I've been following Jeff Jarvis' "Dell Hell" on his influential blog, BuzzMachine and this morning picked up Jennifer Rice's lament with Comcast via @d:tech as reported in MediaPost.
To call Jarvis' comprehensive account of his hell with Dell scathing, would be to call the Unibomber misunderstood. It was worse. The amount of negative PR generated continued to snowball and the hundreds of like-minded consumer comments served as a proxy of what is unquestionably many thousands more of disgruntled and underserved customers.
The harder Jarvis pushed, the more Dell resisted until eventually Jarvis e-mailed Dell's CMO and Chief "Ethics" Officer.
The other day I blogged how hard it is to get hold of a human at Amazon, and it appears that all of the successes of the post dot-com boom are all in the same leaking boat - eBay, Amazon, Dell etc etc etc - why the hell are thier customer service arms virtually non-existent? That's rhetorical. It's the money, stupid. It's the money
But that's not really the point of this post...it's really about "citizen marketing" or corresponding to one of the tenets of today's new consumer in my book, "today's consumer is vengeful" - with the power of blogs and more importantly, communal marketing, one consumer can bring down a mighty company.
Or can they?
What if ALL companies are equally dsyfunctional? What if all companies treat their customers the same way? Then what? Think about it...how many companies can you name that CONSISTENTLY offer superior service time and time again....that CONSISTENTLY underpromise and overdeliver....that are accessible, reachable, responsive, empathetic, adaptive to your needs?
Old Marketing - through it's incessant demployment of 30-second hyperbolic lies and false, empty promises - has perpetuated and exacerbated a scenario whereby employees (that deal with customers) are portrayed as slim, good looking, always smiling warm and fuzzy people, only to deflate this Lollipop Guild with Flying Monkeys that couldn't be more aloof, disinterested and detached from their liveblood: their customers.
Of course there are exceptions to the norm....and clearly, the obvious implication of this post is that there will be certain companies that see the wood for the trees and perhaps even build their entire business around plugging the gaps and disconnects created by dysfunctional stakeholder-centric (as opposed to consumer-centric) companies. Maybe JetBlue is in this league...that is until they too either get to big for their jet engines or piss off one consumer too many or to the point where they Jarvicize their experience like Jeff did.
The sad truth is that Jeff ended up purchasing an Apple and like a leopard cannot change its spots, no doubt he will be disppointed with Granny Smith as well. Remember the Neistat brothers?
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