The Official Fluid Blog

Social Design Principle #4 – Participate in Active Listening

Utilizing social design principles to improve a customers shopping experience has the potential to bring tremendous benefit to a company and its customers.  However, no matter what conversations take place, there are two key components essential to the fourth principle: active listening:

• Maintain your commitment to having conversations – companies must be dedicated to maintaining their social channels to keep content fresh and new.
• Admit your mistakes, and do something about them – part of having authentic conversations is being prepared to accept negative feedback and to do something about it.

Maintain your commitment to having conversations.
Social Design is only powerful when the content is new. Customers will not participate in a conversation if there are very few others or if the thread is old.  If there is little or no activity, then people are not likely to participate.  Therefore, companies must be prepared to maintain their blogs, video and photo galleries, Twitter broadcasts, Facebook groups, and whatever myriad of social technologies they choose to pursue.
More importantly, companies  need to mean every word they say.  If a company promises to modify a product or improve a service in response to an upset customer, they must do so. Engaging customers then failing to follow through and deliver on those promises damages the company’s brand, reputation, and credibility.

Admit your mistakes and do something about them!
The reality is that when a company makes the commitment to listening to and engaging with customers, the company must be prepared for the instances when the feedback is not positive. The biggest challenge is to have a plan to respond to negative feedback and act to solve the problem so that the company is perceived as being customer-focused and dedicated to customer satisfaction.
Dell is a great case study.  In 2005, a single instance of poor customer service resulted in extensive negative publicity.  Joshua Porter writes about the blog series by Jeff Jarvis that started the avalanche of Dell discontent (called “Dell Hell”) in Designing for the Social Web:

“Pretty soon others had picked up on his plight and joined him in a chorus of hatred for Dell. Hundreds and hundreds of people left comments on his blog.”

Eventually, Dell listened.  They apologized, and they acted to reverse the damage by starting a number of customer service initiatives.  One in particular is a great example of active listening: Ideastorm.com.

IdeaStorm engages Dell’s customers by asking for ideas to help improve everything from customer service policies to product features. This dedication to social engagement shows that Dell has become serious about customer satisfaction.  By listening actively, admitting when they were wrong, and actively addressing the problems, Dell successfully pulled out of the “Dell Hell” episode and improved customer satifaction.

Another good example of active listening is the social networking giant Facebook.

They recently announced a change in their Terms of Use, and the new agreement contained vague and ambiguous language about Facebook’s ownership of user contributed information.  This update was very poorly received by the Facebook community, and they immediately questioned the changes and expressed their dissatisfaction and uncertainty. The response was so great that Facebook restored the previous Terms of Use and engaged their users to get feedback in rewriting the new Terms of Use in a manner people could understand and accept.  Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, wrote in his blog about this community backlash:

“Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we’ll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms…”

Dell and Facebook have shown that opening and maintaining channels of communication, admitting mistakes, taking responsibility, and correcting those mistakes are the essential ingredients in active listening. Opening an authentic conversation with your customers can help keep customers happy, strengthen brand loyalty, improve your reputation for customer service, and ensure continued support of your brand and products by your customer community.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 8:46 am and is filed under Online Retail / Interactive Merchandising, Social Shopping, User Experience. 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.