John Caddell's blog

Part 1 of this series can be found here.

Recapping from yesterday: companies need to listen carefully to their customers, and while new means like blogs, Twitter, etc., are promising sources of customer feedback, the truth is that the vast majority of customers don’t (and maybe won’t) use these tools. There is a source to tap the knowledge in these other, silent customers–the front-line support staff. Retail clerks, bank tellers, etc., have person-to-person contact with customers every day. If customers have opinions, they hear them. The following diagram describes how their intelligence could be captured and used to improve companies’ understanding of their customers.

(Steps 1 & 2 were covered in yesterday’s post.)

Step 3: Periodically, a group analyzes the archive of blog posts, comments, etc., pulls out important excerpts and creates summary data based on the content of the posts. The data is compiled and prepared for analysis by a cross functional team in Step 4, below.

Step 4: The team evaluates the excerpts and the graphs to detect broad patterns that can inspire action. By way of example, a retailer who is trying to understand buyers’ temperaments more deeply in this economic crisis might examine a set of blog posts from before the crisis and compare the topics/findings with a set of posts from the last month or two. This will illustrate patterns in how buyers are reacting to the crisis, such as by substituting one good for another, saying different things to clerks, etc.

To perhaps make this concept more concrete, there was an article in the WSJ yesterday (”From Attitude to Gratitude“) talking about how people are treating their investment advisors since the crisis hit. This quote from the article could have been one of the blog posts I envision here:

“I’m not getting complaints,” Mr. Hirsch (an investment advisor at Credit Suisse) said. “People aren’t asking, ‘What did you do to my portfolio?’ They’re asking, ‘What do we do from here?’”

One quote isn’t a pattern, but imagine there were several dozen stories like this from Credit Suisse’s advisory team. From this insight, management could devise approaches to give the clients the kind of advice they’re asking for, building loyalty that could last beyond the end of the crisis.

That’s what customers are really talking about. And knowing it means you can act on it.

And that’s what I’m talking about.

(Acknowledgement to Shawn Callahan, from whom I first heard the possible uses of blog posting and RSS for collecting and using distributed knowledge. Here’s a white paper Shawn wrote on the topic.)

[Part 2 of this series can be found here.]

I touched on this topic six months ago, but I think it’s worthy of some amplification.

Companies need to listen carefully to their customers, and while new means like blogs, Twitter, etc., are promising sources of customer feedback, the truth is that the vast majority of customers don’t (and maybe won’t) use these tools.

Other sources for customer insight include call-center recordings, customer-service chats, etc. [A white paper on using call-center recordings is available here: Gathering-Using Customer Stories.]

This still leaves a lot of customers–those who don’t contact the company–unheard.

There is a source for this type of insight–the front-line support staff. Retail clerks, bank tellers, etc., have person-to-person contact with customers every day. If customers have opinions, they hear them. The following diagram describes how their intelligence could be captured and used to improve companies’ understanding of their customers.

[This is a very preliminary draft, and I welcome comments, critique, suggestions, etc. It may end up to be a dumb idea or unworkable for some reason. I think, though, that it's worthy of serious consideration and thought.]

Step 1 is the front-line teams blogging on a daily basis about their experiences. The prompt for these blogs is a very simple, general question: “What was the most interesting thing that happened today?” Rather than ask them to sign onto a computer and type their blog post in, it’s gathered via phone. What’s easier than leaving a 1-2 minute message on the phone? The poster also supplies a title for the post.

The phone messages would be auto-transcribed using a service like SpinVox or Dial2Do and automatically posted to an internal blog.

In step 2, the blog posts are distributed via RSS to a wide range of readers within the company–customer service, marketing, management, etc. This group scans the post titles on their RSS readers, read any that caught their eye, and comment on, share and/or rate the posts that were most interesting to them. This process will quickly separate the interesting information from the noise (and we should expect a lot of noise).

In addition to sharing their thoughts, the blog readers can propose improvement projects based on the what they learn through reading the blogs.

(We’ll continue this post tomorrow.)

(Acknowledgement to Shawn Callahan, from whom I first heard the possible uses of blog posting and RSS for collecting and using distributed knowledge. Here’s a white paper Shawn wrote on the topic.)