Snow Leopard has been out less than a week and already there are compatibility issues - with Adobe CS3 to be exact. I didn't upgrade, Louis did, and I do not have Adobe CS3 suite on my Mac, only at work on my PC. So I won't launch into a highly technical post on the compatibility issues. Adobe and CS3 users have been at it for days now. John Nack even wrote a post about comments to the post.
What I'd like us to explore is a few learning points about handling customer conversations on a blog, or a forum. Given the gold rush online, it's worth taking a moment to understand how frustration and overwhelm can easily take over and challenge us. If your organization and business is planning to build a presence online, you might think about some of these likely scenarios.
Customer service is not exactly a crisis communications emergency, although it could become one when not handled properly. Poor customer conversations do lead to team burnout along with giving your company a bad reputation and poor word of mouth. Whenever I ask business owners what is the most likely reason people find out about their products and services, they immediately say word of mouth.
Nack later posted an open letter to customers from Adobe VP Lambert Walsh, who recognizes:
We are working diligently – in fact, teams are working around the clock – to resolve these issues. I’d like to thank all our customers who are sharing feedback and giving us the opportunity to respond. We appreciate your loyalty, support, and willingness to make your concerns heard.
Being helpful is where it's at and any business that figures how to do that consistently wins - in the near and long term. Given that there is so much talent out there today, I would be looking at those lines of business that have a near-monopoly on the market for new business ideas.
Read those comments in the posts above - they are by customers passionate about the products who have consistently lamented one thing in unison: Adobe customer service is a check-the-box experience. Run a Google search, you will see that Adobe and customer service don't go together very well. What about?
- getting the actual technical folks online. If they are one and the same with product managers, great. If not, get the tech folk involved early
- developing a way to sift through inquiries coming in (this is where you could make a good use of checking the box ) and then routing them to the right experts immediately. For CS4 issues, John; for CS3 compatibility problems, Dan; for known Safari plug in issues talk to Lia, and so on (I'm making the names up)
- then publishing the help guides and continuing to be proactive
Instead of letting things heat up in the comments to a couple of blog posts, the organization could prepare for issues in advance. Apple has a loyal following of professionals who tend to be early adopters. It's almost a guarantee that they'd be on a new product as soon as available.
Bottom line - It takes as much energy and resources out of an organization to do poor customer service as it does to excel at it. In fact, doing a good and well supported release costs less. The cost of customer support is dependent on good product stewardship. Today at Fast Company expert blog we look at the bottom line when it comes to solving customer issues.
Teresa asks, have we become too lazy as customers? Weigh in with your thoughts.
[image credit the techno file]
Great post, Valeria! In an idea world businesses would have fantastic customer service programs and customers would do their part without demanding shortcuts from a customer service rep.
Sometimes it seems as if customer service programs are developed specifically to ward off interaction, because customers can be highly demanding and even unnecessarily rude. But it pays in SO MANY ways to create a responsive, interactive customer service department, and you're so right that it takes just as much money and resources to have a bad CS department as it does to have a good one.
Frustration can easily get the best of us (I might even admit to it getting to me in that post I wrote), but preempting that frustration by providing solid, helpful customer service can develop even stronger loyalty and eliminate countless "crisis management"-type issues, too.
Posted by: Teresa Basich | August 31, 2009 at 12:08 PM
Ha!
I guess that is one spot M$ shines!
As consumers - every new release of Windows we automatically understand that most things won't work.
We *expect* it not to work-
There is zero expectation that one week in any software at all will work :-)
Posted by: Elliot Ross | August 31, 2009 at 02:49 PM
"I guess that is one spot M$ shines!"
Ha ha ha...
As it happens M$'s OS don't brake old software with every new release, this does make then clunky heaps of crap, but M$ will go out of their way to prevent what happened to Apple and Adobe happening to a windows user.
Posted by: Scott Herbert | August 31, 2009 at 04:51 PM
@Teresa - "Sometimes it seems as if customer service programs are developed specifically to ward off interaction, because customers can be highly demanding and even unnecessarily rude." This works even is you split the two phrases. Warding off and defensive behavior also happens when the product is not so good.
@Elliott - took me a couple of minutes to figure out you were talking about Microsoft. A tech guy told me recently that no software works perfectly on the first release. Maybe there isn't enough time to do the QA? Or perhaps customers are more creative in using the tools?
@Scott - what does happen to me is that my PC freezes constantly while my Mac never does. Maybe it's all the company security features, but there is a huge difference in productivity between the two systems. Good to know that Microsoft would provide a better experience.
Posted by: Valeria Maltoni | September 01, 2009 at 11:16 PM