Accidental Populist
Some good insights and some inane blather from Craig Newmark of Craig's List.
Ask for feedback. Read all feedback and summarize. Do something in response. Repeat. That's our fundamental pattern. I report to customer service. It's the job of customer service to tell the tech guys what features people need and how to create new tools so customer service can operate better. Customer service is something that I've obsessed about.What have we seen over the years? People are increasingly media savvy. People can tell when someone is not speaking for real. People can tell when someone's speaking with a corporate voice vs. a human voice. You go to a Web site, there's a lot of happy, smiling people who are ecstatic you're visiting their site, and you're fairly disgusted with it. There are a lot of alternatives on the Web.
What have I learned about customer service? Customers are generally great at helping each other out. The first line workers know how to do things right, but it's not a hot area. They need management support. Even disgruntled customers will help you out. And you need to engage with customers, not provide some sort of "black hole."
You can actually trust people to do the right thing. If you do, they will. The number of people we have screwing around are a tiny minority. The customer service is run by people in the cities where there are Craig's List sites. If you have a complaint about an ad, you can flag it for removal. If enough people flag something, we remove it. We get 1.8 million ads every month. And we get hundreds of emails and phone calls every day. In the discussion boards, we're not as good with moderation. We starting to think about how to use social networking technologies so people can moderate the discussion boards themselves. Slashdot is a pretty good solution, but they're more of a technically astute audience.
Seems like good advice from a source that should know.
