In cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance.
John Perry Barlow
Wireless is defined as the transfer of information without the use of electrical conductors. In many ways this definition captures the blessing and the bother of Internet connections. The mobility, speed, and ease of the Internet as a tool for “interlogue” are clearly worthwhile assets. However, robbed of the capacity to read non-verbal information, there is great potential for misinformation and misinterpretation. Without accurate dialogue, understanding can suffer.
One study at UCLA indicated that up to 93 percent of communication effectiveness is determined by non-verbal cues.1 Another study found that the impact of a performance was determined 7 percent by the words used, 38 percent by voice quality, and 55 percent by the non-verbal communication.2 Stripping the lion’s share of the effectiveness features from communications with customers puts enormous burden on those factors that are left.
We elected to devote a chapter exclusively to the Internet customer because it is rapidly becoming the communication conduit of choice. The key to turning this “dialogue in the dark” into a boon for renewing the service covenant requires the application of the partnership principles to the discourse.
The Internet is a lot like a rattlesnake. Rattlesnakes are not aggressive snakes until threatened. Then they provide a warning to their opponent in the form of an unmistakable rattle. But if the rattle is ignored they strike quickly and with a bite laced with venom that has a lasting impact on the “strikee.” Successful organizations serving the wired-and-dangerous customer must be great “listeners for the rattle,” intently monitoring all channels simultaneously. “Wired and dangerous” also suggests that once a rattle is heard from customers, the service provider must be prepared to react quickly, succinctly, and effectively.
Let’s return with more detail to an example used earlier: the United Airlines baggage claim incident in the spring of 2008 with musician Dave Carroll. As we unfold the illustration, keep the rattlesnake metaphor in mind.
Dave was flying on tour with his band, the Sons of Maxwell, from Halifax to Omaha with a stopover in Chicago. When he was deplaning in Chicago to catch his connection to Omaha, he overheard a passenger exclaim, “My god, they’re throwing guitars out there.” The ground baggage crew first threw the bass guitar, then the case containing Dave’s $3500 Taylor 710ce guitar. When he appealed to a flight attendant on board, she referred him to the terminal agents. Three different agents responded with indifference to Dave’s concern, telling him he would have to take it up with baggage claim in Omaha.
When he finally arrived in Omaha at 2 a.m. (two hours late), there were obviously no baggage-claim employees available. From this point, Dave’s saga of trying to get some restitution lasted almost a year, involving countless phone calls, forms, and emails. He was bounced from city to city and even airline to airline (Air Canada is the United Airlines alliance partner in Halifax). In frustration he turned his songwriting skills into a YouTube video performance called “United Breaks Guitars”3 and posted it in July 2009. Since we are focusing on the Internet customer in this chapter, we will pick up on Dave’s story at the point his video complaint went viral. In complete fairness, we are examining this saga through the customer’s eyes without benefit of “the other side of the story” from United Airlines.
In today’s cyber world, the diversity of service is loudly amplified. Brick-and-mortar service restricts access largely to those customers geographically nearby. Rarely do customers drive many miles to patronize a particular store or service. Consequently, customers of brickand-mortar commerce hail from similar neighborhoods with similar values and mores. With Internet service accessible to all, no matter their demography, geography, or ethnology, organizations with too many rules and restrictions and frontline employees with too little decision-making authority can box service providers into responding with what customers perceive as stubbornness.
Flexibility is not just an attitude at the opposite end of rigidity; it emanates from a keen understanding of the customer and a desire to adapt the offering to fit the customer. We were working with the call center of a major utility that had elected to eliminate a segment of 24/7 access to the call center for customers, forcing Sunday afternoon callers to wait until Monday morning. Their rationale: Only a handful of customers ever called then, so why worry. It seemed not to occur to them that they could easily and inexpensively have outsourced that service to a retired call center rep willing to cover the segment from home on Sunday afternoon. The cost of adding to the Monday morning handle time could have easily funded the part-timer.
Customer segments are different in terms of their Internet preference. Convergys 2010 research revealed that Millennials showed less preference for live phone support, while Baby Boomers showed increased preference. Their preference was driven in part by their growing frustration with automated phone systems. Gen-X customers indicated they were not using live web chat, email, or automated phone systems as much as they would like. They relied more heavily on live phone support because the channels they really preferred either did not exist or were not being supported in the right way.4
UNITED AIRLINES’S INITIAL DECISION ON DAVE’S GUITAR
Ms. Irwig at United denied Dave’s claim for restitution to repair his guitar because he did not complain in the right place or at the right time. The culprit for the damage to his guitar was never in dispute!
The Convergys research also found a huge disconnect among Millennials between what they were using and what they really wanted. Fifty-four percent of Millennials said they have used or are likely to use texting for customer service; 47 percent have used or want to use social media for service; and 44 percent have used or want to use smart phone applications.5
Customers do expect live web chat to take longer than a live phone call, but if they knew it would take twice as long, 90 percent would opt to speak with a customer service rep.6 There is no gain in providing live web chat if the customer spends 20 minutes chatting with an agent and then decides to pick up the phone and spend 10 minutes talking to another agent.
Dave Carroll described his “Rules R Us” experience with United to be like being served by automatons with one eye on the policy and another one on the cash register. The point is, no eyes seem to have been on the customer. “I’d also like to mention Ms. Irwig. She was mentioned in Song One,” Dave said in a video on The Consumerist blog, “She was a great employee, and unflappable, and acting in the interest of the United policies that she represented.”7 Notice the focus of his comments—“the policies she represented!” And, when he shifted from face-to-face to online, his information was trapped in a silo forcing him to repeat his story over and over and over.
Buy a book from Amazon.com once, or rent a movie on NetFlix once, and on your next visit to their site the computer will suggest other books or movies you might like. “Customers assume that when they make a purchase, the record of that purchase will be readily available regardless of the channel it came from. All systems have to be synchronized,” notes bestselling author Robert Spector.8 Take a look at how many online companies have gone to “My” as the prefix for their personalization—MyFedEx, MyOfficeDepot, and the like.
All of us take that customerization dimension to be table stakes today. We have been taught by Internet providers to expect they will remember us from previous encounters, know our history, recognize our IP address, and populate screens quickly when we transit from online to web chat to live chat. We assume there will always be a trap door giving us easy access to a real person. Log on landsend.com and the bottom left side of the home page offers an 800 number, a chat online, or a button to click for “call me.” The “all about me” customer expects to be included in ways beyond “Would you like to complete a survey at the end of this transaction?”
Service providers are answering that expectation with enormous creativity. For example, according to a blog on www.1to1media.com,
High-tech networking giant Cisco recently tested the power of social media outlets with the launch of myPlanNet, a downloadable video game that allows players to assume the role of a CEO and solve business challenges using Cisco products. Although introduced using traditional live events, myPlanNet quickly gained widespread appeal among IT professionals who turned the simulation game into a B2B social media juggernaut spanning various channels worldwide. According to Cisco, the award-winning social media campaign for myPlanNet has been downloaded more than 35,000 times and has attracted more than 55,000 fans on its Facebook page.9
As Cisco and other innovative service providers know, collaboration is the core of partnership. Threadless.com invites their website community to vote on the coolest t-shirts designed by fellow amateurs. The winning entries become their product offerings, providing great exposure for budding designers and a sense of ownership by the community. Jackdaniels.com has a fan club called the Tennessee Squire Association. They asked squires in Texas to vote online for their favorite color (red, white, or blue) for the Jack Daniel’s sponsored race car to be run in the annual Texas 500 race. Mountain Dew created a user-generated movement to launch a new product. The process (called Dewmocracy) involved more than 3 million customers in various phases of the design, development, and marketing of a new drink ultimately called White Out.10 Kodak has a digital media team including a Chief Blogger, a Chief Listener, more than a dozen full-time staffers who cover the web, SEO, and social media, plus a network of part-time bloggers and Twitterers around the world who represent different departments of the company.11
UNITED AIRLINES SPEAKS
United spokeswoman Robin Urbanski declared, “His video is excellent and we plan to use it internally as a unique learning and training opportunity to ensure that all our customers receive better service. … This should have been fixed much sooner.” One blogger responded with some advice for Dave: “Make sure you’re paid the royalties every time they view it in their training classes.”
eBay is another great example of an organization that views customers as partners. Every sixty days they invite twelve eBay users to journey to San Jose, California, to participate in the company’s “Voice of the Customer” program. These select people visit almost every department to talk about ways to improve service. This focus group methodology goes one step further. Every month thereafter for six months these same users are reassembled to explore emerging issues. As users evolve from being interviewees to feeling like members of the organization, they get bolder in their input. They may come in as a “customer with a concern” but they leave as a “partner with a plan.” The byproduct of these customer conversations has been important new offerings (like iPhone apps) and unique service enhancements for eBay.
eBay CEO John Donahoe put it this way: “ … we were not as outside-in as we needed to be. Consumers are driving a lot of change and we’ve found ourselves better off if we learn how to take advantage of them.…The passion our sellers feel is a blessing. The minute they stop caring and screaming is the minute we should be concerned. We’ve tried to be much more genuine and authentic about listening to their feedback.”12
The Internet world, being devoid of many of the usual signals we rely on to sense deception, demands absolute and complete honesty. It requires the pinnacle of transparency. Log on Bill Marriott’s blog “Marriott on the Move” and you will learn about the new Marriott extended stay Execustay corporate apartment brand. You get a detailed up-close-and-personal tour of a typical apartment.13 Marriott is a “people first” culture that places honesty as a centerpiece of the “home-like work atmosphere” they nurture. Walmart.com puts customer reviews right beside all the products they feature on their home page.
The truth-seeking component of effective partnership is that which values candor and openness. It is the dimension that honors authenticity and realness. The path to honesty in relationships is paved with risk taking. It involves the courage to ask for feedback as well as the commitment to value it in a way that is affirming to the sender. Honesty may sometimes leave relationships temporarily uncomfortable and bruised, but truth always leaves the partnership hearty and healthy. It exterminates guilt and deceit; it ennobles wholesomeness and trust-worthiness.
At its core, partnering is a commitment to a conversation with customers rather than unilateral action. If decision making is made without customer input it corrupts the service covenant. Partnering starts with asking for input. It continues with enlisting others in problem resolution rather than positioning yourself as the sole “answer person.” Partnering is operating with the faith that wisdom lies within us all and that by tapping the collective brainpower of customers and associates, the organization is stronger, more responsive, and more adaptive to the ever-changing requirements of customers and employees.
Honesty is the byproduct of great conversations. Effective Internet servers nurture a vibrant community and foster listening posts. The more the Internet feels like a cyber watering hole, friendly to all as well as protector of all, the more it becomes a crucible of trust and an assembly of importance. It starts to resemble the old-fashioned marketplace where farmers brought produce to sell to merchants and consumers relied on the confidence derived from dependability. As on the Internet marketplace at its best, rotten apples were banned, devious bargain hunters were disdained. Someone just passing through town might get away with a shady deal, but returning vendors were required to be trustworthy.
Honesty requires making only promises that can be kept. And, once made, successful Internet servers pull out all the stops to keep them. When errors occur, they are quick to assume responsibility and demonstrate lightning speed in resolving them. What if United had gotten every person Dave encountered in his saga to write a letter of apology? What if Dave had been asked to be a spokesperson on the United website? What if they had invited Dave to be a guest speaker in the service and ramp operations training classes? What if they had put Dave’s video on the United website along with the key lessons learned and steps in place to prevent future Dave-like occurrences? What if someone higher in the organization than public relations—someone on mahogany row—had commented in their annual report or corporate website?
One feature the Internet world lacks that face-to-face commerce typically contains is a tactile connection. Walk into a store to buy a new pair of shoes and you can feel the leather and the fit. Buy the same item online and, unless you are repurchasing an article that worked before, there is a risk that what you see will not match what you need. This makes fairness a much more crucial feature of the service covenant.
As we earlier mentioned, we consult with the largest wholesale auto auction company in the country. Buyers and sellers come together at the auto version of the “farmer’s market.” Major rental car companies are there to unload last year’s models, auto manufacturers are there to deplete glutted inventory of a model that undersold projections, and banks are there to sell leased or repossessed vehicles. Usedcar dealers are there as buyers of fresh inventory for their lots. If there is a dispute over a vehicle bought that was not as promised (“There was frame damage your inspector totally missed!”), arbitration is onsite to resolve buyer-seller disputes.
When the company elected to provide a portal that would enable buyers to watch auctions online and bid along with buyers onsite, the importance of full disclosure and fair dealings ratcheted up dramatically. All vehicles sold had a “condition report” (CR) that provided buyers detail about the vehicle before the auction. Online buyers began asking for more close-up photos of the scratch mentioned in the CR or a notation that the inside of the vehicle revealed the previous owner smoked cigars—all elements the person on site could see-touch-feel-and-smell.
However, the greatest change between online and in-lane buyers was the standards for arbitration. The old rules failed to take into account that the online buyer was making a purchase with only “at-a-distance” sight as their primary tool for gauging worth. To level the playing field the company instituted a “we’ll buy it back” policy if the buyer registered any displeasure with the fairness of the deal within the first 30 days after purchase.
United Airlines could have taken a lesson from our auto-auction client. Like a rattlesnake, Dave Carroll had given a noisy warning to United in the form of his clever video. It appears that United ignored the warning. Then, Dave struck and struck hard. He not only made three videos, he appeared on the CBS Early Show, CNN’s Situation Room, and ABC’s popular show The View.
DAVE CARROLL SPEAKS
“United has been in contact with me, and they have generously, but late, offered us compensation, and I’m grateful for that, but like I said before, I’m not looking for compensation.”
The fact that Dave suggested they give their financial offer to charity could be interpreted to mean he was never asked: “Dave, what can we do to make it up to you?”
Had United responded immediately and appropriately to the first video, the sequel could have been a pro-United song and the emerging PR bite would have been prevented as the rattler slithered away. Had United monitored and used the power of multiple online channels, the situation could have been uncoiled and contained. But there was nothing about the video on the PR page of United’s website. The unofficial “United Airlines Fans” site had nothing to say about it. And, despite the gazillion tweets, blogs, and posts about the incident, there were only a small handful of tweets from United, mostly outlining their offer to Dave.14 Dave told us in an email, “I did say that if they were to make any commendable policy changes between then and my writing of song 3, that I would be inclined to be fair to them in the song. They never did throw me a bone to chew on.”
The warp speed and surprise power of the Internet means the very best antidote to the bite of a wired customer intent on striking is to be a fast fixer and a sincere healer, not a sounding board. And, that means asking customers for their definition of fair and then adding to it. It means drawing the customer in as a source for learning, not reaching for the checkbook in hopes they will go away. Bottom line, it requires thinking of the Internet customer as a partner who, because of their access to many cyber villages, can be a valued scout, interpreter, and peacemaker.
Immediately following the first Dave Carroll video, the maker of his instrument, Taylor Guitars in El Cajon, California, featured Dave on their website along with his “United Breaks Guitars” video. They also contacted him and, in the words on their website, “offered to have our repair techs at the Taylor factory examine the guitar to see if there’s any way we could restore its musical mojo.”15
UNITED AIRLINES TWEET
As Dave asked, we donated $3,000 to charity and selected the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz 4 music education 4 kids.
When Delta Airlines lost a passenger’s small caged dog, Paco, while it was waiting to be placed on a flight, Delta’s spokesperson indicated that the best they could do was refund his $200 pet transportation fee, but only as a “credit” for future Delta travel. Of course, Paco’s story went viral. The energy behind the story was less about the loss of a new puppy and more about the airline’s miserly response. Delta later raised their atonement to $380 plus two more $200 vouchers. But, the rattlesnake had already struck!
What makes bigheartedness so potent on the Internet? We laud the speedy philanthropy of Taylor Guitars and scratch our heads at the penny-pinching orientation of the two airlines. Now, let’s be completely fair. We do not know the content of the conversations between Paco’s daddy and Delta or Dave’s dialogues with United. Dave did tell us, “The donation of $3K to the Thelonius Monk Jazz School in my name was their decision and donation of choice.” It’s fairly easy to guess the tone, though. Dave launched a second and third video after hearing from United. Paco’s daddy posted his Internet story (with photos) after getting Delta’s “by the rulebook” offer.
Social media like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter provide concrete evidence that customers are changing the way they define marketplace. In some ways the Internet is a return to the old-fashioned village. While the new village is a global community, it nevertheless has many of the features of the village of yesteryear. In a small town, merchants knew you and catered to your specific needs. They acted on history, patterns of previous purchases. They’d even open the store after hours if you needed something. Over the last fifty years commerce has become distant, impersonal, and one-size-fits-all as the service covenant has altered. The Internet in general and social media in particular have helped connect customers with businesses in ways that are more personalized, open, around-the-clock, and valued.
Another feature of the old fashioned village was generosity. The village is where the concept of “the baker’s dozen” originated. Kids got a free taste at the candy shop; merchants gave away “secret recipes,” and adults got a “take it home and try it” assurance behind products. There was no need for a written “money-back guarantee”—the merchant was the guarantee. The closeness of shared space required varied means to maintain relationship balance. Customers and merchants relied on neighborly practices. A spirit of abundance was a way to start and maintain valuable relationships.
Like the old-fashioned village, the Internet is a world under a microscope. Value must be real and look real. The eye candy of websites must be interesting, easy, fast, and imaginative, or the cyber traveler will only be a drive-by window shopper or a targeted bargain hunter with little intent of sticking around (called being sticky) or coming back. It makes generosity—providing extra to value, not thinking of value as tit for tat—an important means to ensure a genuine partnership.
Log on to Gerbers.com, and their home page is organized by the stages of a baby’s life, from pregnancy to preschool. Not only are site visitors given product information relevant to a specific stage, but Gerber also provides information on growth and development, nutrition and feeding, and offers parental advice. At the other end of the spectrum, log on to Jackdaniels.com and, after putting in your birthday to get through the cyber front door, you are treated with a potpourri of recipes, stories, and entertaining trivia about Jack, Jack Daniels distillery, and Jack Daniels products. Intuit gives visitors smart advice by product and links them to a community of Intuit product users.
Applying the power of partnership can turn what might have become an Internet feeding frenzy into a happy ending. Earlier in the book we mentioned the Comcast customer who discovered a Comcast repairman asleep on the customer’s couch. Using his phone, he taped a video of the scene. It seems the Comcast repairman dozed off while waiting for over an hour to speak with a Comcast operator. The video has been seen by more than 1.5 million people. The good news is that the wakeup call for Comcast triggered a massive and impressive turnaround.
According to Tina Waters, SVP for National Customer Operations, Comcast launched a company-wide effort to improve the customer experience that has included:
• Instituting a 30-day money-back guarantee on all services
• Giving new state-of-the-art tools and information to techs and service reps to lower service calls
• Implementing six ways customers could contact Comcast, including an email directly to the CEO
• Giving customers the ability to manage their Comcast account via the web any time of day
• Shortening appointment windows and adding appointment times that customers said were most convenient to them
• Creating a digital care team to engage customers via blogs, online forums, and Twitter
Go to
The late Geary Rummler was fond of saying, “You can take great people, highly trained and motivated, and put them in a lousy system and the system will win every time.” We have included Tool #12 to help with processes or systems that are not helping to create a great service experience.
“Twitter has made Comcast more transparent and showed the benefit of listening to our customers through all communications changes,” Frank Eliason, a former director of digital care at Comcast, told USAToday.16
And, the result? A year after initiating the major effort, Comcast had already begun improving on J.D. Power scores.17 The year the sleeping-tech incident went viral, the American Customer Satisfaction Index scored Comcast at 54. In 2010 their score had already jumped to 61! Listening, learning and adjusting are the never-ending lessons of the age of the Internet.
Internet is a word we repeat without thinking much about its real meaning. When we shorten the word to Net we remove the most important part. Inter means “between,” as in interchange, interconnect, interface, interact, interdependence, and interpersonal. It implies mutuality and reciprocity, a give-and-take that respects both ends of a promise waiting to be kept. It can be the shining manifestation of partnership at its finest. And, it can transform a “wired and dangerous” customer into a wired and devoted one.