Customer Service Blogging

Blogging for Business: Leveraging Customer Service using Blogs

In addition to my nightjob of keeping Stone fresh, clean, and irrelevant, last summer I launched a web-based job search service for $100,000+ executives called The Ladders and with sites at www.salesladder.com, www.mktgladder.com and www.financeladder.com . No, not a headhunter. Not really a job board, either. If you said a job spider you’d be closer, but not quite.

Whatever you call it, what we do is e-mail over 800 all-new, open $100K+ jobs to our subscribers each Monday. You can imagine that for busy people or out-of-work people this is a fairly useful service. Our business idea is pretty simple:

1. It’s always free for hiring companies to post their bona fide $100K+ jobs to our site
2. It’s always free for job-seekers to get job leads with information on industry, title, and location
3. It’s $25 / month for job-seekers to get full job details, links to the company’s hiring page, etc.

And our sites are:

SalesLadder for $100K+ sales executives.
MktgLadder for $100K+ marketing executives.
FinanceLadder for $100K+ finance executives.

In order for this to make any sense, you’ll understand that we need to have a lot of people using the service. But it’s also important that people feel, especially given how painful the job loss / job search process can be, that there’s somebody on the other side of the screen that actually gives a damn. (Despite the fact that similar “real world” out-placement services can cost $5,000 or more, we’re expected to provide reasonably similar service levels at a much lower price.)

So it is important that when we speak with customers:

1. We present a human face.
2. There’s an immediacy and relevance to what we’re saying to people’s lives.
3. We don’t talk like a corporation, a bot, or an automated customer service system.
4. We provide internet “training wheels”, technological sympathy, and amiable support that are reasonably easy to follow.
5. We reply quickly in addition to relevantly – we always want to reply within 24 hours, preferably within 4.

Our customers range in age from their late 20s to late 60s; and from sophisticated web surfers with a solid grasp of information technology tools to those who are not; like one kindly old gentleman who wrote me: “Marc, you say I should cut and paste the link below, but you don’t tell me how to cut and paste…. How do I do this???” [We finally hit on the idea of telling him to re-type it. That worked.]

So when we started, I simply cranked out the customer service emails: 100 per week; then 200; then 300; in addition to designing the site, running the business, etc.

But then it rose to 500 per week, 600, 700… it became obvious that as we grew – we now have more than 43,000 subscribers – handling these mano a mano wasn’t going to work.

Further, it wasn’t too long after we started before the tougher questions began rolling in:

“I’m a 58 year-old experienced salesman with 25 years in medical product sales, but I can’t get a job because of my age.” -- For us youngsters out there – I’m 33 – I have been shocked at how consistently and persistently this comes up across all sections of the country from people 50 and over. It’s a real problem.

“I’d like to switch from medical device sales to something more service-oriented.”

“What’s a reasonable base salary for an Enterprise Software salesperson in Texas?”

I could’ve just blown these off, but it seemed interesting and an opportunity to further understand our community’s problems -- there’s a real need for this type of information and communication out there. And since I know that the internet together is smarter than each of us apart, I thought I’d put it to work for my business…

So we came up with the idea of launching a customer service blog – as far we know, the first one on the Internet – though keep your eyes peeled for the “UPDATE” below as I’ll inevitably get an email pointing out a prior inventor!

We thought a blog would enable us to be immediate, personal, AND scalable in answering the influx of customer service emails. It would also be useful for producing a moderated community and forming the basis for further personal interaction down the line.

We launched Ask Marc on January 2nd of this year, using the superb MovableType software, which Stone is also based on. I’ve made seventy posts so far covering everything from pure “customer service” issues to the age discrimination problem to the shameless plug and the occasional inspirational quote.

So, we are two months into our experiment with blogging as a customer service tool, and how do I feel about it as a business tool?:

A blog enables us to be more interactive. Relevant and timely asides or tying the day’s posts into current events give a much “fresher” feel to customer service.

Blogging is effortless, but time-consuming. MovableType’s system is of course, cheap, flexible, easy, and rugged. Which gives me few excuses for not having ever more content and information on the blog.

A blog shows an anonymous internet audience that real people are participating – the range of questions, styles, and vocabulary of the audience shows the breadth and depth of your userbase, and enables customers to identify to a greater degree with you and their fellow readers.

A blog enables you to give long detailed answers in short fast emails. Once a post is written, it can be used again and again as you point back to it.

A blog magnifies the patience, wit, and humanity that one can bring to bear on the repetitive and routine customer service interactions. It’s easier to be friendly and funny once in a while, and keep using that response, than to be that way all the time.

As we are an innovator in our field, and we’re asking people to behave in slightly different ways, the blog has enabled us to provide customers who have detailed questions or want much more information to get long-format answers that would be inappropriate for the typical visitor.

It’s also enabled us to try other fun features such as our interview with Google’s Head of Vertical Sales.

A blog makes it clear that a human is on this side of the screen. The rolling daily timestamps and immediacy give a human “presence” that is usually lacking in the customer service experience

The blog provides fantastic credibility, because the blog accurately reflects our deeper commitment to, and grappling with, the problem of the $100K+ job hunt.

And some of the less than glowingly positive aspects thus far:

The honesty of the blogging world does not translate well into customer interactions. In contrast to political or cultural blogging, in which one is expected to post the tough questions asked by fellow intellectual combatants, and self-fisk if necessary, my early experiments with putting up the good AND the bad comments kind of turned people off. As in love, there’s such a thing as being too honest.

We still have to connect the right question to the right answer, and that can either be done automatically (quicker but less accurate) or by hand. We’ve chosen to go with “by hand” for now…

A pointer to a blog entry still feels a little less warm than a personal reply – “I’ve answered the same question for your fellow reader Janet over here….”

One area of disappointment has been the lack of other relevant blogs, websites, groups, and advice sites with which to interact and cross-link, both on a permanent and on a daily basis.

Daily comments expire – there’s only so long you can direct folks back to “that answer I wrote back in ‘03”.

So that’s our experience so far. It’s certainly not the last word on the field, but maybe the beginning of a new way for customers to interact with companies in a way that’s more human, more relevant, and more… fun!

I can be reached at blog@cenedella.com (or blog@salesladder.com) and I look forward to any thoughts you might have to share about how we can do better!

OK, back to the jobs….