PART TWO
The Resolution Manifesto: The Wired and Dangerous Link

When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the worldwide web … now even my cat has its own page.

Former President Bill Clinton

What do the Sears Roebuck catalog and the birth control pill have in common? Both revolutionized the experience of the recipient.

In the late 1800s Americans moved west following the emergence and expansion of the railroads. When the postal system was added near the turn of the century, it created the conditions for the birth of the mail-order catalog. Richard Sears, always a genius with clever phrases, bannered the cover of the first Sears Roebuck catalog with “Book of Bargains: A Money Saver for Everyone,” “Cheapest Supply House on Earth,” and “Our trade reaches around the World.”

The Sears Roebuck catalog gave farmers in rural areas and pioneers in remote settlements access to a wide array of products otherwise unavailable within hundreds of miles. The catalog included watches, sewing machines, sporting goods, musical instruments, saddles, firearms, buggies, bicycles, baby carriages, and clothing. The 1895 catalog added eyeglasses, along with a self-administered eye test for “old sight, near sight, and astigmatism.” Miners in the mountains of Utah were able to buy complete houses shipped west on a train. “Your money back if you are not satisfied” was added to catalogs in 1903, complete with Richard Sears’s handwritten note to his customers.¹

And the birth control pill? Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the founding editor of Ms. Magazine and author of nine books, told of the birth and power of the pill in an interview for CNN Opinion:

In 1962, when I was a 22-year-old Holly Golightly-wannabe living in Greenwich Village with my dog and my motor scooter, an event had a seismic effect on my life. … My doctor at the time wrote me a prescription for The Pill. … The impact of The Pill was radical. It meant sex need not lead to pregnancy. But it wasn’t just another form of contraception, it was an equalizer, a liberator, and easy to take. For the first time in human history, a woman could control her sexuality and determine her readiness for reproduction by swallowing a pill smaller than an aspirin. Critics warned that The Pill would spawn generations of loose, immoral women; what it spawned was generations of empowered women who are better equipped to make rational choices about their lives.²

Combine the reach and access of the Sears Roebuck catalog to pioneers in far-flung rural areas with the empowering impact on women of The Pill and you have something like the effect of the Internet on today’s customers. Add power to access and you have the means to put capacity and competence in the hands of customers. But, there is a double edge here. Just as the syringe that delivers life-saving medicine to a patient can also shoot mind-numbing heroin into an addict, the Internet has been as potentially intimidating as it has been potentially enlightening. Its effect on customers has taken many forms.

Wired Is a Means to Connect

Imagine how different the outcome of the American Revolution would have been if Paul Revere had elected to leave his horse in the barn and simply write a letter to the mayor of every small town between Lexington and Concord advising them “The British are coming!” Too many organizations are sending out letters to customers instead of riding the horse of instant connection. Author and consultant Pete Blackshaw has named this phenomenon “consumer-generated media, or CGM.” He defines consumer-generated media as “the currency of a new commercial relationship between business and consumers. It is the endless stream of comments, opinions, emotions, and personal stories about any and every company, product, service, or brand which consumers can now post online and broadcast to millions of other consumers with the click of a mouse.”³

Wired Is a Tool to Accelerate

Customers’ concept of time has dramatically changed. Few people today delay reviewing their emails until they can get home or to the office to fire up a computer. Text messaging has replaced dialing; fax machines are viewed as obsolete. More important, the customer’s sense of urgency has forced organizational life to become 24/7. For customers, an organization that closes its merchandizing access at 5 p.m. is a bit like Paul Revere electing to wait until morning instead of mounting his steed at midnight.

Like it or not, it means every enterprise on the planet must reconceptualize its habits and practices regarding time and speed. It necessitates creating easy access when customers want it; it means providing a supersonic response that matches the customer’s “I want it now” attention span.

Wired Is a Resource to Instruct

Ask people in most organizations about how they get customer feedback and you will get a sermonette on their scientifically sanitized customer survey. The higher-ups would rather wait for J.D. Power results than visit the factory floor, ride in the truck with a service tech, or sit in the call center listening to customer calls. Real time feedback is too often viewed as complaint management by the frontline, not as a powerful source of customer insight and postmortem forensics. Monitoring social media as a means of instant learning and rapid intervention is far from mainstream. Meanwhile, edgy customers vilify to the digital masses a service hiccup in the evening and by morning the organization is surprised by the arrival of “the British.”

Author Pete Blackshaw relates the story of what Comcast faced in 2006:

… Comcast found itself in the middle of a viral firestorm when a guy named Brian Finklestein found a Comcast technician asleep on his couch. Making matters worse, the technician had fallen asleep waiting for Comcast’s own customer support line to answer the phone. Finkelstein quickly took a video of the sleeping repairman and posted it to YouTube, where it was viewed by a half-million people within hours. The story was, of course, picked up by bloggers, MSNBC, and several national newspapers; it continues to punish Comcast by showing up in search results.”⁴

Wired Is a Forum to Unite

When we were kids, one of the coolest communications with buddies was constructing a “phone line” using a long string with an empty bean can on either end. When you spoke right into the bean can, the sound carried over the string to be heard by the ear in the can on the other end. We could trade secrets and tell racy jokes without parental eavesdropping. We even figured out a way to connect several cans creating our own “crowdalogue.” It became the best way to plan pranks on younger siblings or kids we didn’t like.

The Internet has features similar to the party-line bean cans on a string. When one person tells another person in an email about an experience at Acme Pyrotechnics, it is the computer version of word of mouth. But, when customers access their entire buddy list of 850 friends instantly and most of their friends follow suit, contacting their own buddy lists, they can create a hero or horror overnight. Their virtually instant communications can have the power and punch of business insurrection, creating a candidate for bankruptcy by the end of the week. And, given the degree customers “listen” and value the reviews of other customers, their influence can spread like a pandemic, with devastating impact on the bottom line of the victim in the crosshairs of one computer mouse.

Wired Is the Great Equalizer

One of the most curious pieces of demagoguery coming out of the 2007–2009 recession was the drama pitting “Wall Street” against “Main Street.” Wall Streeters were positioned as gluttonous, evil moneychangers against whom the tables should be turned by the common people of Main Street who were victims of their wily ways. The fact is there is no Wall Street without Main Street, and vice versa. The Internet has been a tool for egalitarianism. David has exactly the same arsenal as Goliath. The advent of social media has kept cyberspace operating with norms similar to those of a small town.

Tara Hunt, in her ground-breaking book The Whuffie Factor, referred to the new norms of social media as whuffie, a term coined by Cory Doctorow. “Whuffie,” Hunt wrote, “is the residual outcome—the currency—of your reputation. You lose or gain it based on positive and negative actions, your contribution to the community.…” Influence comes through “being nice, being networked, and being notable.” “There is no room for bullies with lots of money. Money may buy you an audience but it will not guarantee influence.”⁵

In January 2008, The Economist published an article reporting a fascinating alteration in customer behavior.

In 2006 EMI, the fourth-biggest recorded music company in the world, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realized the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.⁶

Why the Mouse Is Roaring

The Service Museum would likely have a special display on the infamous Word of Mouth. It has been the historical means by which customers learned about great service and lousy service beyond their own experience. Sure, they could read the PR drivel and advertising claims the company crafted, but that transmission was suspect to all but the most gullible and uninformed. We kinda sorta trusted the brand spokespersons—fictitious ones like Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima, and Mr. Clean, as well as real ones like Michael Jordan, George Foreman, and Florence Henderson. And, there were also the surrogate judges—the Good Housekeeping Seal, the Better Business Bureau, and J.D. Power—that gave us some degree of assurance. But, the most trusted source was what Larry next door had to say.

The computer mouse changed all that. Word of Mouse has replaced word of mouth as the most viral means of gossip, grousing and groaning about last night’s slow restaurant service, yesterday’s rude sales clerk, or this morning’s glitch on Acme.com. As was earlier noted, today’s Internet connections, whether blogs, tweets, or other forms of social media, have five times the impact of traditional word of mouth.⁷

The change in the service covenant has altered the social outlet that service historically has provided. When Duke Energy closed 99 local payment centers to consolidate to a single centralized call center, the complaint was not about the quality of service. According to then VP of Customer Service, Sharon Decker, it was about the nature of service. Instead of talking with the neighbor at the Duke Office downtown, the customer was now talking with a stranger. While the stranger could deal with the request much faster, more knowledgeably, and around the clock, it was not the Tammy or Todd the customer knew from church. And that was almost twenty years ago!

With customers cut off from the customary social connection that has been the cornerstone of commerce, the Internet has become the surrogate. The more service delivery becomes impersonal, the more the customer turns to the Internet as the conduit to commercial conversation. There are pockets of customers called cocooners who, thanks to the Internet and UPS, are able to engage in all their buying activity without ever having to leave their nest.

The difference between the village of yesteryear and the cybervillage of today is the fact that customers create their own village. Residents of the old-timey village were typically there due to the accident of their birth or relocation. Now, the customer can vote you in or out of their Facebook, Linkedin, or MySpace city limits. And since all in my village are my choice, when I register a concern, they are far more likely to echo my sentiment to all those in their village!

The Revenge of the Mouse

Dell Computer ran headfirst into the power of the Internet-enabled customer a few years ago. As chronicled in Kim Williams’s case study, “Dell Hell: The Impact of Social Media on Corporate Communication,” in June 2005 Dell Inc. received some major complaints concerning its customer support services. One of these complaints was from Jeff Jarvis, an Internet blogger.

Soon after Jeff purchased a new Dell laptop, it malfunctioned. After contacting Dell’s customer support, Jeff was told he would need to send the machine back to the company because the technician would not be able to come to his home with the parts he would need (Jeff had purchased a four-year warranty with home support). This exchange upset Jeff and he began to vent his frustrations about his experience on his blog at Buzzmachine.com in a series of posts, nicknamed “Dell Hell.”

When he received his computer back it still did not work. Jeff sent a string of emails to Dell customer service and continued to tell his story via his blog. He received a number of email responses from Dell with the wrong customer name and decided that no one at Dell was listening. The only way he was able to elicit action from Dell was to write the executive in charge of Dell’s U.S. consumer business. He was offered a total refund, which he accepted. He used it to purchase an Apple.⁸

Meanwhile thousands of disgruntled Dell customers posted comments or linked to Jeff’s blog. The activity attracted media attention and was soon reported by Computerworld and Intelliseek, among others. Michigan University’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) showed Dell’s customer service rating had dropped 5 points in a year.⁹ This is significant because ACSI has documented a strong relationship between ACSI score and both market share and stock price. ACSI scores and the companies’ share prices historically tend to move in the same direction. ACSI’s research has found the range of that stock price drop averaged between 1 percent to 5 percent based upon the industry for each respective business.¹⁰

“Desperadoes Waiting for a Train”

“Desperadoes Waiting for a Train” is a song made famous by the Highwaymen, a singing group made up of country music giants Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and the late Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash. It perfectly captures the sense of eagerness customers have today. Unlike the patient, willing-to-wait customers of yesteryear, customers today want instant everything. They can’t wait for a fax anymore. And, overnighting anything seems like an eternity. Precious documents are scanned and emailed, rarely mailed. Sending something via the postal service now is called “snail mail.” Got a document too large to send, we use warehouses in cyberspace (like YouSendIt.com and 4Shared.com) to avoid bringing pain to our servers.

To say customers are wired not only means they are Internet-connected but it also implies the edginess brought on by superfast availability in a 24/7 world. Wired means “hyper” or “restless,” as well as “bound together.” Zappos.com made the record books and “Best of” lists, not because of the quality of its merchandise or the zippiness of its website, but due to its ability to get you merchandise way before you expected it. Order a pair of shoes on your home computer after supper, and they are on your doorstep the next morning—and you are not charged a dime for the jet plane ride that brought them there. It is a service experience that perfectly fits the restlessness of today’s customer.

We have littered this book with the language of upheaval. We see it in our clients; we experience it in our personal and professional lives. The transformation of the service covenant, the alteration of the character of the customer, and the potent quality of the Internet have made the world of commerce like a bomb waiting for someone to light the fuse. On the entertainment front, the Internet turned a $25,000 film called The Blair Witch Project into a $250 million megahit. On the political front, some claim Obama’s edge in the 2008 U.S. presidential election was largely due to his campaign’s savvy use of the Internet, both for reaching his base and raising contributions. Social media played a significant role in bringing down the dictatorial governments of Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011. The Internet will likely foster the creation of a formidable national third party within the next decade.

The solution is not to “just get rid of the Internet.” The Internet is here to stay. The edginess present in many customers was not caused by the Internet. One could make a case that their picky nature has been the result of the pain of the last recession. The vocal nature of customers has been increasing ever since companies began actively to seek feedback. That was not an Internet-driven change. And, the pursuit of “all about me” service has been fueled by the capacity of organizations to offer customers more diversity than “one size fits all.”

The solution lies in renewing the service covenant. Customers enjoy the efficiency of self-serve; they do not enjoy being excluded or abandoned. Customers react negatively to “I don’t think there’s anybody back there” (as actress Clara Peller said in the famous Wendy’s ad). Customers value the time savings of service automation. They do not want automation that makes them believe they are devalued, isolated, and excluded. Customers gain from the deep knowledge of a specialist, but emotional distance between teacher and pupil reminds them unpleasantly of their dependence.

The new service covenant can turn turbulence into calm and restlessness into tranquility only to the degree it infuses customer transactions and relationships with the feeling of partnership. It will require service providers’ rethinking how service is designed and delivered. It will take repositioning the customers, not as cash machines or consumers, but as the experience co-creators they really are. The cost for continuing on the same familiar path is not just the loss of one customer, or two, or ten. The price tag will be the arson of a reputation fueled by a dangerous customer armed with a “lighted mouse.”