flaws in Campfire’s design).

This works even better with everyday customer interactions. When I eat out at restaurants I like to ask the wait staff about their favorite dish on the menu. I can often predict the quality of a meal based on the strength of the waiter’s opinions. A good restaurant will give its staff lots of opportunities to sample its food. It wants its servers to know not just the culinary factoids about tonight’s unpronouncably gourmet dish, but also how it tastes, its mouth feel, what else it’s like. Not just which wine should be paired with the dish, but why.

And I’m far more likely to trust a waiter, and the restaurant by extension, if he also talks about what he doesn’t like. Though it is counter-intuitive, it gives me real comfort when I order to know that some dishes aren’t as good as others. Similarly, I spend more money at clothing stores where the salesclerk tells me when something’s not looking so hot on me. I trust them when they give me the thumbs up on something else.

Now think about the customer service interactions that fail–insurance companies, phone companies, PC-makers. These are organizations that have no place for opinions, nor the passionate involvement of their staffs. They actually provide scripts designed to protect against such things.

As people we share opinions when we genuinely care–care about the subject we’re discussing and those we’re sharing with. So it’s natural that the wait staff at great restaurants tend to be foodies themselves. Successful boutique workers are fashionistas. We can see that being opinionated is ultimately tied to who we are. We can’t fake it, at least very well. That’s what makes being opinionated so special, and why it’s today’s New Rule.

By Thor Muller | Posted in philosophy, customer service, hospitality, new rules | Comments (0)
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