Your Customer Community is the Heart of Your Business
By Robert Spector
A Self-Service Customer Community is the sweet spot of customer engagement: the space where the economic order and the social order meet. It’s the place where a company displays respect, trust, and empowerment for its customers, who can freely exchange suggestions, information, and opinions — both positive and negative.
You can hold onto your customers by making them part of the journey and demonstrating loyalty to them. Loyalty is earned, not expected. Any enterprise worth patronizing understands one simple truth: The sale is never over.
The commercial relationship starts with the sale of the right item (or service) at the right price, at the right time. But the commercial relationship endures with customer service and customer engagement, including providing a forum where customers can communicate with each other around your brand proposition. This allows them to share experiences and to ask (and answer) service questions about that product whenever they need it.
Everyone in sales knows that the customers have most (if not all) of the answers. You just need to ask and listen while they converse, debate, argue, vent, examine, and seek answers to questions.
A confident company is eager to learn and discover new things about its products and services and culture by following these conversations, and learning how to improve its offerings.
You can’t have community without communication — and commonality. For those of you old enough to remember the early days of e-commerce, you’ll recall that an online bookstore called Amazon.com was a pioneer in customer communities.
As I wrote in my book, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (HarperBusiness), two decades ago, visitors to Amazon used the search engine to hunt for a specific book, topic, or author, or browse through a database, which back then consisted of 1.1 million titles of books in 23 subject categories. Three book editors read book reviews, perused customer orders, and reviewed current events to determine what books would be featured. Users were now getting the same kind of literary feedback they would find in a small, independent bookstore.
Here’s how then-Executive Editor Rick Ayre said explained it:
If you spend a lot of time on the site, I hope you get a sense of the quirky, independent, literate voice, and that behind it all you’re interacting with people, and that it’s people who care about these things, not people who are trying to sell you these things.
My mantra has always been ‘the perfect context for a purchase decision.’” Amazon customers were invited to “Click and Write Your Own Review of this Book.” One reason for doing that was to create a sense of community. A more pressing reason was that the Amazon needed to generate more content on its site. By having customers write their own reviews (positive or negative), Amazon was able to spark some intellectual dialogue as well as free content on pages that would otherwise be blank. (The company awarded cash prizes for the best customer book reviews.)
Amazon.com’s corporate philosophy on customer reviews was “Attack ideas, not people.” Reviews that were negative or slanderous about something other than the book were removed.
Maire Masco, who then was a customer service manager, recalled a firestorm over an in-house review of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The Amazon reviewer claimed the book was “misogynistic” and supported the practice of beating children.
The reviewer “didn’t take it from a science fiction point of view, but a sociological point of view,” said Masco. “Oh, my God! It was like the doors of hell opened! We were inundated with e-mails and counter-postings. I stopped counting after we posted 300 reviews by readers who condemned that review.”
When publishers and authors asked Jeff Bezos why Amazon.com would publish negative reviews, he defended the practice by claiming that Amazon.com was “taking a different approach, of trying to sell all books.”
“We want to make every book available — the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said. “When you’re doing that, you actually have an obligation — if you’re going to make the shopping environment one that’s actually conducive to shopping — to let truth loose. That’s what we try to do with the customer reviews.”
A self-service customer community is where a company lets truth loose. Customers have always wanted to take the notion of service into their own hand. It’s the self-assured company that lets them do it. If they want to resolve an issue, why don’t customers just go to a store’s Website or chat room? Perhaps they don’t want to contact a service agent who may have more information than they need at that moment. And maybe they don’t want to be sold to.
Many years ago, Barneys New York was a discount men’s clothing operation, not the chic store it is today. When a bargain-hunting Barneys visitor did not want to be bothered by a salesman, he was given a big round badge with the words “Just Looking.”
I thought that was a good idea then. I think it’s a good idea today. It’s preferable to visiting a company website, looking at a particular item, pondering whether to buy it, deciding to move on with your life — only to have that item follow you on every Website you visit. Where’s that “Just Looking” button when you need it?
“Consumers are statistics. Customers are people,” said Stanley Marcus, the late chairman of the Neiman Marcus department store, who is considered one of the most important figures in the history of American retail merchandising and marketing.
What Marcus was saying, of course, was that behind the numbers are flesh-and-blood human beings with definite tastes and opinions.
In today’s customer-engagement economy, customers have more power and influence than any other consumers in the 7,000-year history of commerce.
It’s the customer who ultimately signs your paycheck. The companies that recognize that fact are the ones who will achieve longevity and loyalty. Self-Service Customer Communities are one strategy to make those goals a reality.
Learn more about how to empower your customers here.
