It’s 5 o’clock — do you know what your moderators are doing?
I’ve been doing deep dives into some communities on the Web and have decided that many of them are time bombs waiting to go off in companies.
To see why, let me take you on a quick trip down memory lane.
In a previous life, I was a strategic consultant to major IT companies – and once found myself presenting to Wang Lab’s Board of Directors. The topic of the day was customer satisfaction. A cadre of VPs were telling Dr. Wang that customers loved the company. Our customer satisfaction surveys showed that the peasants were getting ready to storm the castle, pitch forks and all.
Wang’s solution to the problem was simple. The company’s engineers and support staffs were mobilized to visit all of Wang’s major customers, chat up product benefits, and listen to their needs. Six weeks later, the company had to sponsor a series of mandatory classes to teach its technical staff how to talk to customers, and wear a suit and tie. Customer satisfaction never improved — and the end game is now industry lore.
Fade out a couple of decades later and we have the same situations brewing in digital form. To see why, consider a couple of examples I ran across the other day.
In one case, a customer posted a comment that he was very unhappy with a particular product and was going to defect to a competitor. The response from the moderator? “I’m sorry you feel that way. You’ll be back though. Their product is as bad as ours.”
Or consider what is happening in the D-Link forums, where customers are threatening to form a class action lawsuit and telling prospective buyers to run away. The company’s reaction? A great deal of silence punctuated by moderators hurling insults at angry users. If that’s not a pitchfork moment, I don’t know what is.
This brings me to the salient point. Operating any community without an army of well-trained moderators is a great way to destroy your brand. Once upon a time, companies thought they could stem the tide with some sartorial splendor. Today, even more damage can be done with a pair of fuzzy slippers and a laptop at home.
Tags: Communities, Marketing, Social Media, worst practice
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