I’ve been thinking about this post for a long time. I’m noticing that many businesses will set up a community for their customers, but the community never makes it any further than the customer support stage.

My Verizon example

I bought an HTC Incredible phone from Verizon. I’ve had Verizon service for years and years, and I like them. I like that the Incredible is built on an open OS, so that I can write an application for it (in my copious free time, of course).

Since the OS is built by Google, all of the Google tools you normally use are built in. People are writing all sorts of neat applications – I have a pedometer, a wedding countdown app, an app that tells you the stars and constellations you are looking at in the night sky, apps that tell you where your twitter friends are in relation to you, an app that prevents me from butt dialing my friends, and many others.

Sometimes the applications don’t play nice with the internal memory. There is a tool that shows you how much memory is being used, but it doesn’t report that information accurately. Once you start running low on memory, applications start to break. Like texting – and I need to be able to text.

I googled around and confirmed my suspicions: the memory reporting tool isn’t providing accurate information. So I called Verizon, and talked to a really nice guy. Had me do the stock – pull the battery from the phone – move. I kept asking him how to tell what is really using up all the memory. He said there was no way. He said the best way was to wipe the OS and do a fresh install.

Here’s where customer service and a community to support customers should be different.

On the one hand you have me. I’m pretty good with operating systems, although truthfully I’ve never played around much with a phone OS. Mostly because the wireless carriers lock that down so you can’t play around with it. But from what I researched, and from my technical experience, I knew although wiping the OS would only solve the immediate problem — it would come back. I wanted to troubleshoot the phone.

On the other hand you have the Verizon CSR. He gets paid based on how fast he can get people off the phone, and how many people he can help a day. He’s not going to take up half his shift to troubleshoot an open OS issue. He actually told me this (in a really nice way though). So from a customer support point of view he identified a problem, identified a solution, and pleasantly tried to help me.

Of course I said no thanks. I went on to find a solution – Advanced App Killer – that gives me the ability to kill any running apps on the phone, thus freeing up some space. I didn’t need the answer that got me out of the queue, I needed some help understanding the deeper issue and developing a strategy to deal with the root cause of the problem. I needed community support, not customer support

Lessons learned

If you have a community set up for one of your audiences, fight the urge to answer their questions as if you have a customer support queue to clear. While you were building the community, hopefully you were

• Finding the target community members
• Messaging to the prospective members about the types of content and interactions that would be available in your community
• Listening to what your members were saying

Now that folks have decided to join you, the next steps may be to foster an atmosphere of trust where members are learning from your official program team, but also from each other. If you can get that trust rolling then you can promote engagement and build affinity between the community members and with your program. Hopefully this will lead to a dynamic learning environment.

Building a dynamic learning environment in a community

All of this work has to happen with a background appreciation for the small world you are trying to bring together in your community. Is the content (and the way it is presented)  in the community relevant to the information needs of the members? Verizon didn’t care that I was an advanced user with different information needs, they just wanted to fix the high level problem and get me off the phone.

I’m not saying to ignore the problems and questions, there needs to be a mechanism to answer every question. What I’m saying is in a community you have to dig deeper. Don’t just answer the question using a paraphrased version of a script your customer service team would use. Why not leave the question sitting there for a few hours, see if another community member has some insight? Observe the conversation between two natives of the same small world, perhaps you’ll see the real question that didn’t get asked.

Pause and think about the information needs of the member who is looking for help. Why is the member asking for help? What is the underlying information need? If you can ensure that the information need is completely met, that member will feel a very strong affinity to the community.

Even if the community managers do not belong to the same small worlds as the community members (perhaps marketing runs a community for highly technical individuals), having the community managers adopting  communication rules that make sense to your target audience will help build affinity. If members have access to the vocabulary of their own small world, they will have the words they need to initiate a search for information.

Doing customer support online is easy. Answer the question, clear the queue. Community support is hard. Identify the question, speak the same language, dig deeper for the real information need, provide relevant content and answers, build engagement and affinity. There are no short-cuts, and its easy to fall into the trap of just clearing the queue. But taking the slow, arduous route to real community support will get you to the place where you are reaping the real benefits of social media.

In case you missed the drama over the weekend, SouthWest Air was embroiled in a social media and customer service nightmare with director Kevin Smith.

Here’s how the story was reported:

Smith was thrown off an SWA flight for being fat. He started tweeting right away. He was offered a voucher, which he refused. He finally got home (on another SWA flight). He tweeted and made a podcast. SWA put a post on their blog defending their actions. The media (and social media fanboys & girls) sided with SWA, and painted Smith as an angry fat guy.

Here’s the timeline, according to Smith’s podcast(s):

• Smith had purchased 2 seats, he does this because the tickets are cheap and he likes a barrier (probably from fans.  I know I’d talk his ear off and probably embarrass my son to death! Come on, we all know how geeks are and sitting next to a captive Smith would be like nerd nirvana. I get why he buys a barrier seat!)
• He had a chance to catch an earlier flight. He actually chatted with the gate agent about how sure he’s a bit overweight, but he can buckle up and lower the armrests. She put him on the plane.
• When he was called to board, he asked about getting his money back for the unused seat, which seemed to aggravate the new gate agent.
• When he got up to the plane, some guy asked another SWA employee if Smith was “revenue”. They wanted to be sure he had paid for his ticket, and wasn’t traveling on vouchers. I guess they were close to some ratio they had to meet.
• He sits down, and buckles in, and the original gate agent comes to escort him off. He shows her that the arm rests could go down, but it doesn’t matter. He gets booted for the “safety” policy.
• He waits for over 10 minutes for the gate agent to come deal with him. From the sounds of it, the conversation got heated. And remember, Smith is a storyteller by trade. His tweets about not throwing a fellow fatty under the plane were priceless.
• Smith is tweeting the entire time. SWA tweets back, and it sounds like they were able to get someone on the ground to go apologize to Smith. (He admits he wasn’t really reading tweets, he was writing them).  But it was too late, the damage was done.
• Smith gets on another SWA to go home, using both seats. Another plus-size lady gets in the third seat on the row (that’s right, there was now a fat buffer seat for two passengers).
• The lady gets pulled off the plane by an attendant, but she comes back. Smith learns later that the lady was told she should be more considerate of other passengers, and purchase two seats when she flies. Even though there was a fat seat purchased in the row in which she chose to sit. For the record, this seems to be what really set Smith off. He said all he could think of was his daughter – what if someone did this to her?

So lets look at the performance problems here:

• Is the policy the problem?
  Many posts have been written about how the enforcement of this policy is at the mercy of the gate and flight attendants. Should there be a weight or girth size stipulated that kicks off the buy 2 seats safety policy? Is going by the handrests going down enough? Is it possible to enforce the policy in a fair manner to customers?
• Is execution of the policy the problem?
  Was Smith kicked off for a safety reason, or would returning his ticket have made that flight below the percentages set for revenue? Was there any reason to pull the woman on Smith’s second flight aside and shame her, since there was a paid for “safety” barrier seat? Is this a training issue, or a hiring issue (don’t hire mean people!)?
• Was the social media reaction adequate?
• Is responding to an irate customer who is tweeting his/her frustration with standard corporate-speak really engaging? Should you always engage? This is customer service 101, you let the irate customer get it all out until they are calm enough to reason with. Then you follow up on whatever you promise to do for them.
• Did SWA have a contingency plan for when one of its highly controversial policies?
  All they had to do was google (or search on Metafilter) for posts of how horribly this policy has been implemented in the past, were they ready for this?

Wrapping it up…

I’m thinking of this from the engagement piece. We have this powerful, powerful tool that we can use to connect and engage with our customers. Guess what, sometimes customers get pissed off. Sometimes for very good reason. Do you know what is going to make them go all Kevin Smith? Do you know how to react when they do? Do you know how to use the feedback from negative experiences to improve the experience of ALL of your customers?

For the record, I like Smith’s work. Most of it (most of it – come on a DONKEY!! WTF!!). And he is my son’s idol (again – a donkey?? come on help the moms out a little here Kevin!). I think my appreciation of his work is what connected me to his network, but his passion for seeing things set right really makes me helped me connect his problem to problems I am sure to face in the future.

For those of you who may have missed my tweets and Facebook updates, I’ve been on vacation this week. We rented a condo on the Gulf of Mexico in my hometown (I’ve learned that staying with family sorta negates the restful feeling vacation gives you).

The drive down was pretty uneventful. Once we checked into the condo we had some issues. First of all, we came down so we could go to the Billy Bowlegs Pirate festival. We planned to check into the condo, leave my daughter there (she has sensory issues that make navigating big noisy crowds a nightmare) and walk across the bridge to the landing. But our condo wasn’t ready. I asked for a time, asked when it would be ready, and was promised a call when it was ready.

They never called. We missed the landing. We decided to just show up and see if the condo was ready. It was. It probably had been, and they forgot about us because they were busy.

We got to the condo, and several things were just wrong. The AC was broken. The cable modem wasn’t connected to anything and we didn’t see a splitter. The shower curtain had crusty brown stuff on it. The icemaker wouldn’t dispense ice. Almost every single dish has a chip in it.

This is what our internet setup looked like:

I was trying hard to keep the vacation calm – but the AC and the internet were necessities. The AC because we are on the Gulf Coast in June. The internet because that is how we navigate things now – looking at menus, times, etc so that we have less stress from crowds, noise and all the things that can sabatoge our outings.

I called the front desk to tell them about these problems, and encountered some of the worst customer service I have ever had. I kept trying to explain that the cable modem was not hooked up, but the woman decided I was just too incredibly stupid to plug in an ethernet cable. I resisted the urge to tell her what I actually do for a living (create technical training for a product customers – like cable companies- use to manage these networks!!!) She finally informed me that I needed to call the cable company so they could walk me through plugging in the cable.

Yes, this made my happy vacation vibe slip for a moment. That’s when we decided to just jump on an unsecured wireless network from another unit in the condo. That worked fine until the cable company lost a core router and their service went down.

I never called about the other issues because of the complete unhelpfulness of the first person I talked to – the gatekeeper of customer service – was so rude. I had decided I’d deal with everything else and just blog about the experience later.

I called again Wednesday – 5 days into our trip – to complain again about the internet. The woman this time was very nice. So I told her about the icemaker, the dirty shower curtain, and the broken dishes. She sent people to fix things, and everyone who came out was very nice and competent. They replaced the wireless router.

And on Wednesday, I tweeted about the customer service FAIL I had encountered. And I included a reference to the rental company we are using – Resort Quest.

And someone was listening!

Someone called the room, made sure everything got fixed, and took care of us for our troubles. This is the level of customer service that I had expected from the very beginning of our trip. Because the management company was listening on twitter, there was a way to get around the original gatekeeper of customer service who had soured me on dealing with anyone at the company. I also feel if I had mentioned the name of the resort in my first tweets, our problems would have been resolved earlier.

So instead of having to write an angry email about how ripped off I felt from staying in a poorly managed property, I get to remember the beautiful view and the great customer service we had from @ResortQuestNWFL. I have to say – the view and location were amazing. And aside from the encounter with the person on the phone, everyone has been incredibly friendly and helpful. If you want to experience the mix of Southern and Gulf Coast culture, and be on the most beautiful beaches in the world, you should think about staying at one of the Resort Quest properties on Okaloosa Island or in Destin.

I also got Brian to admit that Twitter is good, and that in itself is priceless!