by
Josh Bernoff
and
Ted Schadler
Maybe you’ve heard about the musician Dave Carroll and his experience as a United Air Lines customer. He was so incensed that the company rejected his damage claim after its baggage handlers broke his guitar that he made a catchy YouTube video, “United Breaks Guitars.” Eight million people have already viewed this decidedly negative take on the United brand.
Carroll’s reaction is hardly unique. The popular mommy blogger Heather Armstrong was so upset over the failure of her Maytag washer and the company’s ensuing service missteps that, using her mobile phone, she told her million-plus followers on Twitter they should never buy a Maytag. Greenpeace supporters barraged Nestlé’s Facebook page with complaints about how the company’s sourcing policies lead to environmental damage. The list of examples is endless, because these days anyone with a smartphone or a computer can instantly inflict lasting brand damage.
But it’s not just cranky customers who can use readily available, powerful, hyperconnected technologies to make an impact. Employees can, too. Mark Betka and Tim Receveur, of the U.S. State Department, used off-the-shelf software called Adobe Connect to create Co.Nx, a public diplomacy outreach project that presents webchats with U.S. government officials, businesspeople, and others. The webchats now have international audiences in the tens of thousands and more than 100,000 Facebook fans. At Black & Decker, Rob Sharpe uses homemade online video for sales training, just as Dave Carroll used it to lash out at United. Paul Vienick, in charge of product development for E*Trade, made E*Trade Mobile Pro possible—he used mobile to serve customers and build loyalty, just as Heather Armstrong used it to attack Maytag.
You can build a strategy around empowering employees to solve customers’ problems—but it will challenge your organization from the inside. Freeing employees to experiment with new technologies, to make high-profile decisions on the fly, to build systems that customers see, and to effectively speak for the organization in public is not something most corporations or government agencies are accustomed to doing.
They may be concerned, for example, about how employees will use the technology. After all, part of Nestlé’s problem with Facebook was the clumsy response of its own employees to the Greenpeace attack. But in this age of smartphones and broadband, employees can’t be blocked from doing inappropriate things. It would not have been possible to stop the Domino’s employees who posted a video on YouTube of themselves pretending to perform unsanitary acts on customers’ pizzas.
Far better than trying to prevent such activity is to acknowledge that your employees have technology power. Then you can set policy, train them in permissible communications and activities, and harness their creativity as a strategic force to power your company. Armed with technology, your employees can build solutions at the speed of today’s connected customers. They’re ready to do so. But if you’re like most managers, your company isn’t yet set up to make this activity possible. It could be. It could behave like Best Buy.
Best Buy Empowers Its Staff
Best Buy is just as susceptible to online customer complaints as any other company, but because it’s run differently, it can respond differently. A good example is Twelpforce. More than 2,500 Best Buy employees have signed up for this system, which enables them to see Best Buy–related problems that customers have aired on Twitter and respond to them. Twelpforce includes customer service staff, in-store sales associates (called Blue Shirts), and Geek Squad, the service reps who make house calls for technical assistance.
Source:hbr,org
No comments:
Post a Comment