If it’s a poor craftsman who blames the tools, perhaps it’s also a poorly-run organization that blames its tools, or plans on relying on new tools, to bring about fundamental change. Jon Udell poses a “What if?” regarding the notion that our personal blogs could one day serve as effective beacons for soliciting customer service help:
What if that ability to draw a response were democratized? What if any blogger could simply mention a problem with a Dell computer, and have a Dell support person notice and chime in right there on the blog with a solution? Very cool idea.
Maybe. I don’t intend any undue pessimism on that point but a necessary first step would be for support people at places like Dell to stop using canned scripts (e.g., “Is the keyboard plugged in?”) in their attempts to assist.
The truth is though no outsider to an online community will successfully influence a conversation – it’s the online equivalent at sitting down at a table full of strangers and starting to talk…
I’m optimistic, but not thoroughly convinced, that the simple availability or increased use of new social networking tools inside organizations will improve the relationship they have with their customers.
New tools used by an organization, brought in and dropped on the workforce with some training, no matter how fancy, probably won’t change executive strategy or ingrained assumptions about who the customer is, what they’re doing, and what they need.
Earlier in Jon’s post he describes Seattle’s Visible Technologies as one provider of “a new breed of power tools”, alternatives to “search, link aggregation, tag aggregation”. You have to request a demo to find out what Trucast is, so I’m not sure if it’s some kind of reputation adjustment system or what and in any case, I’d be thrilled just to see organizations learn to use the “old” tools to actually talk to and learn about their individual customers via the Web.
