What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [3]
Google Rules
New Relationship
Give the people control and we will use it
Dell hell
Your worst customer is your best friend
Your best customer is your partner
Give the people control and we will use it
Before getting to Google’s laws, allow me to start with my own first law, learned on the internet:
Give the people control and we will use it. Don’t, and you will lose us.
That is the essential rule of the new age. Previously, the powerful—companies, institutions, and governments—believed they were in control, and they were. But no more. Now the internet allows us to speak to the world, to organize ourselves, to find and spread information, to challenge old ways, to retake control.
Of course, we want to be in control. When don’t you want to be the master of your work, business, home, time, and money? It’s your life. Why would you cede control to someone else if you didn’t have to? And once lost, wouldn’t you take it back if given a chance? This empowerment is the reason we get so much angrier today when we are forced to wait on hold for computer service or at home for the cable guy or on the tarmac to get to our destination. It is why we lash out at companies—now that we can—on the web. But it is also why, when we are treated with respect and given control, we customers can be surprisingly generous and helpful.
Many good books have hailed the rise of the new, empowered customer. In this book, we ask: What should you do about it? How should this power-shift change the ways companies, institutions, and managers work? How do you survive? How do you benefit? The answer—the first and most important lesson in this book—is this: Companies must learn that they are better off when they cede control to their customers. Give us control, we will use it, and you will win.
Dell hell
Here is a case study in Jarvis’ First Law involving Dell and me. But it isn’t about me, the angry customer. It is about how Dell transformed itself from worst to first in the era of customer control. Dell had been the poster child for what you should not do. Then it became a model for what you should do.
After I quit my job as a media executive and left my expense account behind, I had to buy a new laptop. I bought a Dell, because it was inexpensive and because Dell had a reputation for good customer service. To be safe, I paid extra for at-home service.
From the moment I first turned on the computer, it had problems. I’ll spare you the excruciating details of my shaggy laptop story. Suffice it to say that the computer had a number of bugs and I tried to fix them a number of times, spending countless hours on hold with people in faraway lands. Though I had paid for in-home service, I had to send the machine in to get it fixed, only to find something new wrong every time I got it back. Each time I dared to contact Dell, I had to start from square one: Sisyphus on hold. I never made progress. It drove me mad.
Finally, in hopeless frustration, I went to my blog in June 2005 and wrote a post under the headline, “Dell sucks.” Now that’s not quite as juvenile as it sounds, for if you search Google for any brand followed by the word “sucks,” you will find the Consumer Reports of the people. I wanted to add to the wisdom of the crowd—which Google now made possible. I wanted to warn off the next potential customer who was smart enough to search for “Dell sucks” before hitting the buy button (which I should have done in the first place; the knowledge was there, at Google—all I had to do was ask). There were already a few million results for “Dell sucks.” Mine was just one more.