So here are three good places to start:

Related posts:

1. Aesthetics, statistics and strategic marketing plans
2. Old-school hip-hop and a pretty strange lesson in customer engagement
3. Bad customer service is dead

Can any company with bad customer service survive in a world of ubiquitous social media?

Here’s a small round-up of the many ways in which my local train company, First Capital Connect, is committing customer servicide.

• Twitter feed of real-time feed of passenger angst.
• Search YouTube for First Capital Connect and results are full of documentary evidence of lousy customer service.  The most witty reflection is below:

• Online government petition to end First Capital Connect’s franchise here.
• First Capital Connect official Facebook page (364 members).
• I hate First Capital Connect Facebook page (2,548 members).
• FirstCrapitalConnect parody site (Page 1 on Google for ‘First Capital Connect’).

Can’t help but think that as a shareholder, I’d be worried.  I can’t help but think that this weight of authentic, peer condemnation neutralises any investment that FCC could make in its brand.  Putting it another way, your customer service is your brand.

Related posts:

1. Bad customer service is dead
2. Old-school hip-hop and a pretty strange lesson in customer engagement
3. New utility customer service challenges

• If it was a country, Facebook would be the third largest in the world.
• 50% of UK mobile internet traffic is Facebook.  Imagine what that means for customer service word of mouth.
• 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are user generated content.
• 200 million blogs exist and 34% of bloggers post opinions on products and services.
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations.  14% trust advertising.

Bad customer service begins to sound like customer servicide doesn’t it?

There’s a great video here, which explores the social media revolution:

Related posts:

1. Customer service or customer servicide?
2. Banking customer service. The old oxymoron
3. New utility customer service challenges

Customer insight arms race

For £10,000 a report, anybody can buy as much customer surveying, benchmarking, customer ethnography, usability, psychodemographic segmentation, social network monitoring and integrated listening capability as they want.  There are two problems with driving innovation from this kind of insight:

1. Lots of organisations have deep pockets, so the pursuit of a commercial edge through third party solutions becomes an arms race rather than a competitive advantage.
2. These approaches are a step removed from reality.  They’re constructs.   They are to real customer experience what television is to reality or what air conditioning is to climate.

Contact centre Cassandras

By contrast, service teams are the most under-exploited resource for driving product and service innovation out of customer insight.  If this isn’t self-evident, ask yourself the following questions:

• Who spends the day in constant contact with customers?
• Who has most emotional investment in putting right the things that cause customers angst?

Contact centre staff know exactly what customers love and hate.  They experience it viscerally every day.  But, Cassandra-like, their voice is often overlooked in strategic marketing and new product innovation.  Why?  The reasons boil down to a)  narrow service management focus on cost and operations, b) silo’s between service management and marketing c) service staff without the skills, systems or incentives to make a strategic difference and d) physical and cultural remoteness from the Board.  Visually, the problem looks like this:

Service management barriers to product innovation

The most powerful customer insight you’ll ever have?

All of these barriers can be broken down fairly easily, and for far less cost than many customer insight approaches.  Here are four key ways of doing it:

1. Get service agents to listen and probe for what customers are saying about competitors, products and features.  Make sure that this kind of insight can be captured and reported in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
2. Track service performance against brand values, and not just operational targets.
3. Conduct regular reviews of raw customer service feedback, searching for strategic product and service insight.
4. Give the Board regular, visceral, experience of the customer.  Board members should sit in on the call centre at least every month and should regularly listen to representative recordings of customer contact.

Related posts:

1. Five ways that customer service fails… and what to do about it
2. How to have disruptive ideas
3. After Eureka: 7 questions to test innovation for big and unreasonable profit potential