Once again, I’m a co-producer and active participant at the 4th Annual Voice of the Customer Conference near Boston. Now in its fourth year, the First Wednesday Group’s annual conference has built a strong reputation as the place for leading-edge insights from the support world’s smartest people. Some of these smart people are on stage with microphones; others are part of our audience of hands-on support managers and professionals–people who are eager to share their ideas and experiences with their colleagues in an intimate, friendly retreat away from office distractions.

Find out more at: http://www.first-wednesday.com/conference/

Over the last year or two, I’ve been trying to replicate the magic of start-ups – where everyone is laser-focused on the mission of the organization. Everyone knows what needs to be done and just does it.

Unfortunately, this ‘honeymoon’ phase quickly dissipates during the transition to a middle-aged company and beyond.

I think I’ve moved one step closer to finding a solution, as this month’s article discusses. Two of my retainer-based clients are one year into the ‘alignment and measurement’ process, and have reported (mostly) amazing success.

One of the biggest unanticipated side effects has been the boost in employee morale, which has a multiplier effect on productivity, customer loyalty and so much more.

Get the article in a pdf format — http://bit.ly/cpFoMv or sign up for the next newsletter from my home page – www.verghisgroup.com

A highly under-rated and under-used partnership is between marketing and customer support/customer service. I’m working with a large client now where (as part of a larger engagement) we explored and developed a partnership between marketing and customer service that has resulted in more loyal customers that at the same time yields tens of thousands of dollars of incremental revenue a quarter.

Yes, it can be done without turning customer service and support into sales people. They always have to be the customer’s advocate. However, understanding the customer lifecycle, personas and churn risk points and making that part of the support DNA helps. Dramatically.

Embedded in this interesting article from the Economist is something similar that Cablecom (a Swiss cable tv/internet/phone provider) did.

“Like many telecoms providers, Cablecom has grappled with churn.  Using advanced data analytics, Cablecom discovered that although customer defections peaked in the 13th month, the decision to leave was typically around the 9th month (as indicated by things like the number of calls to customer support services).  To reduce defections, Cablecom offered at-risk customers special deals 7 months into their subscription. 

The results were impressive:  customer defections fell from 20% of subscribers a year to under 5%, enabling the firm to save significant marketing acquisition costs while boosting customer satisfaction.”

Andres Sanchez has published a book titled Technical Support Essentials – Advice you can use to succeed in Technical Support and has cited the Savvy Support model a few times as one of the new models for support.

Read all about it, and much more of what Andres has to say in his book.

Oracle’s revenue from software maintenance and service fees have reached $12 billion a year. Read what this interesting article had to say on this topic (includes SAP and more).

http://bit.ly/Sv3ub

After almost 4 weeks of travel (just crossed the 100,000 mile mark with United Airlines this past weekend), I’m back in Boston for a few weeks.

One of the reasons I’m back is the Third Annual Voice of the Customer conference hosted by the First Wednesday Group. There is a terrific lineup of speakers and participants. If the past two years were any indication, it should be a fun event with a lot of provocative ideas. I’m looking forward to seeing many friends, colleagues and customers there.

 (Disclaimer, I am one of the producers of the First Wednesday Group.)

The Voice of the Customer Conference 2009
Boston, November 3-4

 Some of the strongest, most active communities in the social media world are based on post-sale customer support relationships. User groups, online forums, advisory boards, expert networks, survey panels–a growing number of “voice of the customer” channels now provide a rich dialog between companies and their customers.

 A great place to learn more about how social media is influencing the support world is the First Wednesday Group’s annual Voice of the Customer conference, which will take place Nov. 3-4 at a conference center outside of Boston.

This is a boutique event–highly interactive, small in scale, with an impressive lineup of expert speakers and an audience of managers with a good deal of hands-on experience with social media in a customer support environment.

If you’re looking for great conversations and lots of real-world data, this is the place to be.

 Registration is $385/day. For speaker and program details, please visit

http://www.first-wednesday.com/support_conference.html

Ah the simpler days of the Internet. Way back in 2002, during my Akamai days, we had team members manually mining public forums for customer comments during live events to ensure that we could pin point and resolve issues close to real time. Of course it would be impossible to scale staff enough to do that smartly today.

That’s why today’s New York Times article  (free registration required) on some of the tools available to mine blogs, Twitter and more caught my interest. Selected quotes from the article:

Scout Labs recently introduced a subscription service that allows customers to monitor blogs, news articles, online forums and social networking sites for trends in opinions about products, services or topics in the news.

Jodange offers a service geared toward online publishers that lets them incorporate opinion data drawn from over 450,000 sources, including mainstream news sources, blogs and Twitter.

Bo Pang, a researcher at Yahoo co-wrote “Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis,” one of the first academic books on sentiment analysis.

To get at the true intent of a statement, Ms. Pang developed software that looks at several different filters, including polarity (is the statement positive or negative?), intensity (what is the degree of emotion being expressed?) and subjectivity (how partial or impartial is the source?).

For example, a preponderance of adjectives often signals a high degree of subjectivity, while noun- and verb-heavy statements tend toward a more neutral point of view.

How are you tracking sentiments about your organization? Have you been able to strike a good balance between a rapid response and appropriate response (i.e. not over-reacting) ?

After years of being able to use the proverbial 80/20 rule, anecdotal evidence seems to point to it being even more skewed with online knowledge bases. Growing evidence from my own clients and listening to other knowledgeable observers points to a new 2/98 rule.  For a sample size of thousands of documents, one or two percent of the documents account for close to 50% of all the ‘hits’.

Note: If there is great seasonal variance (for example back to school time for an University or tax time for a financial software company) then look at your usage statistics split out by season so you don’t lose the trees for the forest…