customer conversation

Three Companies that Started down the Trust Path with Customers First

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 22:04:50 -0400

They do it by talking about and engaging with topics and content that will make their customers smarter. Or they share tidbits that are fun and engaging, and share the love. These are the secrets of successful corporate blogs - and I’ll share then in less than a thousand words.

Five Companies that Fix their Story to Inspire Service

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:17:31 -0400

Branding as a strategy means little if the customer experience is not there. If your story doesn’t align with what you do, all of the clever tactics you can come up with to follow your lofty goal will not make the cut.

Unless you can fix your story by inspiring a culture of service from the inside. You instill a belief as well as make an example of behaviors to follow throughout the organization. You know that this cannot just be a grassroots effort, it needs to come all the way from the top.

Would CPG Brands Compete with their Own Channels for Customers?

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:52:46 -0400

AdAge writes an interesting article about going beyond online ads to eCommerce opportunities for CPG brands. Will it pay off? Services are easier to deliver online. A few product dot-bombs in the early 2000s made us keenly aware of that.

One of the companies mentioned in the article is Alice.com. Their model is to connect customers to companies directly. But this is not their main story.

Customer Issues and the Bottom Line

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 21:52:44 -0400

Many marketers spend a considerable amount of time calculating the ROI of campaigns by looking at cost per lead (CPL) or Web conversion numbers. You are probably quite smart yourself to the ways of lead nurturing and its importance in branding and customer acquisition. Those are known costs of doing business these days.

Yet many companies fall apart when it comes to opportunity costs.

Innovation and Failure

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:32:57 -0400

There is a good relationship between innovation and failure. As Monica Harrington shares, Microsoft Bob gave plenty of very smart people a run for their money - and lessons to take to their next project. Those are familiar lessons. Building on Harrington’s:

Mad Men and Trust Agents

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:16:12 -0400

They’re at the opposite ends of the conversation spectrum. The show context is that of media and advertising, two areas that are undergoing rapid change - some would call it a decline. Mad Men captivated the public’s imagination by its depiction of a long gone era - dare I say with a tinge of nostalgia?

Fluency in Customer Conversation is a Key Business Driver

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:15:40 -0400

There is a reason why this publication is called Fast Company. The US has an even shorter attention span than many places I’ve had the fortune of spending time in. I’ve been writing about customer conversation here for more than 18 months and I don’t get tired of saying it - fluency in customer conversation is a key business driver, one that will make or break a company’s tenure at the economic table.

How to Give Your Company Service Deadlines

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:12:02 -0400

Usually it’s the customers who give you deadlines - and sometimes ultimatums - on service. Needing something done by, support within “x” time, service at “y” time and place. What would happen if you turned that concept on its head and gave yourself a deadline instead?

How you can get the Most out of Customer Service

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:12:26 -0400

We spend so much time talking about how to improve customer service that I thought one post on how to improve customer attitude would be time well spent. If you think about it, we call a customer support line only when we have a problem - rarely if never to proactively say how much we love a product or a service.

Why are we so ready to give feedback when we have a bad experience and yet so harried and thoughtless when we have a great experience? Probably because we’re busy telling all our friends and do not think the company that gave us that experience might care.

How to Map to the Social Media Engagement Profile of Your Customers

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 17 May 2009 20:20:57 -0400

You probably already know that Forrester’s social technographics profile can help you analyze the social profile of your customer base. As authors Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li explain in the book Groundswell, people increasingly use technology to get what they need from each other, instead of relying on companies and businesses.

This is a social trend accelerated by technology, not the other way around.

How to Answer the Social Phone

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:53:15 -0400

It seems that if there are many ways to listen in the social Web, there are also many reasons with the ways to answer. Tom Asacker puts it well, we define ourselves both according to what we identify with and what we reject, and given the abundance of marketplace choice, we now choose interactions which we feel will produce the best story possible.

How do You Find Out What Your Customers Want?

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:44:55 -0400

You could just ask, but that wouldn’t give you a product or service worth the money you might put into it - 50 to 90% of the product and service initiatives by US companies are failures. This costs in the magnitude of $100b per year.

And that’s taking into account that these companies have adopted customer-driven thinking. Innovation needs to be outcome-driven to create breakthrough products and services, writes Anthony Ulwick in What Customers Want.

Sprint Nextel Tells Customer “No” Data

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:20:55 -0400

Sharing the data you collect about a customer with that customer may be your single most important gesture of transparency - not to mention that it may give you the ability to convert more of those conversations.

I found the story while reading the Sunday edition of the Inquirer and it caught my eye. When a Sprint customer requested an itemized bill, the company refused to send the information. The answer, after some considerable waffling:

When it Comes to Customer Service, Action Speaks Louder than Words

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:36:12 -0400

Social media is rarely the work of only one person, especially when it comes to implementations done by organizations. Today however, I wanted to talk about the difference that one person made in each of three companies - even though they worked in concert with a team that supported them.

What’s Your Moment of Truth?

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:36:07 -0400

Quite a few years ago, Jan Carlzon wrote a book titled Moments of Truth. At the time, Calzon was the CEO of Scandinavian Airlines Systems and had helped the company reorient itself to become customer-driven. In his own words, a company that recognizes that its only true assets are satisfied customers, all of whom expect to be treated as individuals and who won’t select them as their airline unless they did just that.

How Intuit Keeps the Pulse on Tax Advice to Help Customers

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:10:31 -0400

TaxAlmanac is a free resource for tax professionals, a wiki created by Intuit to help them stay current. In return the company gets free tips and advice from a roster of tax specialists that help improve its products for customers.

The wiki includes:

Adobe Creates a New Kind of Customer Conversation on Delicious and Reaps Rewards

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:27:51 -0400

Smart companies have learned that often the best users of their products know as much or much more than their employees. Adobe is one such company. They are the creators of design and desktop publishing tools for communications and the company’s mission is to revolutionize how the world engages with ideas and information.

How Best Buy Socializes for Business

Valeria Maltoni — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:45:56 -0400

In an interview with Francois Gossieaux of BeeLine Labs, Barry Judge says "to the extent that we can basically be human with what we know, and share it as freely as we possibly can, I think we'll go a long way towards gaining a higher or stronger level of trust with the consumers."

How to Build an Engaging Video Library for your Customers

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 31 May 2009 13:32:34 -0400

This is not the kind of library that just sits on the shelf. It’s a very active and dynamic way of offering information, tutorials, FAQs answering most asked questions, and special announcements for your customers.

Why does video work?

How Customer Conversation can Be the Keystone of Your Marketing

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 03 May 2009 19:07:48 -0400

Direct conversations with customers allow organizations to become public resources on areas of expertise. This happens in at least two ways: (1) through engagement, or social components, and (2) with valuable content, which is where I see a future for marketing.

How do you recover from a bad attitude in customer service?

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:58:24 -0400

Ask Dave Taylor, as his site says, Dave is an industry guru who is willing to answer questions about a wide variety of technical topics. He’s not the only professional who is giving service away.

3 Tips any Business can use to let Customers in the Conversation

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:56:05 -0400

Movies are so compelling. There’s a reason for that. They’re distilled stories we can identify with and feel something about - the hero, the villain, even the lover. It’s all so simple in a movie. They tell us something about the human condition, but not the whole thing.

Can You Just Add a “Stay in Touch” Function to your CRM and Make it Social?

Valeria Maltoni — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:07:18 -0400

If you think about the fact that many of us need reminding to stay in touch even with family and friends, it could be an interesting proposition - add the button or function to the system and you’re ready to go.

However, there might be a bit more to it than meets the eye. New media is not just channels, or the ability to (potentially) reach anyone in the world within seconds, although if you’re connected, it does.

How to Show Your Customers You’re Listening, Even as They Might not be

Valeria Maltoni — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:15:34 -0400

Twitter culture rules these days. There are many conversations going on at the same time and that seems to be part of the attraction. People tend to want to be where things are happening. In the culture prevalent in the medium and in the Western culture for that matter, a question warrants a reply.

In fact, often it is tempting to reply with a question to a statement. That’s how we figure things out, learn about what’s going on, and develop relationships with each other.