The ENTiPping Point

This morning, Amber Naslund wrote about her experience with Hotel 71 in Chicago this week and detailed how a customer service experience went awry, but was quickly remedied by the manager at Hotel 71 after seeing her discuss it on Twitter.

As we have seen in many stories over the past few years, businesses are becoming more adept at keeping an eye on the social media space for complaints about their products and services.  Instead of letting a "customer service experience gone bad" explode into something unmanageable, more companies are quick to jump into a situation made public and help to rectify a volatile situation.

But this brought me to some interesting questions regarding companies who look to correct these situations:

Do we want a company to attempt to "make us happy" or would we rather have them go so overboard to correct a situation that we can't help but be happy?

Is meeting expectations good enough when a company wants to correct a poor customer service experience?

If you're like me, you've had bad customer service experiences in which the company you're dealing with has asked "what can I do to make this situation right?".  Companies want to put the control back in the customer's hands, giving them the opportunity to conjure up their own solution.  In some way, this should be more satisfying because we have control over our own happiness with the company.

But my hunch is that most people's nature is going to be to only ask for what is going to financially "null out" the situation.

While we may each have more or less financially than one another, our society is structured around fairness and equality where treatment is involved.  We want to be treated fairly.

With this in mind, it would seem that companies actually are missing an opportunity to overwhelm a customer with a positive experience by asking "what can we do to make this situation right?"  Society has tuned us to be just and fair and we may feel bad for asking for an upgrade in shipping, something additionally for free, or other special treatment that is above and beyond what was expected from the experience.  

So what does this mean for companies trying to excel at customer service?

In Amber's case, the manager of Hotel 71 took the situation to another level when he provided her with his cell phone number and then promised to send her an invitation to return.  She didn't need him to go to that extreme -- she wanted the situation to be taken care of and brought to the level of service initially expected.

But by going a step further and providing exceptional and outstanding customer service that went beyond what was expected, Hotel 71 gave Amber something that most of us do not want to ask for -- more than she expected. 

When we get more than we expect, we almost can't help but be excited and overwhelmed.

When I get more than I bargained for from a company, I rarely am put in a mindset of feeling dissatisfied.  Is your company providing "more than it could"? 

What would you prefer as a customer?

Should a company ask you what they can do to correct a problem with a customer service experience or would you rather have them take a shot at overwhelming you?  Let me know what you think.

(Photo credit: Striatic)

As bright as we all proclaim ourselves to be, we are woefully inadequate at helping ourselves and each other manage personal relationships.

I don't mean to imply that we don't know how to interact socially, either online or offline.  But I think there is a great opportunity for us to crowdsource our relationships together. 

I wrote about the idea of "metafolksonomy" a few months back.  It was the notion that if you crowdsourced Delicious-like tagging of people in the social space, that you could define an aggregate social profile of that person.

Businesses have embraced the idea of customer relationship managment (CRM) for years.  Converse with Jeremiah Owyang and he'll tell you that the concept of "social" CRM is going to be key as we move the concept of CRM forward with added social profile management components.

But what about those people who aren't in the social space that are part of my network?  How do I keep track of them, categorize their relationship to me and, even more beneficially, make my relationship to them useful to you?

I Need A Tool

There are some interesting tools out there to help you manage personal relationship and contacts for sure.  Tools like Gist and Rapportive help you manage your social network contacts and intergrate the management of those into your Gmail, Outlook or even Salesforce.com environments.

Several weeks back, I came across an interesting product called Jigsaw that integrates into the Salesforce.com CRM.  It's a jointly-maintained database of business contacts at companies all over the world; think of it as a "Wikipedia for business contacts".  So if I have a phone number for an executive at a company that I feel is more "up to date" than his profile that someone else has entered in Jigsaw for him, I can update the information to the most current data, and everyone who has that person as a contact will now have the new information.

So why does this have to be for business only?

If I have a contact in my network (think "personal" and not "social" for a moment), wouldn't it be great if I made the context of my relationship to that person available to everyone so that my connectivity to that person could be utilized by others?

This is the intent of LinkedIn from a business perspective.  But not everyone's on LinkedIn and the relationships I'm referring to may not suit LinkedIn.  Let me give you an example... 

"I had no idea..."

Let's say you have really been trying to made inroads in Company X.  You and I are friends because we were on a board together for a local charity.  You've tried and tried to get a consulting gig with Company X, but it'd be great if you knew someone there.  You check your LinkedIn profile and have no contact there.  Wouldn't it be good if you knew that my wife was a 3rd generation descendent of the man that founded Company X?  My wife's not on LinkedIn -- she's just someone you know because of me.  How many times have you found out this kind of information and thought, "I had no idea..."?

Now you know about that relationship -- how do you make this newly-discovered fact available for others that may know me?  This isn't something that Outlook's "contacts" area is going to help manage.  And even if I can manage my own relationships that way, it's certainly not going to benefit anyone else.  These "relationship affinity traits" somehow need to be captured and shared if we're all truly going to benefit from our personal networks.  If a Jigsaw-type repository for personal contacts and the relationships these contacts were involved in were available publicly, we could all benefit;  we might truly be but "six degrees of separation" away from anyone. 

Remember: Social Doesn't Mean "Online"

The world isn't completely "socially networked" yet.  Get involved in your local community and you will realize that the knowing how people interconnect and knowing how to leverage those connections is key to becoming integrated in making things happen.  But it's also important to remember that who you know offline can be just as important to those relationships that are primarily online.  We should find a way to combine the two so that all can find value in those interactions that we nurture.

So, what tools do you use to manage your personal relationships and network offline?