Your Customers Are Attacking!

Friday Book Share

For just a minute, I want to imagine your business surrounded by a bunch of wild, uncontrollable customers... got the image yet?

It’s no secret that customers have more influence and “voice” in the marketplace than ever before, largely on account of social media. Whether it involves posting a YouTube video showing baggage handlers tossing guitars around, or launching a Change.org petition to persuade retail banks to reverse their debit-card fee policies, customers are way more empowered today, largely because they are way more connected today.

If you’ve ever feared what could happen to your own business if your customers were to launch an attack, then Paul Gillin and Greg Gianforte have authored an extremely useful book, appropriately titled Attack of the Customers. It is well written, and chock full of real examples and sound advice.

First, tap the benefits of social commentary

Most companies are virtually unarmed when it comes to defending themselves from irate customers, because they have completely neglected the real power of social media. In 2010 and 2011, for instance, 28 of the world’s top 50 brands didn’t respond to even a single customer comment on their Facebook pages! It’s really hard to overestimate the social-media incompetence of some of these companies. Some 60% of the 329 North American businesses surveyed by the Economist persist in treating this customer-feedback, dialogue, and research tool as simply another marketing channel, to be managed by the market department and used primarily for disseminating freebies and discounts!

But the world of social media isn’t just a “channel.” It’s an important avenue of customer service, intelligence, and relationship-building. One study found that “seven out of eight businesses using social media for customer service have seen a positive impact. Less than 1% described the experience as negative.”

Moreover, the authors say, social media can be like a “free global floating focus group,” providing enormous insight into customer motivations. This customer insight continues to accumulate at a faster and faster rate, along with Moore’s Law. By 2020 there will be 25 to 30 times as much social media commentary available on a daily basis, and the trick, Gillin and Gianforte say, is to have a process in place now for synthesizing and making use of this proliferating feedback.

You could start, they suggest, by hosting objective customer reviews on your own web site, a policy Martha Rogers and I strongly advocate in our own book, Extreme Trust. Objective customer reviews have been found to stimulate sales – even if they are negative reviews, which tend to lend credibility to positive ones. Epson, for instance, launched reviews on its site in 2010 and found that visitors who took the time to read reviews spent nearly double the amount spent by those who didn’t! And AlpacaDirect.com, the authors say, “saw sales jump 23% on reviewed items. Sales even grew for products that got negative comments, such as a golf cardigan that was described as ‘kinda sweaty’ and a ‘poor fit.’”

Always treat complaints as the opportunities they really are

A customer attack can cause a great deal of damage if a brand isn't treating customer complaints as opportunities to get better, but as costs to be minimized. The truth is, complaints can be “an important source of improvement and even word-of-mouth marketing.” When handled properly, in fact, 40% or more of “ranters,” the most serious complainers, can be converted into “ravers.”

And Altimeter Group analyzed 50 significant customer attacks and concluded that a full third of them were precipitated by a single customer’s negative customer experience!

Our ever increasing inter-connectedness does give individual customers enormous potential leverage today. Molly Katchpole, for instance, was the 22-year-old who launched the online petition calling on Bank of America to reverse its monthly $5 debit card usage fee in the fall of 2011. Her campaign soon attracted national media attention, as she staged events like cutting up her debit card for television cameras, and moving her $2200 savings account to a community bank. After 300,000 people signed her petition, and some 650,000 people opened new credit union accounts (eight times the normal rate), Bank of America reversed its policy, and its competitors soon followed suit.

Just a couple of months later, according to the authors, “Verizon Corp. quietly began charging a $2 fee to customers who paid their bills online.” This is the classic kind of untrustable “stealth” fee that will soon become a thing of the past for most legitimate companies. The Twittersphere took notice, and Katchpole took action – again. She launched a new online petition (against Verizon’s stealth fee) which quickly gathered 166,000 signatures and led to a reversal by the carrier.

Take preventive action to avoid future problems

Another point Gillin and Gianforte emphasize is the importance of preparing for these customer attacks in advance, by taking the time now to institute the right internal social media policies. They include some very helpful advice on what ought to be included in those policies, governing the behaviors and authorities of individual employees. I suggest that for this reason alone, Attack of the Customers is worth having on your corporate bookshelf.

Your own brand is probably already represented on a number of different platforms, and my guess is – if you’re like the vast majority of companies out there – no one at your head office actually has a complete inventory of them. Do you know just how your brand is represented in the following forums? (Does anyone at your company know?)

• Facebook accounts
• Facebook pages
• Branded Twitter accounts
• Independent Twitter accounts of people who represent themselves as your employees
• LinkedIn company profiles
• LinkedIn groups
• Pinterest accounts
• YouTube accounts
• Flickr accounts
• SlideShare accounts and pages
• Instagram accounts
• Managers of communities you own
• Authorized representatives in communities you don’t own
• Forum administrators
• Authorized company bloggers
• Independent bloggers who represent themselves as your employees

Gillin and Gianforte argue that you need to have a solid, informed social media policy, which will necessarily involve things like ensuring that official corporate accounts have an administrator in addition to the contributors, and that employees’ comments in public online forums be monitored regularly (this isn’t spying on employees, just paying attention to what is said publicly).

There’s way more to this book than I can cram into a useful LinkedIn post. Read it yourself. Before Halloween, if you can!

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If you like to learn about books, my previous Friday Book Shares include:

Age of Context (Robert Scoble and Shel Israel)

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Nicholas Nassim Taleb)

The Beginning of Infinity (David Deutsch) and Alone in the Universe (John Gribbin)

Big Data (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier)

This Will Make You Smarter (multiple contributors)

Smart Customers, Stupid Companies (Michael Hinshaw and Bruce Kasanoff)

The Lights in the Tunnel (Martin Ford) and Race Against the Machine (Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee)

Winning the Zero Moment of Truth - ZMOT (Jim Lecinsky)

The Secret Life of Pronouns (James Pennebaker)

Being Wrong (Kathryn Shulz)

The Success Equation (Michael Mauboussin)

The Signal and the Noise (Nate Silver)

Firms of Endearment (Sisodia, Wolfe, and Sheth)

Moonwalking with Einstein (Joshua Foer)

The Most Human Human (Brian Christian)

Six Pixels of Separation (Mitch Joel)