Shel Holtz recently had some issues with his computer setup. Shel:
- “I’m running Windows XP SP-2 and have been happily running the public beta for Office 2007 (which I love). A minor problem has occurred whenever Microsoft releases an update. I have to repair the Office 2007 installation in order to get it working again. After this past week’s update, though, bigger problems occurred. I cannot get into Outlook, so I started a repair but got a message telling me the Office 2007 installation was corrupt and that I should reinstall. So I tried reinstalling, but that only got about 20% through the process before it gave me an error (2711, I believe). I tried uninstalling Office 2007 but got the same corrupt installation error. And reinstalling Office 2003 did no good at all-I cannot launch Outlook 2003 because of a mismatched .dll file.
So I have no Outlook and, effectively, no Office installation.
So…any Microsofties out there with a clue what I should do?”
This triggered the thought: instead of this being a process where a customer puts a note in a bottle and throws it into the blogosphere, what if this were a pre-meditated process? Here’s how it would work:
- When an organization puts out a product, the organization defines and publishes a particular tag that they will listen for in the blogosphere when there are customer questions (for example, “office2007question” would have been a good tag the MS could promote with its Office 2007 product)
- If a customer has a question with a product, he posts the issue (just like Shel has done) with the tag(s) of the associated product(s)
- The vendor organization, which is theoretically listening for posts tagged with its “support tags” takes notice, and addresses the issue on the customer’s turf.
I believe we’ve just (re-)entered the era of the customer support “house call.”
Further reading: A Customer Support Barn-Raising
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Christopher Carfi, CEO and co-founder of Cerado, looks at sales, marketing, and the business experience from the customers point of view. He currently is focused on understanding how emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networking are enabling the creation of new types of customer-driven communities. He is the author of the Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.
