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CTO's Blog Produces "Just-In-Time" Customer Service

I'm an on-and-off reader of Chad Dickerson's column in InfoWorld.  Chad is the CTO at Infoworld, and his March 21st column ends with an anecdote that might reveal something of the future of customer service.  The relevant section:

One recent experience proved to me just how valuable this real-time element of blog publishing is when it comes to dealing with IT problems. I was installing a piece of software called Quick News on my Treo 650 when I ran into some trouble, so I blogged about it in some detail. Within minutes I heard from a fellow Treo 650 user who suggested using an entirely different piece of software. Within an hour I heard from the support department of Stand Alone, the creator of Quick News, with some thoughtful suggestions that solved my problem. I don’t know precisely how they found me, but I do know that by subscribing to the name of their product as a search term in PubSub, Technorati, and/or Feedster, they would have found me quickly.

We all know that any company interested in understanding how their reputation is fairing in the land of consumer-generated media needs to pay attention to key bloggers.  But what isn't stated strongly enough in Chad's column, is the business opportunity provided by rapid index & alert services (such as Technorati) to customer service organizations.  Data is coming in fast via ping servers and it's going back out the other side just as quickly via alerts. 

True, Chad happens to be the CTO of an widely read technology publication, so maybe the response time was a little faster than for some average Joe having the same problem.  But we've all read the impact of not responding fast enough to blog chatter (see: Kryptonite debacle) and I think that Chad's experience with a software vendor is really a fine example of how the management of publicly advertised issues can be managed by the front lines.

Posted by Jason Vantomme on April 6, 2005 at 04:04 PM | Email this post Permalink

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