Customer Advocacy and Abdication

Good friend and fellow blogger Paul Greenberg has been regaling the audience at the CRMe09 conference in New York this morning. He is previewing the next version of his CRM book – this time focused on Social CRM.

“Take a negative experience and turn it to a positive - you get an advocate”

But what to do with someone already an advocate who has an issue? Like Paul’s issues with United Airlines even though he is one of their better customers.

Let’s talk about companies I am an advocate of. I have been more than generous to Southwest on this blog (type Southwest in the search box and there are over 100 hits). But I report a bad experience with their new Wi-Fly and post a link on their blog - and no one reaches out to ask me for more details. Or offer a refund. I escalate another issue with 2 supervisors and ask for a call back. No call back. I email someone who has helped in the past about the incident. She ignores my email. Finally I sent a letter to the CEO. That got action, but in the 2 months that ensued, I moved my and my wife’s travel away from them.

And I am already an advocate…

Same thing with WalMart. Over 100 hits on this blog. Most positive. Then I write about a concern that Walmart may be losing its edge and Twitter about it. Silence.

Again I am already an advocate…

Now let’s talk about companies I am not an advocate of. I am tough on AT&T and Verizon and T-mobile on this blog – I am a customer of all three. Not once has one of them reached out and said – how can we turn you more positive? I deal with their people in a business setting quite often, and I ask them how the negative press affects their perception in enterprise transactions. Most will say “ our consumer groups run by different rules”. They should be back at corporate screaming at those consumer folks. No, that’s someone else’s problem.

My concern with Social CRM is we will build better antennae and pick up even more customer signals. But unless we have passionate (and empowered) employees who can follow up and do something about it, we will gradually turn off our advocates. And go back to traditional CRM – hope our marketing and PR dollars drown out the non-advocates.