Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again
Wow, I’m reading Clued In:How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again by Lewis Carbone (Amazon link). It contains timeless stories through decades of customer service. It describes rich experience management as the business of making clues about customers systematic and embeded throughout the values in a company – where decisions are made based on the customer experience, not the bottom line necessarily. As the introduction so clearly states, a business has to make money and a business has to make customers, crediting Peter Drucker with the distillation of the value proposition every business is built around.
This book pushed me to think, what experience management clues are in a community? It’s not an aging orange roof such as those on Howard Johnson franchise hotels signaling the demise of a known, predictable customer experience. It’s not the exact science of the temperature that ice cream is served at in an amusement park in central Florida. There have to be other clues so that you can tell a vital online community as soon as you arrive.
I have two ideas that I’ve borrowed from user experience readings: read wear and social weather.
The phrase “read wear” describes how a well-worn cookbook whose spine is cracked and readily opens on a favorite recipe gives the reader a clue as to what’s good – or what’s cookin’ anyway. Jakob Nielson’s Participation Inequality essay on useit.com offers suggestions to show wear marks on content – ratings, votes, number of times content is shared, and so on. These could be immediate indicators to the amount of sharing, reading, and learning activity occurring on a community site.
The concept of social weather describes how you can enter a restaurant and immediately pick up clues about the social weather – the formality of the table setting, the overall noise in the room, the proximity and view of the kitchen and staff to the diners. Clay Shirky describes social weather in his description of the course with the same name at New York University. The collective atmosphere of a community may be more difficult to detect but with monitoring and metrics tools, the “noise” level could be detected. Do you see signs of gatherings of larger groups or do you notice pairing off of collaborators? All of these and more contribute to the atmosphere of your community, which to me is exactly what customer experience is all about.
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