For as long as I can remember customer service IS and always has been marketing. Here is why- if you look up the definition of Marketing you’ll find a few “old school” definitions here is one….The American Marketing Association (AMA) states, “Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.” And how is customer service defined? Per wikipedia- Customer service (also known as Client Service) is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase.

For the life of me, I cannot understand how customer service got separated from Marketing? I think of it this way- customer service is real people interacting with real people a.k.a. prospects, suspects, customers to deliver on the value proposition of your company. Why do we think with the wave of popularity of SM will change this?

Before the internet (gasp- who remembers that?), the only face or voice customers experienced was sales folks or customer service folks. Before companies had websites, twitter, blogs and all the other SM stuff they had face to face or phone selling and customer service. Even back in those says customer service was marketing- we just called in good service back then

The suspicious side of me, says maybe customer service professional are really behind this entire initiative. What if they are driving this in evil underhanded attempt to get the respect and $$- budget allocations, they so desperately eed and deserve? After all customer folks everywhere are doing the most difficult job with the least amount of respect. I say, go for it, and I hope the effort makes significant changes for all customer service organizations.

So, while I don’t agree that social media is creating a new movement to re-define or re-position customer service as the new marketing, if the result is more companies pay attention to customers and build advocacy centers a.k.a customer service, client services, customer care organizations that are funded for success and have a voice in the company, then I’ll buy in to Customer Service is the new Marketing!

In my humble opinion, this is misguided, and since its my blog, I get to disagree. Instead, I believe companies are simply anti-customer. By anti- customer I don’t mean they don’t want customers- that would just be crazy talk. Without customers we don’t have a business- right? In todays environment its easy to point the blame to the newest channel to the mix- social media. But let’s face it, companies who display this behavior are simply afraid of interacting customers on any level in any channel. The companies who get it, Apple, Nordstrom’s, Zappos, would embrace smoke signal communication channels with their customers if it meant improving their customers experience an ultimately their brand. Don’t blame the channel, instead look at the company and its leadership. Chris Brogan’s article
Check it out!

Seth’s blog Too Small to fail, makes me think that if ALL companies approached everything they do by acting small, while thinking BIG, most companies would save quite a bit of $$ and reap the benefits of increased retention, increased wallet share and ultimately increase their profits. Thanks Seth for the thought provoking post.

One secret of being a large financial institution is that you can take huge risks because you’re too big to fail. If you hit craps and lose it all, don’t worry, because you’ll get bailed out.

One secret of ’small is the new big‘ thinking is that you won’t fail and you can’t fail and you don’t need to worry about a bailout. Not because you’re small in headcount or assets, but because you act small.

A small acting bank would never have invested in tens of thousands of loans that they hadn’t looked at. And a small acting startup wouldn’t hire dozens of people before they had a business model… and then have to lay off a third of them just because their VC firm showed them a scary PowerPoint.

I’ve always been frightened by big-firm accounting. The sort of financial legerdemain in which skilled accountants work hard to make the numbers look the way the CEO wants, instead of making them clear. Cash accounting run on a simple bookkeeping system is the small way to do it… even if your company is huge. That’s because sooner or later, management has to know what’s actually happening as opposed to what they can pretend is happening.

Big-thinking companies lose customers all the time because big-thinking companies isolate the decision makers from the outside world. Angry customers who are leaving don’t get heard… that news is heard by the poor shlub reading a script at the call center. 90% of the angry customer mail that people forward to me (I have enough for a lifetime, thanks) is angry because the (former) customer is tired of being ignored.

If you act small and think big, you are too small to fail. You won’t need a bailout because your business makes sense each and every day. You won’t need a bailout because your flat organization (no matter how large it is) knows about problems long before they’re too big to deal with.

The media and the tech blogs glamorize businesses that act big. They write about the big checks VCs hand out and they lionize the organizations that make a splash. The untold story is in the organizations that are close to the customer, close to the product and close to each other. Acting small always pays off.

(Thanks to Howard for the phrase that inspired this post)

[From Too small to fail]

Critics, creators and spectators are all on the rise in social media, according to a new report from Forrester Research’s Josh Bernoff.

Bernoff looked at the number of “US online adults” who are using social tools. The overall percentage rose from a little over half in 2007 to three-quarters in 2008.

To help visualize the different types of social media users, Forrester created this excellent visual last year:

The new data showed that every category — except “Inactives” — grew in the past year as a percentage of Web users.

Check out the year-over-year numbers:

While a few more people have made the always-intimidating jump to “Creator”, what surprised me was the growth of the “Critics” category.

There’s nothing new about letting people review products online, but it definitely seems to be an increasingly mainstream activity.

So what does this mean to businesses trying to use social media? If you’re one of them, here are a few questions to ask yourself:

1. Have you given your visitors or customers any way to weigh in on your products through your own site? And no, listing an e-mail address on your “Contact Us” page doesn’t really count.

2. Do you know where and how your products or services are being critiqued? Such reviews used to be limited to books, movies and hotels. These days, you can review anything from dentists to day cares.

3. All these reviews — even the bad ones that make you cringe — are creating priceless data. Are you incorporating it into your research, development and planning?

[From More critics are cropping up online. Are businesses ready?]

I was lucky enough to be part of the myshelterhelper team, check it out! Serious props goes to GangPlank for everything you do to support start ups and Phoenix geeks :). Read the coverage from Tech Crunch- yep, its real!

It’s been some time since we last covered Startup Weekend, a series of events that bring a roomful of developers and entrepreneurs together to develop new startups in only 54 hours. When the program originally launched last year, each weekend was geared towards building a single application, of which every participating member was a cofounder. Since then the format has changed - multiple companies are created at each event, and they don’t have to incorporate at the end of the weekend. Here’s a handful of the companies founded at last weekend’s event, which was held in Phoenix (you can see the event’s blog here).

ReserveChute

With so much of our essential data making its way to the cloud, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to quickly make a local backup. Reserve Chute, an open source web app that will be available for use in the next few weeks, will automatically make backups of popular cloud based services including Gmail, Twitter, and Basecamp.

It’s unlikely that any of these services will be going out of business in the foreseeable future, and they almost certainly have redundant backup systems in place. But the prospect of having my entire photo collection or Email history wiped out is unnerving - having an easy way to back up these services would definitely give users some peace of mind, even if they never had to use it.

My Shelter Helper

My Shelter Helper is web page builder aimed to help animal shelters establish a presence on the web. Shelters can logon and after entering some basic information like their address and telephone number will be presented with a functional and good looking website. It’s a great idea, and I love the tagline: “Helping save animal’s lives.”

For now the service is generating some pretty barebones sites, but will introduce support for donations so that shelters can easily collect from benevolent animal lovers worldwide. I hope the team keeps working on this - anything that helps animals is a good thing, and plenty of people (like my mother, for example) would love to donate to their local animal shelter along with the national organizations.

Twittrratr

Awful domain name aside, the Twittrratr team has actually built a pretty cool Twitter site. After entering any keyword, Twittrratr will find related tweets and attempt to figure out if the subject is being spoke about in a positive or negative light. It’s a good idea but unfortunately it doesn’t work very well - oftentimes words that Twittrratr associates with a negative tweet aren’t being used to describe the keyword that was searched for. The team acknowledges that the system isn’t perfect and is open to suggestions (it’s still pretty impressive for 54 hours from conception to launch).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

[From 54 Hours To Build A Company: A Look At Startup Weekend Phoenix]

Gusty was SO good that she kept getting promoted. Over the length of our relationship, she was promoted from Stylist, to Senior Stylist, to Master Stylist, to the other of all titles: Artistic Designer. I don’t know if those were the exact titles, but you get the picture. She got promoted over the years and as a result her rates increased. I understand this and was happy for her and totally thought she deserved it.

It was only when she got to the Artistic Designer level that I had to say “love ya, love your work, but buh bye.” For 4 years she had been doing pretty much the same thing to my hair, but now I was paying more than double what I had been paying at the start. Gusty and I ended our stylist/stylee relationship amicably and just like I understood her ever increasing rates, she understood that it was not something I was willing to pay.

I was satisfied with Gusty. I was MORE than satisfied with her, actually, I was thrilled. But I wasn’t loyal. I knew I could find someone who could do to my hair what she did for 1/2 the price. It was the Artistic Designer promotion that was the tipping point. My feeling of satisfaction was outweighed by the reality of the situation. Satisfaction + Loyalty, as a team, may have won out, but alas satisfaction on its own was not enough.

The salon had tons of opportunity over the years to secure my loyalty, but they didn’t. They rested on their laurels, believing the cache of their name and reputation AND the superior skills of their stylists would more than make up for climbing prices. For some people, maybe. But for me, no. It was a shining example of the difference between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Today, I arrived to my deli counter and there was a big flat screen on a high stand about eye level, curious by nature, I check it out. And what to my astonishment is this, but a fully functioning touch screen to place my deli order. No kidding, nobody is using it, it must be too hard or maybe they ignore this machine like the beaming red number dispenser? I am feeling lucky today, okay, really in a HUGE hurry to get in and get out, so I touch the screen, it is so drop dead simple to use- a cave man could use it I click thru, there is offer to up-sell cheese, which is not too annoying, only 1 extra click. A receipt prints out and I hear a loud beep as it prints out behind the deli counter at the same time- no kidding.

I do the rest of my shopping, return to the deli in about 20 minutes, and there before my eyes in the deli case case is a pick up basket with my numbered receipt and my order all complete, ready to go. I feel like this is my lucky day. Its like the Southwest Airlines commercials with the people singing Hallelujah…… Normally I wait at least 15 minutes just to get attention from someone, and even when I reach the human I rarely get exactly what I asked for. Astonishing, this automation has saved me 15 minutes or more and my order is perfect to specification.

A minor cost to the store, and I am the happiest I have been since, well, my college days working in the deli when I never had to wait for my lunch meat. This one adjustment means I will shop at Fry’s, period. There are 3 other grocery stores within 1 mile of my house, and some are rumored to be cheaper- don’t care, this store has my business because they made my shopping experience 100% better with one simple adjustment.

I bet you know a few things your company could do, that are minor changes or low in costs that could add real value to your customer’s lives in the form of time, savings or convenience. And by doing so, you could create loyal customers to your brand who would be telling everyone- like I just did - go find it and fix it.