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) ?

One of the most under-rated yet powerful tools we have at our disposal as customer support/service folks is a well thought out customer lifecycle plan (complete with a timeline). This involves formally mapping out customer touchpoints along the customer lifecycle starting with the transition from sales to support all the way to ‘exiting’ the customer when they leave the  business.

As part of this lifecyle and timeline, the first few days of a customer relationship is recognized and treated as importantly as in a personal relationship. A little effort at the right time will go a long way in making the relationship smoother. 

I was given a powerful reminder of this yesterday while visiting ValueLabs as part of a client engagement in Hyderabad, India yesterday.

I was welcomed at the airport by a driver with a sign, and an admin assistant. I was given a local Indian cell phone with all the numbers I would need pre-programmed. If you travel a lot, you know that the cost of using your cell phone internationally can take a year off your retirement savings, and figuring out all the local codes vs. national codes is not a trivial matter. This was a most welcome touch.

When I arrived at the facility the next day, the cab driver (arranged by the company) had clearly been given instructions to call ahead to let them know I was on the way.  I was welcomed with flowers and a ‘VIP’ badge. Very nice touches, and it showed an attention to detail for the customer  experience that is unusal.

What are you doing to make your new customer experience a special one?

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.

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.

Famous science-fiction author Sir Isaac Asimov, who was also a professor of biochemistry, once said, “The most exciting phrase in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I’ve found it!) but “That’s funny…”

Speaking of funny, enjoy this hilarious customer service complaint letter written to Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Airways. But be forewarned: If you travel a lot, and enjoy food (confession: guilty as charged), you are quite likely to make a fool of yourself laughing out loud as you read it.

Business Week has a very interesting story of how an employee at Comcast (cable provider in the US) decided to do something about the poor online reputation at Comcast. He started using Twitter.

This is another step in the move to ‘personalizing’ support. It can be done, profitably and help the customer at the same time.

To read the story, check out: http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/jan2009/ca20090113_373506.htm 

Thanks to my buddy Sean O’Driscoll from Ants Eye View for alerting me to this story.

From the October 2008 Verghis View newsletter. (Sign up at home page.)

Many of us in the technology world have been witness to two “once in a lifetime” events. The first was the dot com bubble, where huge growth was pursued at all costs. That was followed by a big bust when it became clear that profitability mattered after all.The second event is the most extraordinary financial crisis since the Great Depression in the US.

Despite billions of dollars and euros being spent to ease the liquidity crisis, financial institutions are still hoarding cash because they don’t trust each other’s financial stability.In addition, billions of dollars of shareholder value are being wiped out as rumors of corporations’ possible demise enter cyberspace and ricochet around, taking huge chunks out of their stock price.

For a recent example, look no further back than September 6, 2008, when several web sites mistakenly picked up a Chicago Tribune story about United Airlines filing for bankruptcy. In reality, United had filed for bankruptcy in December, 2002 and emerged from bankruptcy in early 2006. But some sites reprinted the 2002 story, thinking it was current news. UAL shares opened the day at $12.16 before plummeting as low as $3 before trading was halted.

So what does all this have to do with support? A lot, it turns out. Unless you operate purely in a break-fix model, much of what we do involves gaining our client’s trust and becoming a true partner with them for their success. Last time, I wrote about how to manage in tough times. This time it seems to be a perfect time to revisit what being a trusted advisor is all about.

I recently re-read Clients for Life: Evolving from an Expert-for-Hire to an Extraordinary Adviser by Jagdish Sheth and Andrew Sobel. In it, they interview CEOs and advisors to see what distinguishes a client advisor – an irreplaceable resource – from a tradable commodity like an expert.

• Experts are specialists; advisors become deep generalists with broad perspective.
• Experts are for hire; advisors have selfless independence.
• Experts have professional credibility; advisors have deep personal trust.
• Experts analyze; advisors synthesize.
• Experts supply expertise; advisors are educators who provide insight and wisdom.

As we explore the shift from a tiered model of support to a Savvy Support model, one of the key attributes will be a transition from frontline staff being break-fix experts to valued advisors. Under Savvy Support, routine/ simple/ known issues are taken care of either by eliminating the problem in the first place or solving the issues via self service. This approach frees the support staff to handle more difficult, unknown problems. The more they focus on resolving these, the more likely they are to become client advisors.

There you have it: how to move from being “hired hands” to “client advisors.” The faster you make the change, the more your clients will trust you and call on you — in good times and bad.

Yesterday’s second annual Voice of the Customer retreat in Bolton was a nice affair, at the classy International country club in Bolton, just outside Boston. One of the most memorable quotes was from Marlene Bessette, VP for Strategy and Customer Loyalty at Xerox. “Culture eats strategy for lunch every time.” So true.

During the open mike session, I asked if anyone had success creating a common company-wide vocabulary regarding Voice of the Customer – even something as basic as who the most ‘important’ customer was. The answer was ‘no’ from all but the smallest (or single product) companies. Shows how long a way we have to go before we truly start embedding the Voice of the Customer into everything we do.

Speakers and topics for the October 7 “Voice of the Customer” retreat will explore a range of leading-edge topics in customer satisfaction and customer interaction, according to the organizers of the event, which will be held at a country club resort outside Boston.

The agenda includes the following speakers:

• Marlene Bessette, vice president of customer loyalty at Xerox, on how her company uses satisfaction data to identify and cultivate customer champions.
• Tina Taylor, vice president of global customer care at GE Fanuc, on using satisfaction scores to measure the results of internal process improvements.
• Dale Troppito, managing partner of The Gantry Group, on a new research study that explores best practices in pay incentives for high customer satisfaction scores.
• Matt Tippets, product manager at Parature, on using a Web forum to solicit and prioritize customer-inspired product innovations.
• Ann Walker, support team manager at The MathWorks, on a way to integrate customer feedback into the product development cycle.
• Peter Holt, director of worldwide technical support at Progress Software, on capturing and acting on “outside-the-box” customer feedback.
• Renee Bochman, senior director of global customer care at Endeca Technologies, on how to link internal knowledgebases and external community expertise into a single Web portal.

“Technology companies are wrestling with all the challenges of empowering their customers,” says conference co-producer Jeffrey Tarter. “We’ve brought together a group of people who have implemented very successful solutions to these challenges, and we know the discussions will be extraordinary.”

The “Voice of the Customer” Conference will take place on October
7 at the International, a world-famous golf resort and spa in Bolton, Mass. The registration fee is $285 per person.

Additional program information and registration is available at:
       http://www.first-wednesday.com/support_conference.html