At the recent 2010 CIO Summit – The Year Ahead – Tony Scott, the CIO from Microsoft asked the audience the question: “who here is best friends with their CMO?” Only about 1 in 5 hands went up, to which he made the comment that by next year everyone should be friends with their CMO or risk to no longer be in their role.

That struck a chord with the audience. CIO’s should be best friends with their CMO counterparts and here is why:

1. Changing processes will require a different infrastructure
   Whether companies pro-actively embrace the social wave that is currently hitting businesses or not, most marketing and sales processes have already profoundly been affected by the social. People no longer listen to companies and instead make their buying decisions based on recommendations from peers. The funnel disappeared and is being replaced by a messy, swirly social buying process. Innovation and support can now be turned into social processes involving customers and employees whose job it is not to design and support new products. The CMO cannot enable his team to support these new processes without the CIO and the CIO’s team cannot build the right infrastructure without thoroughly understanding the new processes. They need one another to succeed in this area.
2. Cultural environment conducive to high technology adoption rates
   CIO’s need to find pockets of culture within their company that are ripe for social technology adoption or enterprise 2.0 adoption. In many companies the marketing department may be that department. Most marketing departments are being forced into adopting social tools by their customers, prospects and detractors. So for CIO’s to get a win under their belt with social tools, they may benefit from befriending the CMO.
3. Together create an opportunity to regain senior strategic roles at the executive table once again
   Many CMO’s and CIO’s have lost their strategic place at the executive table. At a recent large investment banking portfolio company retreat, the three execs from the portfolio companies that were invited to represent the  executive team were the CEO, the CFO and the Exec in charge of Human Resources. Look at many executive teams on company web sites, many of them don’t have a CMO or CIO reporting all the way to the top. The CMO and the CIO can team up together to regain a strategic seat by representing the voice of the customer within the company. That will require for the CMO to stop thinking of their role as the company advocate in the marketplace and instead become the customer advocate within the company, and for the CIO to stop thinking about how to build hard walls around the company and instead to find ways to extend the edge of the company to encompass customers, prospects and detractors. 

There are many other reasons why CIO’s and CMO’s should be best friends, but those three alone should make for the divide that exists between them to disappear now.

[self-serving ad coming up]That is also the reason why the upcoming Hyper-Social Mini Summits are now focused on both CIO’s and CMO’s – which should make for a great brainstorm session.[/ad]

I am a big fan of jetBlue, and of many employees that I have met during my travels. In fact, it is my favorite airline and I would fly it everywhere if I could. I also love the way they think about their business and how (in my opinion) they execute flawlessly against one goal – bringing humanity back to the airline industry.

That is what we all want, isn’t it? We do not want to be treated as cattle or  indirectly be told that we will suffer while flying – as some airlines seem determined to do.

Right?

But guess what – in order to bring humanity back to the airline industry you have to do one thing: allow your employees to behave like individual human beings, not corporate automatons that spew corporate speak all the time or try to sell you credit cards while they have you trapped in their seats. And that is what jetBlue does – their front line employees are genuine human beings…If you ever spoke with one of them, you would know. They are friendly, they have opinions, they are different from one another – they are genuine social human beings that treat us as if we were long lost friends.

And humans also have emotions…sometimes they will get mad and sometimes they will do crazy things – that comes with the territory. We are all fine with that when it happens in the real world, that which we inhabit outside of work. If someone from our tribe screws up, we put social pressure on that person to get their act together, we apologize, and we move on.

Why cannot we do that in business? Why do we have to ostracize the whole jetBlue tribe because one human being exhibited a side of humanity that “maybe” should not have been expressed in public – frustration and anger?

I am fine dealing with an occasionally frustrated flight attendant if the brand promise is to make me feel like a human being while flying with jetBlue - any day!

And I think you should too. jetBlue deserves our business and our support, and they surely have mine. It angers me to hear all the pundits jump on this occasion to talk about their puny little agendas.

The only thing I wish for is that the response from jetBlue would have been more human and less corporate-like, but with all the legal issues floating over this incident, I am sure that there are limitations as to what can be done while protecting the corporate legal entity.

Amazon lost one of its most loyal customers yesterday – ME.

I used to be a walking billboard for Amazon. I felt like they cared about me and were delivering me good services. I ignored those who told me that I could buy products cheaper in other places. I felt special.

I  know of at least a dozen people who bought their Kindle and countless others who bought books based on my recommendations. Knowing that customers who become customers through word of mouth can be twice as valuable as customers that come in through advertising, that must be worth something. Plus, I bought 850 items from them over the years – that’s a heck of a lot of stuff…especially when considering that many of those items are not books, but 4 digit purchases like high end cameras, high end lenses, and barbecues.

But I will now donate my new Kindle, buy the iPad, and test other book delivery services.

Why?

Because they told me I was not special after all…

My Kindle (the second one I bought) broke last Friday. I called Saturday and was promised a new one by Tuesday. Tuesday, no Kindle. Wednesday, no Kindle. Wednesday I call again. This time their automatic callback system calls me and puts me in a 10 minute queue. The chipper customer service rep assured me that this feature was working properly – as there is no way for the system to know how many people are in the queue. Duh, how dare I expect technology-savvy Amazon to write software that would check the length of the waiting line  before calling me…

She proceeds by telling me that there is no record of my call on Saturday, and that she will reenter an order for a replacement Kindle that will get to me on Friday…no 1 day shipping this time, two days. She also apologized for the inconvenience and offered me a $5 discount on future purchases to make up for it. I choked, asked her whether she really said $5, and when she confirmed I told her that she could keep the generous offer.

So that is the value that Amazon puts on me as a customer: $5.

And I thought I was special.

I have been staking my social reputation for more than a decade on recommending them, I have been sending them thousands of dollars for stuff that I did not always need…$5.

You see, this is what went wrong here, and many companies make that mistake. I wasn’t looking for any compensation. I was just looking for a good old apology. If they wanted to give me something, they could have done it through a gift – like upgrading my 3g so it works in Europe, or sending me a few free books based on my recommendations. I would have been blown away and would have continued to act as an unpaid advertorial for the company. But the minute they put a monetary value on me I switched in a totally different mode. So that is what they think I am worth…$5.

You do not need to pay people to make up for mistakes and you do not need to pay them when they help you…mixing the two is bad business.

More so than for any other department within your company, taking advantage of the social in customer support requires that your organization be allowed to behave social as well. The reason for that is twofold – people will seek help from others about your products in a variety of places, not just your customer support community; and people want to be helped by people, not faceless organizations.

While it may seem obvious that customer would seek support for your products in your customer support community, in reality they will look for it across a multitude of sites. That is especially true for products that have complex distribution channels. When you have a problem with your shiny new Canon lens, do you look for help on Canon.com, Bestbuy.com, Amazon.com or GetSatisfaction.com?  Or do you turn to your independent photography enthusiast community, or maybe a photography Facebook group you belong to? If you truly want to support your customers, you need to empower your employees to engage those people where they are. Sometimes that is your site, sometimes it is all over the place, and sometimes it’s on a focused destination that you did not set up. That was the case with TiVo, where a vibrant TiVo customer support community was set up by users and ran independently from the company. Tivo did not try to set up their own customer community and lure people away, which many companies would have attempted in the name of controllable knowledge management – i.e., access to people’s profile, ability to mine the content, ability to generate reports, etc. They engaged where people were already hanging out, and turned the existing community into a real competitive advantage. They realized that in order to take advantage of the social in customer support you need to behave social yourself.

We just finished a series of in-depth interviews with companies who are deploying social media as part of their business processes. Most initiatives were marketing based – and none were focused on deploying social media as part of customer service.

What is wrong with that picture?

Customer service is a perfect place for people to use social media – people love helping others, and at some point in the customer lifecycle, most people need help.

It is also ironic to realize that the biggest brand damage often occurs through a poor customer service experience.

So why are marketers not seeing that as a fertile ground for social interactions with customers and as a way to achieve some big marketing and brand benefits? Is it because marketers have grown myopic and no longer consider customer service as part of the brand experience? It is not because marketers do not actually run customer service that they should not consider it as an important touch-point between the company, the product and the customer. When looking at companies like Zappos or Tivo, where they have turned customer service into their main customer touch point, you realize that even if what you’re after is increased word of mouth or increased sales – customer service may be your best avenue.

Maybe I am just missing something…

Or maybe not – in most companies, customer service is treated as an expense, just like marketing…

It really should be an investment!

As you may recall, I had my share of problems with my last laptop, which culminated in a bad customer service experience. I was sufficiently incensed to blog (see vent) about it here.

What happened next made me stay with Lenovo instead of switching to a Mac. First off, Mark from Lenovo posted a comment on my blog, asking me to contact him. He apologized for the bad experiences I had and scheduled for a technician to come to my house to fix my problem. When I had additional problems with my computer he jumped through hoops to get it fixed. At the end he send me a brand new computer – extending the next business day on-site warranty beyond what I had purchased.

So what happened that made me regain the trust in the company:

• Timely response to my problem with a genuine “I feel your pain” attitude
• No corporate speak – honest and transparent conversation to resolve my issues
• Wow me through customer service by doing unexpected things – in this case send me a newer and better computer without me asking for it.

At the end of the day, most customers know that products cannot be flawless. If they do end up with a lemon, their tolerance to work through the issue with the vendor is usually large – after all they bought the product because they have a certain affinity for the product and/or the company and so their default attitude towards that company is usually positive.

Unfortunately you can squander all that positive social capital in minutes by having a customer service rep with a bad hair day becoming combative with a customer calling to resolve an issue. That too will happen – especially in large companies.

The key is to minimize this negative people-effect by hiring the right people and by building a no-excuse customer-centric culture – much like what Zappos.com has been able to achieve. The other key is to have a swat team of people on staff who can jump in when the inevitable will happen – a complete system breakdown. Because even when that happens, you can and should try to recover that customer.

Lenovo just did it with me…thank you Mark.

I had the pleasure to see Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com talk about the importance of corporate culture at the recent community 2.0 conference.

I was left with two new proof points for things that I knew were critical to a company’s success – the importance of hiring people who have a perfect cultural fit with the company, and the importance of customer service as a marketing and sales channel.

When you look at the Zappos.com corporate values, or read the corporate culture book (they ship it to you free of charge) – you are not left with that empty corporate speak feeling that you get when reading most companies’ belief statements. They mean something, and you can either associate with them or not. When they say “create fun and a little weirdness,” or “deliver WOW through service,” or “be humble,” or “build a positive team and family spirit,” or “build open and honest relationships with communications,” you can point to numerous people issues within many companies that are caused because the company does not foster or enforce a culture like that. In fact, they go so far as to pay people $1,000 to leave the company – and according to Bill Taylor, so should you. If people do not feel a 100% fit with your culture, make it easier for them to go…

The company is also a great case study for how you should treat your customer service department as one of the most important customer communication channels. At Zappos, they go as far as saying that customer service is their business. Even for non-retail companies, the lesson learned should be that customer service should be treated as one the most important touch-points of your company’s UI (user interface) through which customers experience your brand. In fact, and as McKinsey and Booz Allen & Hamilton have argued in recent articles on the change of the CMO role, customer service should be managed by marketing.

Now I need to buy some shoes, and it looks like I will be a loyal Zappos customer for a long time to come…

[Update 6/11/08 - I wrote the story of how Lenovo Wow'd me and turned me into a loyal customer once again here] 

After spending 7 hours diagnosing my 8 month old Lenovo T60p today, which I bought with next business day on-site service, I found out that the computer’s hard drive is busted. They are sending me a new hard drive, but the image disks needed to rebuild the hard drive will take three days. When I told the technician that they should not sell their service as a next business day service he snapped at me telling me that he was not selling anything – he was just fixing stuff over the phone.

So much for IBM service…

And this is the computer that already had its main board as well as its memory replaced (within a week or so).

In the old days they called this a lemon…

Time for Mac?