Tune in to your customers online

Tuning in to end-users or customers in real time is crucial in a world that moves at such lightning speed. One of the effects of a transparent and digitally connected world is that the tolerance levels of customers have shortened dramatically. They will no longer wait weeks for a response to a complaint. They’ll be on Twitter or Facebook complaining to their friends, and if they are creative enough in the way they express the complaint their issue could go viral and global frighteningly quickly.

As an example, the video streaming company Netflix was recently forced into an embarrassing climb-down after user objections became so deafening that they had to kill off an idea before they could launch it. The company had planned to spin off DVD rentals into a stand-alone service called Qwikster. Customers didn’t like the idea, and through social media their complaints went viral, causing serious brand damage within just hours.

Netflix spokesman Steve Swayze was forced to admit that the internet was a great equalizer. ‘We made mistakes that hurt our brand, and now we’re rebuilding step-by-step.’

When one person is able to assemble an army of hundreds of thousands, that person becomes a force to be reckoned with. Thanks to the increasingly savvy use of tools like Facebook and Twitter, the power balance between companies and customers has very much tilted in the latter’s favour.

For this reason the best leaders are now monitoring social media on a continuous basis, and using that to provide insights all the time. These insights can be the trigger for improving a single customer’s experience, recognizing a negative trend or even spotting an opportunity for a whole new product or service line.

I remember being regaled at a dinner by the marketing director of a chain of women’s sex shops about the use of social media for service improvement. Much to my amusement and discomfort, she told me about monitoring the conversations in chat rooms that often caused her to take action the next day. The one incident she spoke of that stuck in my mind was about two women chatting online about a shop attendant who had piercings in her lips, nose and ears. Both women, on the point of buying intimate sex toys, felt there was possibly something unclean about the attendant, and were put off their purchases. The next day the marketing director requested that all shop attendants removed their piercings while on duty in the stores, citing this exchange as the insight behind the action.

Beware of false data

Lou Gerstner was Chairman and CEO of IBM from April 1993 until the end of 2002. He is largely credited for turning around IBM’s fortunes. How? By truly bringing the outside in. There is a video available online showing Gerstner talking about what he found when he first arrived at IBM. He asked to see customer research and was amazed to find that it showed customers loved IBM. How was this possible, he asked, when the company’s fortunes were nose-diving and customers were deserting in droves? A month later he asked again to see the data, to find it had now improved even as the company’s fortunes had worsened! He asked the key question: how was the data gathered? He was told that customer account handlers selected who was to be approached, and if they were too difficult to reach, they filled the questionnaires in themselves, on the basis they really knew what the customer thought. This, said Gerstner, was both funny and tragic.

Sadly, however, this technique is not as rare as you might imagine. I have seen it happening in several organizations where I have worked, including the UK Atomic Energy Authority. At a time when the Authority was preparing itself for flotation on the stock market as a commercial science and engineering consultancy, we were doing a huge amount of work to improve perceptions of the organization. I did a significant amount of research, polling lots of different stakeholders about their attitudes to AEA. The customers we polled gave us some worrying feedback. While they loved the science and technology we were producing, they felt we had a huge amount to learn about being customer-centric and providing a good service.

When I went back into the organization to talk to the scientists and engineers about what I’d heard my report was flatly rejected. They told me they knew their customers and that their customers were very happy. They produced evidence of their own surveys to demonstrate the truth of what they were saying and all of my ideas for change were resisted. Crushed, I went back to the drawing board. This time, I conducted a much wider survey of customers, and asked the researchers to get customers to give specific examples – in their own words – of how they were being disappointed. At the same time I asked for copies of the ‘research’ that our own consultants had conducted. Without saying that their research was flawed, I simply compared and contrasted the findings and encouraged debate and discussion to open minds to new ideas. It was only when our staff saw the quotes from customers who were prepared to be named that they started to be shocked enough to move from complacency to action.

Figure 6.1: Bringing the outside in