We Don't Own the Customer Relationship and What We Can Do About It

Ah, those halcyon days when companies owned the customer relationship and decided what the buyer needed to know and when she needed to know it. When advertising on television or in newspapers were the only way to capture the attention of a rapt audience. We built it, however indifferently, and they came.

Well, that was then and here we are now. I came across again a great book published ten years ago, titled “The Cluetrain Manifesto” and its preamble struck me as more true now than when it was first published. “We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings – and our reach exceeds our grasp. Deal with it.”

In thinking about how our companies can change the conversation with customers, I believe it’s the whole company that engages and creates the moments of truth. Frankly it amazes me that I can still come across stories as I did last weekend in the New York Times about the complete failure of a major airline to deal effectively with a reasonable request for a refund. It wasn’t just the unbelievably difficult voice mail navigation or the lack of a human to speak with or the conflicting information provided by different departments but also the arrogance of a senior employee who blamed the customer for not being able discern the difference between a Customer Refund Department and a Customer Relations Department (huh??). Oh yes, we still hold our customers hostage, but those opportunities are fewer and the more often these stories are repeated online and the dinosaur company that still doesn’t get it is named, the more the customer manifesto gains strength. Did this story just make you sit up? Remind you of your own company? Uh oh.

Here are a few thoughts in the context of engaging the whole company to create effective human networks:

Strategy: How do you define your market? It’s a human network of conversations that are smarter and more informed than ever. If you aren’t providing information and support, your markets are finding it among themselves and making you irrelevant.

Leadership: Are you having a conversation with your markets or providing talking points, corporate communications and PR? Markets can move quickly – away from you.

Culture: is it command and control you seek or hands on knowledge and respect?

Employees: This group is remarkably like your markets because they, too, are human beings who want information, support and conversations. Are you building networks for them to have meaningful exchanges? If you think your intranet fulfills this requirement, look at it again. Or, read about what Proctor and Gamble did to build its very successful networks for employees and customers.

Customers: They have a voice and they want to use it. You have a voice and they want to hear it. Not in brochures or web sites that have no substance. Not in the scripted “dialogue” with your call center. As the Manifesto summed it up, “You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.”

We can invest in all the technology and processes our CFO will allow but if we don’t build in the human desire for connection and conversation, we will be talking to ourselves.