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…

Boston, MA — Drawing on an impressive lineup of speakers, the 2009 “Voice of the Customer Conference” will focus on leading-edge issues in building end-user communities, improving satisfaction metrics, and creating customer-centric organizations. The conference, produced by the First Wednesday Roundtable, will take place in Bolton, Mass. on Nov. 3 with a day of optional workshops on Nov. 4.

Registration for the Nov. 3 conference is $385 per person. Additional information about the program and post-conference workshops can be found on the First Wednesday Web site:
http://www.first-wednesday.com/support_conference.html

I lead a discussion for the SSPA’s Small and Medium Business (SMB) Community of Interest session in late May. Despite audio problems for the first 15 minutes, only 4 people dropped out by the end of the hour. We re-recorded the session for the SSPA to post, but once again there were audio problems on the SSPA end.

Sean O’Driscoll and I will be presenting as ‘experts’ for the SSPA Talent Management Community of Interest webinar on May 10th. We will be focusing on the big trends impacting service and support, and how communication and collaboration fits in to recruiting, retaining and developing talent. If you are interested in participating, and are a SSPA member, let me know if you want an invite.

I came across an article a few moments ago on what Steven Wolfram has been up to. It is a different kind of search engine, and it sounds pretty interesting, and according to his blog, will be available in May.

I’m particularly interested to see how this can be used to ‘free’ knowledge from the command and control structures we have in place in most support organizations.

http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lz9-4c/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-be-as-important-as-google

For the first time in history, more than half the world’s population has joined the middle class. This startling development just happened in the past year or two. Why should you care? I believe this development will have a profound impact on service and support leaders all over the world.

Let’s start by defining “middle class.” Most economists agree there are actually two types. One consists of those who are middle class by any standard. Their income is somewhere between the average Brazilian’s and Italian’s (i.e., $12-$50 a day). While this segment is growing fast, they make up only a tenth of the developing world.

The second type consists of those who are middle-class by the standards of the developing world but not the developed (rich) one. This group earns between $2-13 per day. (I’ve always wondered about the significance of $2 per day. It turns out that amount is considered poverty anywhere in the world. $13 is the poverty line in the United States.)

But it is not just how many are rising into middle class status. It’s how quickly the number ‘tips,’ given the nature of the growth curve. Between 1990 and 2005 – just 15 years – China’s middle-class population soared from 74 million to an unbelievable 806 million. India’s middle class boom has just begun, with the middle class going from 147 million to 264 million during the same period. (Source: The Economist)

Now let’s see what this means to service and support professionals.

The single biggest source of profit for many technology companies is now services revenue. With intense pressure from CEOs and CFOs to keep bringing in this lucrative revenue, coupled with strong pushback from customers demanding discounts, many companies view selling services to this growing global middle class a smart strategy for growth.

Good idea, but -
* If you don’t take into account the two types of middle class, you will roll out services and products that a large percentage of them find simply unaffordable.
* Using traditional techniques and metrics to service them could choke earnings and even bankrupt you.

So what can a service and support leader do? Plenty, I believe. If you are serious about making profits under very tough economic circumstances, check out Prof. C.K. Prahlad’s Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Another valuable resource is one of the most downloaded papers on my own website, my white paper on “Cultural Implications of Service.”

But you probably want to do more than merely survive in this new, supremely cost-conscious world of service and support. What will it take to thrive? We’ll explore that in the next issue of my newsletter, the Verghis View.