Secret Sauce for World Domination

True story of my customer service experience from the past week:

We just moved (still in Houston). We were thankful that the area is already set up for U-Verse, so we went ahead and had it set up (we had U-Verse at our old house and became big fans). AT&T guy comes out to the house when originally scheduled, sees that our house is still undergoing some renovation and rather than working around a few things, elects to tell us that we’re “going to have to reschedule the appointment.” Fine. I can understand that – sort of. We call back to reschedule and are told the earliest we can get is in 2 weeks. “But we just had someone out yesterday that didn’t want to do the job. Can’t we clean up a little bit and have someone back out tomorrow?” We can have someone out in 2 days between 9 and 11. Fine. I arrange to have a friend be at the house who calls me at 1pm to inform me that AT&T never showed up. I call customer service once. I’m sorry to hear that, sir. I can set you up for an appointment in 2 weeks. Hang up – call again. I’m sorry to hear that sir… You know how this goes. Call a third time and find someone willing to help. Sure I’ll squeeze someone in to come out to the house tomorrow morning. So you’re telling me that the first two people I called just didn’t want to help?

Sheesh.

Technician number 2 comes out to the house today. Again, I’ve arranged to have someone at the house when they arrive. They show up and call me to tell me they’re going to have to drill holes from the outside of my house into the living room to run the cables. Say what? That’s not going to work. They say they can’t drop wires down my walls because there’s too much stuff in my attic. This can’t be happening. Well can you move some of it to give yourself the access that you need? “That’s not my job, sir.”

We come up with an alternative solution (I came up with it – not the installer who clearly does not care if I have U-Verse or not). The installer tells the person at my house that she’s going out to her car to grab something.

She drives away.

I call AT&T twice this time to find someone who cares. Guess what? They offer to set me up with an appointment in two weeks. I ask to speak to a supervisor. They put me on hold. Waited for 20 minutes before I realized they just didn’t want to deal with me anymore.

Believe it or not, this isn’t just a platform to complain. I did need to vent a little, but we’ve all had comparable experiences with the likes of AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Cingular, etc. We dread making those customer service calls. Sometimes you even end up feeling like they’re your client rather than the other way around.

I can’t come up with a possible explanation for why these companies have decided to not demand that they become known as THE provider with great customer service. It costs money, I know, but don’t you see this gaping hole in the market? Your competitors are few but they’re huge competitors. It’s like Ford and Chevy. If the next F-150 comes out with a glaring weakness, you better believe Chevy is going to make that weakness their strength.

It’s the secret sauce. If one of these guys would
commit to great customer service, massive investment as it may be, I switch today, and my guess is, so do about 30 million others. There is no industry, no business model, that can’t support a commitment to customer service. In the internet/cable/phone service provider industry, the guy with great customer service just may take over the world.

Brand Humanization: Who’s Doing Business with a Logo?

I’m sure you’ve heard it. Whether you believe it or not is a different story altogether, but piggy-backing on the prevelance of social influence marketing is the thought/saying, “consumers don’t want to work with logos – they want to work with people.”

A large number of brands have been very intentional in putting a name, face, personality and/or voice (which we were always supposed to have) behind their brand. Zappos has Tony. Apple has Jobs. GE had (and still has to most of us) Jack Welch. Comcast has….Frank?

Before we even had the option of using Twitter for a brand or developing a facebook fan page, certain companies recognized the need and capitalized on the opportunity to humanize their brand. I believe and hope I would have always argued in favor of this approach. But now, it’s getting painfully obvious. Most, including myself, would make the assumption that the face and personality of the brand should be the CEO (and if your CEO just isn’t that charismatic, you get a celebrity to do it for you).

In many cases, as I detailed above, this is the case, but the successful variations are ever-increasing. Tony Hsieh had a tremendous business model with a unique (and simple) philosophy to which he’s unwaveringly committed. But here’s the thing with Zappos: he’s not the only face of the brand – his whole company is. You can find every single Zappos employee on Twitter, tweeting about whatever their hearts desire. One would assume that there’s some level of governance, but it doesn’t come through that way. They come through as people who fit into a well-defined culture that’s about people.

Sweet Leaf Tea, out of Austin, TX, is another perfect example. CEO, Clayton Christopher, is all over Twitter. But he’s not tweeting behind a logo. I was recently in the audience for a panel with Sweet Leaf’s social media lead, April Riggs. April cites the unique culture at Sweet Leaf that allows for this model (Zappos, obviously, falls into this category of having a strong and well-defined company culture). I think she’s right. However, if we accept that consumers want to buy from and work with people, not logos, then shouldn’t brands adopt this model whether they have a unique culture or not?

Onto Frank. Frank has added a little bit of white paint to the bucket of evil jet black that Comcast has been for so long as it pertains to customer service. Use Twitter as a customer service tool! Frank proposed. Frank’s not a CEO. Frank’s not a celebrity. He’s a person, and that’s ultimately what we care about. We don’t want a logo, an automated recording or even a person reading a script. We want a person who will listen and intelligently respond. A person who may be a master in his or her industry but who also loves the Boston Red Sox.

We have a greater opportunity to humanize our brands now more than ever because we have the tools to do it. Edward Boches, of Mullen, has qualified consumer desires to work with people as a consumer trend worth blogging about, and in our interaction, he specifically makes the point to say that the CEO may not be the face of your brand. I agree with him. There may be a lot of faces behind your brand. You need to (1)trust them and (2)ensure they fit into and represent your culture (if they work for you, they should anyway). It’s yet another reason to become a student of these new tools and platforms.

As a student, I don’t have this all figured out yet. Here are some questions I’m still dwelling on:

1. Governance seems to be an obvious need for individuals representing a brand. But does that contradict what this is all about? Is governance trying to create a person that doesn’t really exist?

2. I recognize that developing a web ‘personality’ is key. If 20 people are representing my brand, am I disconnecting that personality?