Archive for the 'Product Support and Customer Service' Category



1,393 views

Using Social Media to Market Music

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on June 9, 2008
in Consumer Electronics, DRM Rant, Disruptive Business Models in Content, I heard it on a podcast, Innovation, My Projects, New Marketing, Photoblogging, Product Support and Customer Service, Social Web and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

My colleague at Heavybag Media, Jackie Peters has a post about the great opportunities record labels have in using social media as a marketing strategy. The challenges they are facing: they must switch from selling music in physical packages to selling musical experiences, allow fans to interact with the music in meaningful ways, and allow music to be an experience to share with friends. The convergence of downladable, infinitely available music along with the ability to learn about new music via word of mouth/social media in the form of music blogs, podcasts, recommendation (both algorithms and friend) is the perfect fit.

But for now, the transition is rough for music industry veterans. Almost every week for the past two years the music industry manages to make one puzzling move after another, while independent artists are free to make decisions who’s only stockholders are themselves along with their artistic and commercial aspirations. Increasingly, independent artists commercial strategy is not in selling CDs, but in the more scarce goods such as early access to new releases, performances, and limited edition vinyl or DVDs, reliable discovery and immediate access to files on iTune or Amazon MP3 . They now they need to sell their fans something they cannot get for free.

People love to talk about the music they love. Allowing them to share it easily and legally, and talk about it online, and put it in new contexts is the new path to commercial success.



521 views

Good Customer Service and Tech Support are Good for Business. Duh

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on May 18, 2007
in Product Support and Customer Service
. 2 Comments

The Consumerist via TechDirt reports that good customer service and technical support are good for a company’s stock price. The Journal of Marketing used public stock data and mashed up with data from American Customer Satisfaction Index to generate this report (pdf). I hope this report gives me plenty of ammo to make my job easier. I hope we see the end of bad outsourcing very soon. Thank you Journal of Marketing!

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544 views

Help Oppose the PERFORM Act

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on January 13, 2007
in Consumer Electronics, DRM Rant and Product Support and Customer Service
. 4 Comments

Via BoingBoing and TechDirt, Diane Feinstein (D-Ca) seeks to make music listening more difficult and more expensive for everyone across America to line the pockets of villainous organizations such as the RIAA.

Take action here at EFF.org. There is a form to automatically generate a letter and fill in your address. I have customized my letter below. I have focused less on the recoding aspect and more on the listening aspect. If they are going to make it hard to record music, this also spills over into listening to music.

Dear Mrs. Feinstein,

As a resident of California and a constituent with an interest in technological innovation and the future of music playback devices and radios, I am writing to ask you to oppose S.256, the PERFORM Act, introduced in the Senate by you, Senator Feinstein.

The “first 100″ hours are very precious, and I don’ think this bill is a good use of taxpayer’s time. You seeks to cripple the music listening experience of everyday people by catering to do organizations such as the RIAA who are suing the likes of children and grandmothers. Electronic music devices are complicated enough as they are. I know, I work for a major home and car radio maker. I have personally spoken with tens of thousands of users of home and car stereos, and I am telling you that these honest, hard working Americans do not need another layer of complexity in their lives with something as simple as a home stereo. Your legislation seeks to make music listening even more complicated for future generations of your own constituents and for everyone across America.

Mrs. Feinstein, when you were young, I am sure music was there during key parts of your life. What if someone like beloved Dick Clark was telling lawmakers what record players he wanted people to use so he could make even more money from the artists he promoted? You are helping to facilitate the modern day equivalent of this. If it was harder for you to listen to records or the radio becuase the laws told you what record players or radios you could user or when you could play them, I am sure there are nuances of your life that would be different. Do you really want to facilitate a villainous cartels such as the RIAA that takes music away from people by using the their beloved Piracy defense to hoard even more money from everyday music listeners? I don’t think you are that type of person. This is no different than President Bush’s strawman argument eavesdropping on telephone calls helps preserve our freedom, an argument that you clearly at odds with. See http://feinstein.senate.gov/news-exec-power.html

Radios that work perfectly fine now may need to be discarded, putting more toxic chemicals in our landfills. With standards changing, manufactures will be encouraged to make even cheaper products that do not last very long, making customers’ dollars get them even less than it does now.

I urge you to defend my right, your right, and the rights of every American enjoy music, and the freedom of technologists and musicians to innovate new, profitable technological tools. Please oppose the PERFORM Act.

Sincerely,
Nicholas Dynice

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507 views

Dell Needs to Innovate in its Support Channels

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on July 23, 2006
in Consumer Electronics and Product Support and Customer Service
. 0 Comments

Nick Carr writes that while Dell was able to innovate with its made-when-you-order supply chain and direct sales to cut costs, they also need to have a direct support channel, since they have no dealers. And the money would have earned with this innovation now needs to be spent on customer support. They did put up a blog this month.

But there’s another side to the PC business: the support side. And here, the direct model looks less attractive. If, after all, you’re selling directly to customers, you have to shoulder all the related support costs, from handling information requests before the sale to taking and tracking orders to handling service inquiries after the sale. You can’t offload any of those costs onto resellers or retailers or other distribution partners – because you don’t have any distribution partners.

Off-shoring the call center to India is not as innovative at their just-in-time supply chain, and now they are paying the price since this was not factored in. I think the lesson is to innovate in as many areas as they can. One commenter writes that if they let users support each other through message boards and wikis, they might not have this innovation imblanace. It appears Dell does have a community forum. Could a wiki really be the tipping point? Is Dell doing all it can to recommend the support forum to its customers, or is this just an afterthought? Could Dell create a support strategy around using a wiki and looking at customer support as a strategy to cut costs instead of incur costs? Motorola has put up a wiki for its new Q phone. I am eagerly awaiting a report from Motorola on the number of calls and e-mails they receive on this model in comparison to others.

Again, (I seem to do this with a lot of posts) we look at Apple’s strategy. Non-commodity parts may cost more, but it means there are less variables (fewer models) for the support channels to deal with (keep it simple). Apple Stores provide the Genius Bar, a way to talk to a support rep in person. The Apple forums are used by many dedicated users. User experience is baked into every aspect of the business.

Good user experience is not only good for the customer and the brand, but it keeps revenue in the company. As you can see, market share is not everything. I would go as far to say that market share is not sustainable over the long term if your user experience is bad. Who’s the real rock star here, Michale Dell or Steve Jobs? Sure, Michael Dell is the rock star in the supply chain management world, but most end users do not see Dell as the rock star, they see Jobs as the rock star. Jobs’ strategy continues to touch the customer well after the purchase. Dell’s just does it by delivering it to you when you want it, a one time thing.

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450 views

Customer Service in a Web Democratized World

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on July 14, 2006
in New Marketing, Product Support and Customer Service and Social Web
. 0 Comments

Irving Wladawsky-Berger
Via the Emergence Marketing blog, there is a great post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM on how great customer service will make or break a company thanks to the “word of mouth on steroids” that blogging and social media provide. It is great to see there is someone this high in a company that gets it. Link:
The Critical Importance of Customer Service

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1,510 views

New Marketing Using Web 2.0 in 4 Steps

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on June 21, 2006
in New Marketing, Product Support and Customer Service, Social Web and Web 2.0
. 3 Comments

steps
This is the most basic way to boil down new marketing and corporate blogging. The idea for this post came to me while listening to the latest episode of the Across The Sound podcast at about 20:13 to 23:49. These ideas are a culmination of all the books and blogs that I have read and podcasts that I have listened to for the past year, in particular Joseph Jaffe, Malcolm Gladwell, Jason Fried, and Doc Searls et al.

1. Make a great product or service. If it is not great, keep working on it. If you want to use advertising to make up for a crappy product or service, you product or service is not good enough.

2. Go out to Malcolm Gladwell‘s (The Tipping Point) mavens aka Jackie Huba‘s customer evangelists and listen to what they say. Help them get great use out of the product or service. Use a blog (or podcast, social media, or wiki) to talk to them, and use all of the tips in Cluetrain (The Cluetrain Manifesto) and Naked Conversations. This costs almost nothing, especially in comparison to traditional advertising.

3. The mavens will (and you will let them) use the tools of new media to tell other people about the product or service: blogs, RSS, podcasts, wikis, viral videos, social media and IM, because anyone can do it and it costs almost nothing. The mavens are doing it already whether you (as a company) pay attention or not, and it they do it because they want to (think about that). And hopefully it will tip. If you blog, they will want to do this even more, because they see that you “get it”. Word of mouth is the only relevant form of marketing left today because everything else is filtered out as irrelevant noise.
talk to me
4. When the customers talks back, listen to them and show that you are listening (don’t outsource CRM), and use the useful information they provide for the next product or service development cycle. These are also your new round of mavens. If you skip this part of listening, you are doomed because your effort will seem half-hearted and customers will want to punish you by going with a competitor to despite you even if the competitor is no using new marketing, and the blogosphere will make point you out and you will be finished. They will make fun of you and be really mean, but really, they want to see you get it right. They will offer suggestions on your way to interact when them next time around if you fail this last step.

Yes, these are the easy steps of new marketing. The hard part (step 0) is convincing the decisions makers who need to defend what they have done for the past 20 years using traditional means. Maybe the decision makers have become friends with people in industries that provide these traditional advertising services, or believing that you need to rely on a specialist. You are the specialist in that you are the one who can speak for the company because you are in the company. You shape the customer culture both with your products/services and with your real, public voice.

If you are a startup, you will have an easy time using these tips. There are plenty of shining examples of startups using these, because they do not have the bureaucratic roadblocks. In fact, there is probably not one web 2.0 startup that is not marketing this way, simply because marketing this way the part of the web 2.0 meme.
customer service

I have a special interest in this topic as it applies to my current position in customer service and product support. In the era of user experience, all of these points make so much sense to me.

UPDATE 7/27/06
David Armono at Logic+Emotion has an similar point on how there is a cycle between traditional PR and new media that works in a similar way.

Steps photo by Auntie P.
Talk to me photo by misterjt.
Customer service photo by The Shifted Librarian.
Photos use licenced under CC.

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389 views

Controlling the user experience: an example of non-control

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on March 22, 2006
in Consumer Electronics and Product Support and Customer Service
. 0 Comments

A great user experience is at the core of Apple’s products. Apple controls the Mac OS and the computer hardware. Apple controls the iPod, the iTunes software, and the iTunes Music Store. For the most part (although you are locked in to the platform, DRM, etc), the user experience is great because Apple controls all aspects. Lets take a look at the opposite end of the spectrum: Sirius Satellite Radio.

First, you have Sirius Radio, the service provider of the satellite service. There is also Sirius branded hardware. The stand-alone units are also known as “plug and play,” to imply that setup is easy. You just plug it in and it works. Sirius’s branding is so ubiquitous that it has caused confusion for consumers. Some Sirius tuners available from Radio Shack may have no branding other than Sirius. So, what brand is it? Sometimes it is Sirius, other times, it is another manufacturer. A customer may know that these other stereos “work with Sirius,” so maybe it is one of them? Some car stereos are “Sirius Ready,” meaning that have the ability to control a special Sirius tuner, but the tuner must be purchased separately. This is not an easy concept for some customers to understand.

Next, you have the various manufactures of the hardware. Sometimes, you have two or three manufacturers of hardware to make one complete system work. “Sirius Ready” car stereos are available from Alpine, Kenwood, JVC, Sony, Panasonic, Clarion, Sanyo and Panasonic. Each manufacture requires its own proprietary tuner unit. To add to the confusion, within a single brand, there are sometimes specific tuners that do not work with specific car stereo models (older stereos will not work with the new tuners). When Sirius launched, each manufacturer was branding, manufacturing, and distributing its own Sirius tuner. Now, Sirius had made Directed Electronics the only manufacturer of these tuners. So, now we have no fewer than three separate entities involved that the customer may need to contact:
-Sirius, the service provider
-the manufacturer of the stereo
-the manufacturer of the Sirius tuner (Directed)
-In some cases, you can replace the supplied Sirius antenna with a Terk Sirius antenna.

When a problem occurs, whom should the customer contact? Could the customer be passed between each different party more than one time? Is there any easy way figure out where the problem exists without taking everything to a dealer or sending everything to its respective manufacturer’s service center?

Sirius support reps do not even understand the difference between the plug-and-play and a Sirius Ready car stereo. When customers call Sirius to activate their accounts, they ask for the ESN or SID (electronic serial number or Sirius ID number, lets pick a name standard) without asking if the customer has a Sirius Ready car stereo or a plug-and-play. In some cases, the customer has a Sirius Ready car stereo without the Sirius tuner, and does not understand the Sirius Ready concept.

XM Satellite Radio seems to push their plug-and-play radios more than their XM Ready radios, which I could only find a couple of on the XM website. Did they understand that the user experience is better if you don’t have to explain what “XM Ready” means? Maybe. And I say this because they have an XM tuner called the XM Direct that is compatible with most Sirius Ready car stereos. They are using Sirius’s “integrated” solution against Sirius, for yet another layer of customer confusion, thanks to XM.

The plug-and-play units can usually be used in a home or in a car. There are usually special kits that allow it to be used in each one. One expects that these accessories would be available for years to come. This is not the case. Some of these plug-and-play units are made so inexpensively that they are not repairable; some have no replacement parts. So, when a defect is discovered when it is under the warranty, it is replaced. When it is outside of the warranty, the customer is S.O.L. The least the customer could do is buy a new tuner or a new kit to work with their existing piece. But are these available over a year later? Usually not. By law, parts need to be available for a unit for seven years, but apparently this means only if spare parts are made available, and apparently this does not apply to accessories required to operate the unit. I guess Sirius (or one of their radio manufacturing partners) just wants you to buy a new one. What a great user experience.

This last point does not have to do with control of the hardware/service combination, but just another pain point that a customer may have as a result of the manufacturer not putting the user experience first.

Sirius, fix your problems, seriously. There is competition from every angle: iPod and iTMS, subscription services like Yahoo Music, Napster, Rhapsody, and free music licensed under CC featured in podcasts. These all use an open standard that will never be discontinued: audio output to audio input connection. They do not rely on satellite reception. They all allow for a wider choice of music.

Update 8/2/206:
Apparently this example has been written about in a book that compares XM’s and Sirius’s strategies. More here.

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314 views

Budget Allocation and Good Design: A Catch 22

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on January 14, 2006
in Consumer Electronics, I heard it on a podcast and Product Support and Customer Service
. 0 Comments

Some of the panels from the 2006 CES are downloadable as podcasts. I would like to point out an interesting observation in one of the panels. One of the panelists sates that that good design is more expensive (obvious point), but very important. Marketers cannot see a cost benefit in spending more money on good design in order to cut down support costs. After all, the customer support department has its own budget; and this is how the company is left to deal with unintuitive product design. So, with that in mind, a sales/marketing/product management department has no incentive to spend money on good design because it is more money out of their own budget, which could cut into their bottom line personally if are rewarded with a bonus if sales are good (forgoing support expenses that are far removed from themselves). A company could allocate budgets to departments in a way where the departments work autonomously; not a good thing.

The panelist point out that marketers may have more pull in the company than designers. And support may have even less impact on either department. This is most definitely can occur in large, slow companies where the decision makers have been with the company for a long time. As pointed out by It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small…It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow by Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton, people often do a better job (or at least do it with more passion) during their first year. Then, as change occurs, they can sometimes not adapt in order to prove that the way they did it back then continues to work, even through it may not be working. This will be true of big and slow companies. They point out that this can be avoided by moving the people around into different positions.

My theory is that these slow, old decision makers and the people that oversee them may not decide to adapt to changes in the market, and are not creating a system where great design and a great customer experience are placed before bonuses and marketers’ opinions.

Apple Computers and 37 Signals are great examples of companies that have created a situation where customers’ experience is paramount. They realize that if they make this happens profits, envy, and admiration in the design scene will follow. Jason Fried at 37 Signals is small enough to care about every aspect of the company, specifically, customer experience. Steve Jobs at Apple is the cutting edge of cool design and great customer experience. If more companies could emulate the customer experience these companies could provide instead of simply looking at products and services (the end product), they may get somewhere. Maybe someday we will be able to arbor a company that strives to do anything less than this.

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