We are building a lot at our house these days. Not anything large scale, just towers of blocks or LEGOs that our three-year-old daughter delights in crashing to earth. Sometimes it’s a well-placed ball toss that does the damage, sometimes it’s a full-on running smash through the structure. Always it’s followed by giddy laughter.

Once in a while, though, we focus on construction. When she wants to actually build upward, she gets disappointed when a structure inadvertently tumbles down. So I found myself trying to get her up to speed on the basic engineering tenets of structural integrity. Bear in mind that I went to art school, so this is not in my intellectual wheel house. But, she is only a toddler, so she believes me to be an authority on the matter.

“When you only have one pillar, it is very wobbly,” I explain. I stand up one block shaped like a thick, four-inch dowel on end and place a brick-shaped block on top. Not balanced precisely, it falls.

“When you have two, it is better, but still unsteady,” the lesson continues. Demonstrating, the brick piece falls sideways, off the two pillars.

“But three pillars are very steady, see?” I set up the pillars in a triangular configuration as you look down on them. The brick piece lies solidly on top.

She nods, grasping this concept.

I continue, “It’s like the tripod that we have for the camera.” For some reason, this tripod became a play-object for a few weeks in our house, so she knows what I am talking about. She would carry it around the house like a mini Ansel Adams, setting it up here and there, adjusting the leg lengths, and cranking the middle tube where the camera rests on up and down. You know, typical three-year-old fun.

She then knocked over the blocks and ran off to play with something else.

That’s when it hit me. In my role in Client Services at People Design, I am always looking at the experience our clients have when they engage us and, by extension, how our work impacts our client’s clients. Empathic Customer Experience Design is what we do, after all.

“Three pillars creating a solid base”  is a great analogy for the kinds of stories I share (with anyone who will listen) about the impressionistic experiences customers internalize from an interaction.

By my reckoning, you could say the three pillars for solid customer experiences are “good value,” “smart product,” and “rewarding service.” There are a number of customer-service models out there. This one makes sense to me and is pretty simple.

My broad definition of those terms…

Value: Cost relative to inherent worth

Product: The deliverable, artifact, or physical “thing”

Service: The feeling derived from the interaction

When all three are working together, you can feel pretty good about your client’s experience. Two, not so much. One is trouble.

Here’s what I mean (but I’m sure you can build your own equation scenarios)…

(Value + Product) – Service = The DMV. You’re number 86. Now serving 22.

(Product + Service) – Value = Beer at the ballpark. $8.50 for a cup of Miller Lite?

(Value + Service) – Product = Insert your most unappetizing fast food restaurant meal here. Mine involved “chicken.”

Worse yet…

Product – (Service + Value) = My recent cell phone experience.

(Empty Set) = The last minute flight I recently took on a small commuter plane.

So, we continue to do the right thing here—to shore up our pillars. Think about your company’s pillars—and what you can do to strengthen your base.

In the meantime, I will be making some stuff out of Play-Doh.

Mark’s summary of the event: “I was struck by the number of real-world solutions we learned about. Improving the patient experience isn’t something we need to wait for–it’s happening RIGHT NOW, and has been for years, and we can learn from what’s working.”

There is no shortage of incredible, moving, compassionate, and motivated individuals who have done amazing things to make the patient experience not just more tolerable, but intimate, humane, unique, rewarding, and healing–in every sense of the word. People were moved to tears several times during the two-day event. I have to admit that these stories touched me emotionally as well. By the end of the session, however, I was more confused than I was motivated.

How is it possible that something as obviously valuable as a rewarding patient experience does not exist at a systemic level? There’s been a lot of recent public debate about whether government or the free market system should shape the future of health care in the U.S., but however that shakes out, it seems painfully obvious that the demand for a better patient experience already exists–so why isn’t there a supply?

Experience-level thinking is not easy. Experience design involves many different touchpoints. Experience design involves multiple people and or departments. Experience design involves several audiences, each with their own needs. Because of this complexity, it seems that within health care, we choose the easier path. We rely on great individuals to compensate for the lack of a system. We rely on a few great touchpoints to compensate for the lack of a holistic experience.

I choose to maintain my belief that humankind is inherently good. My hypothesis is not that we don’t want to provide positive patient experiences, or that the economics do not allow for it. Instead, we have not yet invested the time and energy required to make the jump from people/events/random organizations to designed, repeatable systems.

As an economy, we have demonstrated that we know how to do this. Examples of beautifully designed holistic experiences are discussed every day at an increasing rate. The patient experience-related stories I heard at Gel were inspirational, and they have a key role in increasing awareness and providing a sense of urgency. However, these examples are not sufficient. Our society is in the process of quickly evolving beyond an economy of products and services. We exist in an experience economy.

In the next several years, it is quite predictable that delivering great experiences will cease to be a point of differentiation and instead will become an ante for just being in business. For now, most of the population is willing to accept poor experiences in health care as long as they meet our immediate needs for treatment. Reform or no reform, I don’t think this condition will be allowed to last much longer.

Case in point: my grandma and the chain letter.

Let me start by saying that I am not a fan of chain letters. Under normal circumstances I find them to be a time suck, full of empty promises. But the chain letter that landed in my home mailbox was from my husband’s dear Aunt Susan, and I was flattered that she was thinking of me. I’m also a sucker for snail mail. Besides, this chain letter promised several recipes in return for my time, with little threat of consequences for breaking the chain.

The letter sat on our kitchen counter for days because I simply didn’t have time for it. But I felt too guilty to throw it away, so I finally did it. I made my copies and found my favorite recipe to share, not really caring whether I received anything in return.

Not unlike Aunt Susan, I sent the letters out to family members, a thoughtful gesture to remind them that I haven’t forgotten about them. I even carefully selected those whom I knew were cooks. My grandma was on the list.

Days later, I received this voice mail.

I had to laugh out loud as I listened to her lament, but the message was one part comedy, one part failure. Of course I began to regret the undue stress I had put on my grandma. I also realized that I had flunked the knowing-your-customer portion of this particular engagement – not to mention knowing my customers’ customer.

Why did I think than an 84-year-old would be interested in a chain letter? She’s still cooking, yes, but her friends are just as old as she is, if not older, and they just don’t cook. They just don’t. Plus, she’s played the chain game before. You heard the woman. She only got two dishtowels!

I’ve since spoken to my grandma and apologized for sending the letter in the first place, and for causing her to worry about breaking my chain. In reality, I’m the one who broke the chain. I broke it when I made the decision to send out those dang letters to quell a guilty feeling, with little regard for my “customers.”

So it’s OK, Grandma. Nobody wants to be the one to break the chain. But this one’s not on you.

A brand is nothing more or less than the perception of your organization in the mind of your audience. That perception is shaped by experiences – a series of touchpoints as they encounter your product or service. Word of mouth, a customer service agent, your friend’s sister-in-law who works for the company, the delivery truck, the sales receipt, and your website are all customer touchpoints that add up to what you know and believe about a company – a brand. The primary touchpoint of course is your company actually delivering – not just broadcasting – value to your customers. The brand promise is the promise you have made to deliver on that value.

Often have we been hired to refresh, repackage, update, or otherwise refine a “brand,” often referred to as “rebranding.” The trouble is, too often there hasn’t been enough attention paid to making the value proposition more compelling. If the graphics have gotten more compelling, but the value proposition has not, we risk false advertising, not to mention wasting a company’s investment in “branding.” Even if you don’t see this alone as a cardinal sin, we now live in a world where customers see through empty promises.

New communications and social networking technologies have made it increasingly difficult to be anything but transparent to your customers. Customers demand it of their commercial providers and politicians alike.

We’ve been following the work of Bruce Temkin (VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research), and we recently participated in a webinar during which he shared some of his latest research on Customer Experience. His findings continue to reinforce the premise of our work. Among the useful pieces that he shared was the following chart, which lays out plainly the difference between communicating and delivering value.

Rebranding should coincide with repositioning, attending to the right side of this diagram. Communicating the value proposition, designing a great experience, is essential but follows the hard decisions required to create a good position. Too often people see branding as only what’s on the left – making promises – or worse, just window dressing, just designing a logo. Don’t get me wrong, I love logos! We live in a world of global ideograms and visual language, and it is critical to understand and capture the essence of your brand and realize its potential in your customer’s experience. But be clear about your strategy first.

Lipstick doesn’t go on pigs, and brand is not a garnish. If you are considering a rebrand, really understand your core value – what you plan to offer to whom. As Tom Koulopoulos noted in a recent seminar, innovation begins with understanding what you’re good at. It sounds easy, but it’s not.

If you’re looking for a brand consultant, throw a rock and you’re bound to hit one. If you want to dig deeper and find new ways to add value for your customer, we can help.

The first presentation (sponsored by the local AAF chapter (formerly the Ad Club) was given by Shari Short, Director of Strategic Research at Aloysius Butler & Clark (AB&C!) in Delaware, who talked about social marketing principles and techniques. Short could have been singing right from our songbook, particularly the verses about getting to know your audience through deeper, qualitative means rather than relying on straight data and demographics – too often the approach for marketing efforts. She emphasized behavioral change as a goal worth measuring, over information exchange alone. Here are the principles she advocates for social marketing:

1. Know your audience. Dig deeper.

2. Awareness is not the same as action. Think education.

3. What’s in it for them? Think benefits.

Social Marketing (not to be confused with social media) is more process than event.

We were glad to see that Short, too, uses Prochaska’s Stages of Change model (a subject of a future blog post, I think) as a way to describe the process of helping an unaware customer become a loyal customer.

Her psychology background showed as she focused on key emotional drivers for their customer work: attitudes, socials norms, facts, fear. Campaigns that do this well Short cites (not done by AB&C!) are these wonderful anti-smoking PSAs from the California Department of Health Services.

While Short brushed upon infrastructure changes within an organization to address more holistic needs of the customer – the problem we aspire to solve for our clients – she mostly showed ad campaign work as solutions. I wish she had gotten deeper into the meat of solving organizational problems.

Short also cited focus groups as the primary source of qualitative audience research, as opposed to the contextual and generative research methods we are persuing. Our Empathy work is focused on uncovering not only expressed customer needs, but also unarticulated needs that can lead to bigger product/service innovations.

A few days later I was invited to attend a Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing workshop at a client’s headquarters with Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking and CEO of Gaspedal, a WOM consulting firm in Chicago.

Sernovitz is a great advocate and educator for the WOM philosophy and techniques. WOM is all about scale and the multiplier effect, how to use the human network to get your message across. The most important metric is: How many people will one person tell?

He too presented several ideas that helped us feel our work was on track:  The medium for WOM is people, Sernovitz emphasized that the cost of customer service is much higher than the cost of providing a good customer experience (by a factor of 100:1)… making the ROI of a good Customer Experience Strategy self evident.

Sernovitz’s three-step WOM practice goes like this:

1. It’s about your value: Give people a reason to talk (in a Purple Cow kind of way), be remarkable

2. It’s about their desire to belong: Make it easy for the conversation to take place and continue

3. It’s about them feeling good: Make them feel good, smart, proud, and have fun

Other ideas he presented that we encourage:

1. Work smart and fail fast

2. Regularly listen and respond to customers

3. Commit to being part of the conversation about your company

An interesting point about WOM work is that while we have an increasing dependency on talkers who create buzz, the talkers aren’t necessarily buyers. We learned this in a hands-on way in our work with Spout.com, and it has big implications for defining target audiences and influencers.

Sernovitz encouraged our group to think outside of the typical marketing “value” mindset. He showed several YouTube movies that were mostly stunts intended to get people talking – about what, sometimes I wasn’t sure. I suppose this fits the entertainment PR mantra that any news is good news, but I wonder if too much of this kind of thinking can distract us from providing great customer experiences.

Sernovitz was great, but while I found the workshop informative and inspiring, I wondered about the bridge between designing stunts simply to get people talking and doing something genuinely worth talking about.

Both Short and Sernovitz rightly focus on the habits and uniqueness of people, and how a greater awareness of their emotional and social needs help companies better get the word out and serve their customers.

Sernovitz says that “happy customers are the best ads,” to which I’d add that great customer experiences make happy customers.

First, this “Innovation Master Class” is clearly targeting business leaders who lead innovation groups, are working to encourage more innovative behavior into their organizations, or are managing incubators funded to encourage local growth. Innovation, of course, is easier to theorize about than do, and large organizations in particular can find it difficult to focus on developing innovative value for their customers.

We have helped both Whirlpool and Amway with their internal business innovation efforts. Tom’s course provided great insights into some of the organizational dynamics of setting up what he calls “Innovation Zones” – protected spaces where free thinking is encouraged and rewarded, and the status quo is constantly challenged and redefined. His recommendations certainly mirror our experience in the importance of working directly with business leaders, striving for both autonomy and transparency for innovation efforts, and focusing on customer-value creation.

Secondly, Tom reinforced our most recent work in customer experience innovation. (Who doesn’t like to hear they’re running on the right track?) Here are a five takeaways from the seminar:

Innovation is a threat to yesterday’s success.
Markets don’t always reward new ideas. This why our customer empathy work focuses on customer needs more than customer wants. Markets – people –  know what they have experienced, but innovation changes the experience.

Innovation is not a solo flight.
The vision of the lone innovator is dated – the world today is just too complex. Scientific papers, patents, and business innovation is increasingly co-authored and co-owned. The trend line is incredibly obvious toward collaborative innovation. Work in interdisciplinary teams and networks to find new paths. Remember that innovation is often about combination: There will be some chaos, but don’t try to avoid it. Fail fast, start learning, be agile. Innovation – as opposed to invention – is more process than product, and the future of innovation is about collaboration.

Budgeting can be an innovation killer.
Rather than managing costs, focus first on investing to create value. The greatest value of innovation results from a context of profound and prolonged uncertainty. So learn how to react quickly when you discern real sources of value. For us, this starts with a well-defined business position. Budgets are put in place to accommodate anticipated needs, and are necessary for many kinds of work. Innovation – finding new sources of value – needs room to explore.

Experience innovation is infinite.
Innovations in product design, price, and speed to market only go so far, but you can always better understand your customer, their needs and desires, and find ways to meet them that are ever better and differentiating. We continue to see a shift from product to service economy, and exploring this area is a great way to surface new innovation opportunities.

Design processes around your customer.
Organizations need to innovate the customer experience first and then work backwards to deliver that experience. When we make plans, we often get the future wrong because we don’t always understand customer behavior. Do all you can to understand the customer’s context before your next investment.

A little over a year later, I’m happy to announce that we continue to grow and fit into these new clothes. As I write this, we’re up to our eyeballs redesigning our firm. This year we roll out an evolved position, new service offerings, web offerings, and tools.

Our own medicine

A lot of our consulting work centers on strategic positioning, but it’s a lot easier to prescribe than to take one’s own medicine.  We want to live up to our name. So we’ve spent some quality time thinking through how we add value to our clients’ businesses. Where the need is, and how our offer is different and better.

Our deeper exploration on experience design has led us to three areas of focus, a process for customer experience innovation that can be described in three movements: Empathy, Strategy, and Realization.

On one hand, this process is the way we’ve been doing for the last five years or so. On the other, five years of learning, research, and reflection refine our model, language, and understanding. We’re a learning company, and this is just one point in the evolution of ideas. A significant one.

Empathy

What does empathy have to do with business innovation? A lot, actually.

Most organizations, as they grow, become more and more separated from their customers’ experiences. If a business doesn’t understand its customers – really understand its customers – how can that business deliver an experience that will keep customers coming back? We believe — and our experience demonstrates — the value of principles that Larry Keeley, Jeremey Alexis and others have been championing for some time now.

A direct, visceral understanding of the customer experience – empathy –  is critical for customer experience innovation.

Our Empathic Research methods are maturing to better help our clients learn about the context of their customers’ lives. What are your customers thinking, feeling, and doing as they approach decisions about your products and services? What is her mindset? What are his feelings? What are their beliefs? How inviting or intimidating is their decision, or your purchasing environment?

Empathic insights from this kind of research fuel the world’s most innovative experiences – products and services that disrupt their markets. We put Empathy to work to craft compelling experiences that help and delight people and earn customer loyalty.

Strategy

Most businesses would agree that a great customer experience is key. But how many create a plan for having a great experience? Too few.

Firms that aim to lead must develop strategies for engaging the customer in ways that are empathetic to their needs, and bring meaningful value. Crowded markets and shifting demographics will demand customer experience innovation is a key competitive differentiator.

Consider: What is your customer’s Ideal Future Experience? And how will you provide it? What are the most critical gaps you must close in your customer’s experience? How much of your budget should you invest in each stage of your customer’s life with your product or service? What are the Experience Touchpoints in the lifecycle of your ideal customer experience? You will need a strategy that synthesizes insights into your customers’ lives with your business goals.

We work with our clients to design, test, and plan product and service experiences that are engaging and memorable, that satisfy real customer needs, yield the behaviors you want, and build loyal relationships.

Realization

How many well formed plans wither and fail because they aren’t executed with precision, care, and craft? Too many.

Design development, management, and execution require training, experience, attention to detail. Today’s customer experiences are built by a wide diversity of creative talents in a world of rapidly evolving new media.

We’re lucky to have a talented group. Our designers regularly win international design awards. Our production partners are the best in the world. But we never take our skills or products for granted. We work hard to stay on top of the latest and best thinking in our fields of interaction design, graphic design, and environmental design.

Studying our customers’ customers’ real needs – the people for whom we’re designing – results in work that is always inventive. We find fresh ways to deliver carefully crafted messages. We test our work, measure our results, and manage your design programs to be sure you are delivering on plan.

People Design 2.0

Did I actually type People Design 2.0? Yipes! It’s a cliché, I know. But clichés work, of course. That is why they exist. You might consider our firm as having entered it’s second release (and second decade) upon our name change. It did, but if that was the first release of People Design, we’re gearing up for the fully featured version. Did I just strangle that metaphor?

We’re excited about what the next year will bring, and what we will bring to our clients. Our new website will launch before long. It will describe our new services, embody new thinking, and be a better expression of who are are today. Our experience pays dividends in the form of better processes, tools, and ultimately a stronger team. Its adds up to our adding even more value to our clients’ offerings. We’re the same firm, only better.

We help companies conceive and produce innovative customer experiences. We work with leaders to gain customer insights, discover fresh approaches to their markets, and make this vision real.

Interested? Stay tuned.

When the eggnog starts flowing, I know my favorite season has arrived: Communications Planning Time!

I love pulling up my spreadsheets, tucking my calculator by my side, and digging in.

Seriously.

Yesterday I laid out an annual plan for one of our best clients. This is part of the work we do to ensure we are providing new and relevant content to all of their audiences on a regular basis. I mention they are one of our best clients because working with people who understand and value this part of the process always results in our best and most successful work.

When a company must communicate with many audiences, it’s important to begin with communications goals — what each audience should know, think, feel, or do about your offering. An annual plan helps you establish those goals and define your approach.

At this point, audiences, positioning, tone and visual direction, budget and recommended tactics have been determined. It’s now time to apply that to a workable plan.

Outline Your Process.

Your annual plan outlines your opportunities for creating communications experiences and prioritizes each.  It is a map for how and when you will provide opportunities for your customers to interact with your brand.

Schedule and Manage Resources.

Outlining these activities and tactics over the course of a year helps you schedule and manage resources. With a well managed communication plan, you can look for and take advantage of opportunities that you may have otherwise overlooked, and it gives you the chance to explore new ideas without sacrificing your tried-and-true tactics.

Work with Interdisciplinary Teams.

Marketing Communications draws together many disciplines and talents to develop programs that capture your audiences and shape their relationship with your brand. Advanced planning with an interdisciplinary team will help you deliver rich, effective, and well-focused messages through the most engaging and appropriate channels for your clients and your team.

Deliver on Your Promise.

The logic and processes developed through annual planning helps you deliver the right message, at the right time, in the right way, even building anticipation in your audiences, and ensuring reliable delivery of each communication.

Involve People.

Now, more than ever, audiences are willing to participate and value being included in corporate communications. Building audience communities, enabling viral marketing, combined with other more traditional tactics, build a more engaging approach that was not possible just a few years ago.

In any integrated plan, it’s important to develop material that can be used across media, layering and building upon the message, to maintain your audience’s interest and engagement. Annual planning structures that process so you stay on target, on message, and build audience loyalty.

Mind Your Budget.

Finally, the best reason we can think of to develop an annual plan is your annual budget. There is simply no better way to manage your work against budget than to have a clear structure for spending your communications dollars. With your audience goals in mind, your opportunities mapped, your strategy for layering your messages clear, your available dollars help you to choose your media with care, never letting the funding run out before your conversation with your audience is complete.

Our Pitch.

If you’ve never created a communications plan before, of course we can help you learn. If you are an old hand at planning, but feel your same old tools and channels just aren’t doing the job, we’d love to help introduce you to some new and less costly ways of reaching your audiences.

But whether or not you call us, the season for planning is here. Enjoy.

That’s no longer the case, of course. The exercise of connecting products – fresh produce, office furniture, design services, you name it – with customers has evolved a lot since those days.

Advances in production, distribution, and communication have globalized commerce, which means – among other things – that we can now get fresh strawberries even when they’re out of season. That’s good, especially if you love fresh strawberries. Unfortunately, it also means we don’t usually get to meet the person who grows the strawberries we buy. That’s not so good. If you can talk with your favorite strawberry growers, you can share your observation that this year’s berries are much sweeter than last year’s crop, and encourage the growers to do what it takes to ensure even sweeter berries next year. You can let them know that you’re also looking for fresh blueberries, and ask if they can recommend a good supplier. You can take a simple commercial transaction, and make it more meaningful by building a personal connection with your favorite strawberry grower while he or she is developing a loyal customer.

Social media – blogs, podcasts, video sharing, etc. – are giving companies the tools they need to bring relationships back to commerce. This new business environment encourages producers and consumers to engage one another in mutually beneficial ways. As columnist Ray Poynter points out in the International Journal of Market Research, social media has rapidly become a credible way for businesses to gather and learn from consumer insights. The broadcast model for communicating with customers has been replaced, reports Ecademy founder Penny Power. BusinessWeek predicted this change back in 2005, when the magazine ran the cover story, “Blogs Will Change Your Business.” The magazine posted an updated version of the piece earlier this year, and the observable changes that have sprung up in the three years since Business Week first published the report are as telling as the original research.

What’s the appropriate response to all of this? Seize the opportunity. For a particularly powerful example, consider our friends at Spout.com. The company could not have existed in the days before social media. The technology to connect with a new audience – and for like-minded audience members to connect meaningfully with one another – developed right alongside the frustration four avid film buffs felt with the Hollywood model for motion picture marketing and distribution. They knew the best recommendations for movies came from friends. They knew that social networks could allow users to share recommendations just as easily as status updates. And they realized that film fans and moviemakers wanted to connect. They put it all together. We helped them name it, brand it, and launch it. It’s been fascinating to watch this new kind of commercial community take shape.

Big and small companies alike have been dabbling with social media as a means to network with customers, with varying degrees of success…
- Don’t fault GM’s Fastlane for the troubles of the U.S. auto industry. The General Motors blog is widely held up as an example of a successful corporate blog.
- Starbucks capitalizes on its enviable customer loyalty with My Starbucks Idea, an online tool for customers to share ideas for improving product and service, and weigh in on ideas from other customers.
- Dell Ideastorm provides a similar outlet.
- Glaxo Smith Kline’s consumer healthcare innovation site places a “Submit an Idea” button front and center.
- In Japan, Adidas encourages fans of the classic sneakers to upload a photo to endorse its “celebrate originality” campaign.
- Whole Foods Market’s blog offers shopping tips, product provenance stories, etc., but they’re not just talking to customers. They’re listening, too.
- Midwest coffeehouse chain Biggby Coffee CEO and co-founder Bob Fish actively blogs, Twitters, and updates Facebook and Flickr. Customers can follow him across the chain’s territory, and if you find him, he’ll buy your coffee.

We’re on board, too. When People Design overhauled our website last year in conjunction with our 10th anniversary and name change, we put a blog right up front. This blog is our very own open-air market where we share the things we’re thinking about and invite your feedback. Plus, Google likes the fresh content, which certainly doesn’t hurt our chances whenever potential clients go searching for a design firm. We’re currently both a group and a page on Facebook (there is a difference). You can link up with us on LinkedIn. And we’re tweeting away on Twitter.

All of these communications – this post included – give us the chance to share with our best customers all the things we’re learning about and exploring. Quite often, the very act of sharing all of this sparks conversations that generate ideas to make our products and services better. Collaboration is buzz-worthy for a reason: It works.

You must understand that the power is now in the hands of consumers.

A perfect example of this is the tool Get Satisfaction. This is a social media tool that lets consumers provide customer service feedback whether a company wants it or not. Some quick searches for companies we know shows some familiar names (Herman Miller and Whirlpool are friends who have products listed there without customer service representation — you guys might want to check that out?). Consumers are empowering themselves to solve problems that they find too difficult to address via traditional customer service channels.

This means that companies are increasingly pressured to participate in the community of their customers. As corporations can be slow to engage in these sorts of activities and have often blocked access to them on their internal firewalls, they have isolated themselves from the discussion. But how do brand managers and customer service representatives best engage their customers online?

First off, where are those customers online? What are they saying about you? Are they on Facebook? Are they blogging about you? One of the easiest things an organization can do to keep track of where their customers are is subscribe to receive Google alerts related to their brand. Find out where people are discussing your product and participate in those discussions.

Look at how Comcast handles customer service on Twitter. Not all business have the scale to support this. It takes work. Increasingly the discussion is owned by the customer on a platform beyond the corporation’s control. This can be an unnerving proposition. How do you influence how your brand is perceived when anyone can say anything about your products or services and rank highly in Google? Potential new customers can easily discover a legacy of problems. Google has a hard time forgetting.

Having a presence on these platforms can be a mixed bag. You might find that the result is crickets. In the customer service arena, this is less about creating a fan base for your brand and more about ensuring customers are getting the answers they need in the way that they are most comfortable receiving them. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need real estate on Second Life. It is a question of brand stewardship.

A social media strategy should be a part of any corporation’s web presence. At the very least, you should take the online pulse of your customers. This means devoting some attention to the situation. That means someone’s time. It is relatively easy to address consumer confusion when you know what that confusion is. To associate authoritative answers with customer questions is the goal.

When someone has a problem, they are probably going to start with Google to find an answer. Ensuring that your answer is there is key. Good SEO is the place to start. Good IA ensures that you are representing yourself appropriately to address your customers’ needs. Why did a user blog about you rather than filling out a contact form? Where is the disconnect?

Take a little time today to Google your company. Any surprises?