MG Siegler at TechCrunch wrote a great piece a couple days ago on the role of enthusiasm. I think he’s dead-on, but I’ll add my little bit of advice: Make sure your Enthusiasm is the right kind. The Enthusiasm you need is really a deep love for what you’re doing. This is the kind of…
Importance of “filters” has been over-stated. As my friend John Pederson puts it: Managing your own filter is critical. The other kind of filter that lets things in vs. preventing things from coming in.[From Dean Shareski on attention.] A filter is a screen that keeps things out. My information problem isn’t solved by keeping things…
My friends all know that I enjoy good PodCasts. My daily commute only is about 8 steps from my bed… maybe a bit more if I detour to the stove to start the tea kettle before starting work. But when I’m visiting clients and or attending events I’m usually going at least 40 minutes (Palo…
These conversations happen in the pub, in the bleachers of our kids soccer games, and just about everwhere. We’re all having public conversations all the time, where the only privacy is that of proximity – you really don’t know who that is sitting at the next table, and usually you really don’t care. Now many of those conversations have moved to Twitter, or Facebook, or your blog. Some of those are open conversations that are easily found, searched, and aggregated and some aren’t.
You want the virtuous cycle, or the vicious one?
The key is to create a virtuous cycle of great support, product improvement, and customer loyalty & recommendations. It’s a virtuous cycle of good will. Here are the steps:
Tech Support folks should also be friendly and like helping people. They should be communicative both inside the organization and with customers. Dont just expect your team to “be professional”. That admonition is at the core of the wooden, scripted responses that frustrate customers.
Twitter is getting another big wave of adoption and many people are asking again what it’s for. How could short broadcasted text messages limited to 140 characters be useful? What utility could it possible have? For tech support organizations I think it’s very useful, in two primary ways: for “eavesdropping” on people who are talking…
Check out the post by Jon Mountjoy on the feedback request from Apple after getting his Macbook Pro serviced at the Apple Store. The folks at Apple have done a very nice job on this process. Compare it to what you do. How does your feedback process make your customers feel? An interesting example is…
Spam in Twitter is becoming a problem. Full 75% of my new followers yesterday were some kind of crass commercial, “I’ll show you how to twitter for money” or “check out my new multi-level marketing scheme.” But some folks are using twitter for their business in some useful and interesting way. The latest I’ve learned…
My friend Ken wrote a nice piece a couple days ago about ROI and the role of the community manager. In particular, I liked this observation: … The community is not a structured presence. You cannot simply pen in the community as they’re a wild herd of virtual voices. The skill of the community manager…