A couple of examples of really odd customer service over the past month have started making me think about the importance of tone, nuance and remembering that there is someone interacting with your software at the other end of the connection. It’s something I’ve always tried to be mindful of, but within social media, apps and widgets, it actually becomes more not less important in my opinion. 

The two examples of strange customer service have come at the edge of the brands concerned.

John Lewis damaged some lighting in our home when delivering some goods to us and didn’t apologise at all.

British Gas serviced our boiler and told us that they have replaced a valve. British Gas came back to visit our still failed boiler two days later and replaced the same valve telling us that the existing valve was old and worn out.

Wally Olins in “On Br@nd” elegantly dissects some of the issues relating to service brands. 

Product brands are about products. Service brands are about people.

… marketing service brands demands additional skill, getting your own staff to love the brand and live it and breathe it so that they can become the personal manifestation of the brand when they deal with customers.

For the customer, the person who represents the brand is the brand. If he or she doesn’t perform properly, the relationship between the customer and the brand may collapse.

I don’t think for a moment that these bad customer service experiences are how either John Lewis or British Gas want to be perceived. I don’t think either that they have followed any of Wally’s teachings from On Br@nd. What has happened though is that bad experiences at the edge of two brands has led to me not wanting to use their services again.

In the examples of the bad customer service experiences I tried to present them in a way which is akin to an activity stream on a social network. We don’t know the names of the individuals as they only ever introduced themselves as the organisations they worked for and even if we did know the names of those individuals you’d still associate the failings of those institutions with the brand, especially since the individuals wore uniforms; they were branded.

How does this relate to the online landscape? In the micro-app and widget world, you are again at the very edge of your brand, in people’s homes and on their phones. and therefore in a very personal space. Your widgets and apps are the people who deliver goods, perform services, they are your shop assistants and your taxi drivers. They are essentially the final mile of your brand and they are your digital outreach and first point of contact.

Yet often the the copy for the messages which are placed at this edge are added to products almost as after thoughts. This is strange to me as these are the very places which I feel tone, context and understanding the response of the user to content matter the most. They are the places which are potentially conversational and are also a place where things can go wrong and be quoted back at you. It gets more personal than that though. If your service is placing something into an activity stream, that is where the wording should be worked on the most to make sure it is sensitive to context. It is a place where both a user is representing the brand and the brand is representing the user.  Role play is a fabulous tool for this. 

I saw one really great example of customer service at the edge of an organisation today, from DopplrHQ on Twitter

we’re renewing our SSL certificate today, so users of our API may see a “Certificate has been revoked” error. We’ll have this fixed asap.

It’s a concise message of course because it’s on Twitter, but it tells the users that they may see a problem, what the symptoms of that problem are and it reassures them of the work in place. It also really shares the root cause of the problem. It doesn’t in some ways need to, simply telling people that there may be an issue is a great start. It’s also conversational, using “we’re” and “we’ll” to make some text about error messages sound human. 

2009 will not be a year to disenfranchise your customers by failing them in terms of service or in terms of poor perceived communications, however it will be a year in my opinion where the edge of your digital brand is going deeper into other online experiences than before.