What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [9]
Now comes the hard part. You have a company and a culture that are broken or this blogstorm would not have built up. Nobody gave a damn about your new buddy Jim, which really means that they didn’t protect your reputation, brand, and business. I would call in all your C-people and project Jim’s blog on the screen. Some execs will quibble with Jim: He voided his warranty; he called when it’s the middle of the night in India; he didn’t read the instructions; he’s a complainer. But if Jim were a lone whiner, no mob would have gathered around him. His message rang true to too many customers.
Some executives will rely on reflexes: hiring consultants, making media appearances, updating the web site. Ignore them. It’s time for new ways. Start by having your executives make the same searches you did, assigning their best people—nicest, most knowledgeable, most open—to solve every problem they find: repair, replace, or refund, whatever the customer wants. The cost is sure to be lower than the PR damage that could occur should the storm grow.
Next, I suggest you start a blog, where you openly and forthrightly share the problem and the solutions as they occur. I see no reason why a CEO should not open a direct conversation with the public. What’s to fear from your own customers? Having set that example, the CEO can expect other executives and employees down the ranks to enter into the same conversation and learn from it. That will do more to change the culture—to finally make it customer-focused and mean it—than a dozen consultants, a hundred off-sites, or a million ad impressions.
Oh, and in that first blog post, don’t forget to thank Jim.
Your best customer is your partner
Jim, no longer angry, will tell his blog friends about your turnaround. Having been heard, he will share more ideas about improving your products and company. Jim cares. He’s not the enemy. He’s a customer, even an advocate. Jim is your friend. Now the challenge—and opportunity—is to open the door to many Jims. The complementary challenge is to reorganize and reorient every division of the company—design, production, marketing, sales, customer support—around this new relationship with the people you used to call consumers but now should transform into partners.
Handing this new relationship over to one department—just customer service or PR or marketing—will not work. Outsourcing it to some crisis management PR company or ad agency will make matters even worse. You have to transform your relationship with your public in every quarter of the organization. This new relationship—this partnership—should take over business-to-business companies, political campaigns, government agencies, universities, charities, any institution or enterprise.
To start, follow Dell’s leads: blog, interact with bloggers, enable customers to critique your products, enable them to share ideas. Next, involve them in the genesis of your products, even your design process (an idea we will return to later in the chapter, “The Googlemobile”). In this hypothetical, why not take the next design of the eWidget—eWidget 2.0, of course—and make it public? Put it all out there: research, service reports, needs, design concepts, sketches, specifications, and new ideas. Go ahead, try it. The product is already in trouble. What could it hurt? I suppose your detractors and competitors might say that the eWidget is in such trouble, it means you’re desperate. But that won’t happen if your customers join the process with you, add