My New Book, ‘Attack of the Customers,’ is now available

Attack of the Customers front cover

Click on the book cover to order with a 30% discount. Use promo code 9AVB4H4K

An idea I’ve been kicking around for a couple of years became a formal book project in January. Eleven months later, Attack of the Customers is now available! I’d like to ask for your support by liking the book on the Amazon page and registering your like on the book’s Facebook page. And if you can go the extra mile and plunk down $13.50, I think you’ll find it a pretty interesting read (use discount code at right).

In some ways, this book is an update of my first book, The New Influencers, which was published more than five years ago. One of the things that has always captivated me about social media is the power it gives to individuals to greatly amplify their voice. Several of the case studies in New Influencers involved customer attacks in the days when blogs were about all people had to work with. Today, attacks take many different forms and involve many different tools, but the pattern is the same: People have learned that they can get better results from rallying friends and supporters to their cause than by going through established customer service or complaint channels.

Most customer attacks don’t go viral, but they can be effective even without big numbers. Just last week a woman who claimed she had been victimized in a contract dispute with a big Canadian retailer took her cause to YouTube and Facebook. With YouTube views averaging about 25,000 per day, her story caught the eye of mainstream media, which is usually the turning point at which things happen. One thing I discovered in writing the book is that mainstream media attention is essential to helping a cause go viral. Newspapers and magazines may be suffering financially right now, but they’re just as important as they always have been to validate and spread information.

Farming Out Customer Care

One reason customer attacks have become so numerous in recent years is because businesses and government agencies have historically had such miserable customer service. Support organizations were outsourced en masse in the 1990s, customer service agents were hidden beneath layers of confusing call routing menus and complaints routinely disappeared into black holes. Big organizations often didn’t respond to complaints because they didn’t have to. Customers had no easy way to share their frustrations, so there was little concern that a product or service deficiency would become a problem.

Goodbye to all that, and good riddance. Customers now complain so fluidly that the problem for many businesses is figuring out which gripes to take seriously. In the final chapter of Attack of the Customers, my co-author Greg Gianforte presents a formula he calls “Eight to Great.” It’s a list of eight steps companies can take to become customer-focused at the core, and it’s been applied by thousands of companies during Greg’s term as founder and CEO of RightNow Technologies.

His advice really comes down to the Golden Rule: Treat others the way you would like to be treated. The trouble is that the payoff of good customer satisfaction is a lot harder to measure than the benefit of a dime saved in production. We make the case that companies have no choice but to invest in this area, though. In the age of the empowered customer, service is one of the few points of differentiation left.

Self-Publishing Experiment

This is the first of my five books that I’ve self-published. We used Amazon CreateSpace and hired professional design and copy editing resources, but much of the work between the covers was done with Microsoft Word. I even created the index myself to see what the experience was like (although I don’t think I’ll try that again). Many authors are experimenting with self-publishing now because the commissions on commercially published works are so small that book-writing becomes a $10/hour proposition. Social networks are also sufficiently mature that good word-of-mouth can potentially replace traditional marketing.

Whether that’s true or not I expect to find out in the coming months. I certainly could use your help. Whether it’s a like, a review or a credit card, anything you can do to express your support is gratefully appreciated.

And if you’re a blogger or editor who would like a review copy, just leave a comment here or drop me a line and I’ll be pleased to send you one.

What a Hotel Manager Taught Me About the Future of Business

Wyndham Wingate Erlanger, KYScott Wright is the general manager of the Wyndham Wingate Hotel in Erlanger, KY, and in a 15-minute ride to the airport yesterday morning he taught me something about the future of business.

The fact that the manager of the hotel was driving me to the airport was unusual in the first place, but Wright makes it part of his routine. “I try to get out of the office at least a couple of times a week and connect with the customers,” he said. “I don’t ever want to be stuck in a back room shuffling papers.”

Wright’s attitude is one of the reasons the Wyndham Wingate has a 91% positive rating on TripAdvisor. He ticks of the two factors that most influence customer loyalty: “Cleanliness is number one by far. Customer service is number two. But you’d be surprised how forgiving people can be about customer service if the room is clean,” he says.

Scott Wright has no choice but to know what makes customers happy. Ratings on TripAdvisor and dozens of other evaluation sites have transformed the hospitality industry. The impact of open, online customer feedback on his business “is huge,” Wright says over his shoulder. The hotel’s policy is to contact online critics directly within 72 hours to address their complaints.

Many times those problems are more a matter of misunderstanding than mistake. One traveler recently posted a scathing review of the Wyndham because charges had appeared on her credit card despite the fact that she paid cash for her stay. Wright patiently explained that the practice was standard operating procedure for cash customers in the hospitality industry and that the charges were routinely reversed within a few hours. Another complained that the hotel wouldn’t let him cancel a reservation. Wright had to explain that the discount deal the customer had booked was clearly marked as nonrefundable.

These outreach sessions don’t fix the damage done by a negative rating. Few consumer feedback sites permit bad reviews to be reversed by anyone, so hotel managers are limited to posting responses, which Wright dutifully does. More importantly, though, the constant feedback cycle is driving he and others like him to become laser-focused on the customer experience. The terms of competition in that already brutally competitive industry have come down to one factor: quality.

Cincinnati hotels - best & worstLook at the ratings of these two Cincinnati hotels on TripAdvisor. Scan the excerpted customer comments. If you’re the owner of the Howard Johnson Inn, how do you solve this problem? Certainly not with advertising. No, there are three options the owner of the Howard Johnson Inn has:

  • Cut prices and compete for low-margin budget travelers;
  • Invest what it takes to fix the problem;
  • Hang out a sign that says, “Under new management.”

None is very appealing, but a customer-driven market doesn’t permit the luxury of spending your way out of trouble.

Conversely, the owner of the Best Western Premier Marlemont can cut the advertising and direct mail budget because customers are doing a better job of promoting the hotel than any marketing could do. The owner can also raise prices because business travelers are less sensitive to cost than they are to a pleasant place to stay.

Fifteen years ago, America’s most-admired brands were those with the biggest marketing budgets: GE, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Microsoft. Today, the brands everyone wants to emulate are Apple, BMW, Southwest Airlines and Harley-Davidson. There are two things these brands all have in common: Neither has dominant market share and all are fanatically devoted to delivering delightful customer experiences. In the future, every successful brand will have to operate the same way.

For Scott Wright and others like him, the rules have changed, but his industry isn’t alone. It’s just a leading indicator of forces that will sweep through nearly every market as customers learn to organize and apply the new powers of influence. These forces will affect B2B and B2C businesses, nonprofits and government agencies. Businesses will have to serve customers better because there will be no choice. All our managers will drive the shuttle to the airport.

I’ve been telling audiences about how customer ratings are reshaping the hospitality industry for more than a year, but no one made that impact more real to me than Scott Wright. As I stepped out of the shuttle, I reached into my wallet and handed him a few dollars.

“Oh, not necessary,” he said, waving his hand.

“Take it,” I said. “It’s a consulting fee.”