Going the extra mile for your customers

Posted by Daniel Welch

Customer service was so much easier before. If your customer had a complaint, he or she would be referred to the call center. Businesses had the upper hand because it was a one-on-one affair. Sure, word-of-mouth still had some influence, both positive and negative, but as a whole and on an individual level, it was difficult for customers to pressure businesses.

That all changed with the Internet, of course. Many of us have visited sites like Yelp.com or PlanetFeedback, or immensely popular blogs like Consumerist. The power of these sites, of course, is the power of embarrassment. If enough consumers get together to complain about a certain company or project, momentum can be generated against the company when these complainers are joined by frustrated “me too” customers. And this no longer happens in the one-on-one environment, of course – the company’s dirty laundry (terrible customer service, products that break or malfunction, etc.) is aired for all to read.

Get Satisfaction is yet another customer service hub, but with a slightly different goal. Instead of a venting factory, Get Satisfaction envisions itself as a “Switzerland” in the company-customer battle by providing “specific tools that allow people to get answers to their questions” and “not get buried in online discussion forums.”

One interesting note on Get Satisfaction’s business model is that, unlike the other similar Web sites, it isn’t relying on advertising dollars for revenue. Instead, it wants to sell companies customer-communication software – not to mention persuade them to add a widget (application) to their Web sites that refer visitors to that company’s dialogue on Get Satisfaction. This is a risk for these companies, of course – while they may save money if they receive fewer customer service calls (if some of these questions are answered through a Get Satisfaction discussion, for instance), they also may be sending customers to a site where they’re being bashed by frustrated customers.

The takeaway from all of this, however, is that the customer service world is getting broader – and fast. Instead of just having a call center, now companies need to be scouring Web sites and in general engaging their customers where they are, instead of waiting to be contacted. It’s a more proactive exercise, and as a UC Berkeley professor notes in the article, “by not engaging consumers in this environment, the mere fact that you haven’t engaged them becomes public knowledge.”