Who owns Customer References and Support in the World Wide Web?

Categories: Community Marketing, Enterprise Web, Web Marketing, Word of MouthPosted on August 6th, 2007

As a child, I was often labeled as disruptive in the classroom, always to my parents dismay. I’m now very disruptive to corporate strategists, but I’m bringing a message that needs to be heard.

A few months ago I spoke at the Customer Reference Forum in the city of Berkeley. My presentation was loosely based around this post: The impacts of social media to customer references.

I opened my presentation with a the recollection of a conversation I had with two of the attendees over lunch. They were talking about which wing to stay at in the hotel that was hosting the conference. One cleverly learned that one side was more desirable, and she learned this from a hotel review website –not the official hotel website!

What’s a customer reference program? It’s a group within a company (often B2B tech companies have this group) that harvest the positive customer mentions and turn them into marketing or sales tool materials. The end goal? To convert prospects by using these filtered and biased customer opinions.

I suggest these great folks that run these programs need to evolve, as prospects can now find customer opinions online. Tools like Yelp, (restaurant rating) blogs (like this one you’re reading now) and the emerging Get Satisfaction (universal product support) product that could be very disruptive to the corporate website.

At the conference, I gave the suggestion that the customer reference teams were to evolve and start being more active in social media. I received push-back from the already startled crowd. (One attendee even called my message scary, but in a positive way). So who’s to manage these ‘unbiased’ and ‘organic’ customer references? Robin Hamilton of reference geeks cares a lot about customers, and would be a great start to learn more.

[Previously, there were dedicated groups that were responsible to harvest the testimonials of customers. Now with the world wide web, these voices appear organically and are easy to find. Now questions of ownership and management rumble from within the enterprise]

So who owns the customer testimonials? Well we all know that they do, but within the organization? We all agree that there’s likely folks who we don’t want talking to customers (and they probably don’t want to either) however I must suggest that everyone who’s a touch point to a customer is actually responsible for customer references. And with many, many employees being on the world wide web, this can include many folks, even those not in sales, marketing, or support.

Additional Resources

The impacts of social media on customer references programs
The support site is no longer on your extranet
Web Strategy: The Air Traffic Tower
Marketing is not on two domains alone
The many Forms of Web Marketing

Shout back: Who should “manage” or “own” the customer references in the modern corporation?

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 7:10 am and is filed under Community Marketing, Enterprise Web, Web Marketing, Word of Mouth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

jeremiah_owyang

Colin, Yup, silos sure make things hard. I see some social media folks (they're called community managers) already dealing with customer references (organic) without customer reference programs involved.

I agree Steve, those connections will need to be forged, this makes reference programs more effective.

Steve Ellis

Surely, *everyone* in a company is responsible for delivering a great customer experience and thereby creating references.

Depending upon the product or service, the various different functions play a greater or lesser role. This great experience should result in a stream of advocates or references

Customer reference professionals will be responsible for monitoring, nurturing and sometimes directly engaging with these communities and/or individual advocates, to either amplify their positive voices, or to 'put it right' for them, when negative statements arise from a poor experience.

But currently, I see few formal connections in most organizations between reference teams and those empowered to 'put it right' - usually in sales, product support or customer service. Often reference professionals do try and feedback through informal channels but lack the empowerment to escalate or demand a resolution.

That's where Dell appear to have stolen a march and demonstrated just how much progress can be made by being seen to recognize, and then fix, a problem through its engagement with bloggers like Jeff Jarvis et al.

Colin Henderson

Great post Jeremiah. Traditional organisations are not structured to deal with your question. Traditional mandates could all argue, that its marketing, product, segment, channel, etc etc. The orgs who figure this out, and settle on a spot will be early winners.

I would argue that it has to be someone operational, with profit and customer loyalty targets .. the virtual equivalent of branches/ front line staff.