Managing Customer Experience and Relationships, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8 Customer Insight, Dialogue, and Social Media

It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.

—Dick Cavett

Although the strategy of customer relationships must precede the successful implementation of customer relationship technology, it was the technology that mandated that enterprises map out their path down the road we’ve been following in the preceding chapters. Customers have always been able to interact with a company, but mainly on the company’s terms—through mail, if a customer could get the name of a person to send a letter to; through phone, if a customer could get the right phone number; and maybe through salespeople, if the customer were important enough to warrant a personal sales call and if the salesperson was authorized to provide service to the customer’s satisfaction. That was pretty much it. Today, the customer rules. And savvy customers are leveraging social networking tools to get what they want, when they want it, more than ever before. But social media also allows new possibilities for dialogue and collaboration between and among customers and enterprises that can benefit both parties. This chapter addresses how a customer-centric company can recognize and reap the positive impact on customer value these technologies potentially provide.

So far we have been talking about interaction and dialogue as if the only thing of importance to a marketer is the dialogue that can take place between an enterprise and a customer. ...