Turning blog entries into customer experiences
John Ragsdale points out a new product that allows companies to monitor what’s being said about their products and services in the blogosphere. We’ve been talking a lot about this here at Dovetail, specifically how a post on a blog or forum can be turned into a customer experience. I’ve mostly thought about identifying problems that customers may have posted about, but John points out another interesting aspect, identifying expert users who are very knowledgeable about your products, with whom you may want to align. Very cool.
A negative blog post about your company, product, or service can automatically create a support case, and the company can reach out, hopefully turning a negative customer experience into a great one. Proactively. Nice.
John also talks about identifying new content sources, which I completely agree with. I pointed out in an earlier post that there’s way more knowledge in the world than in your own little knowledgebase system.
Even though you make the product, and you have a knowledgebase about your product, don’t assume that your knowledgebase is the end-all-be-all of knowledge about that product. Customers already know this. When I have a problem with a Microsoft product, I don’t go to microsoft.com so that I can search their knowledgebase. I use Google so I can have access to everyone’s knowledge, whether that’s an actual database of KB articles, a static web page, a blog or forum post, or even a wiki. And most of the time I do find what I’m looking for. And more and more, the answer to my question is usually in a blog post.
We’ve seen companies publically discussing how they monitor the blogosphere. It’s great seeing companies like Visible Technologies building a product to do this.
Mash-ups of this type of technology with CRM and integration with KM systems are not far off.
