I spent a couple of days this week presenting to a large financial services business and encouraging them to learn some lessons from social businesses.
One of the major chords was about the values of the business: being open, transparent and honest and in public. I was using 3 examples of ”crowdsourcng” and “crowdservicing”: Mini showing its customer ratings for sales and for service on its dealer sites, first direct ( happy 21st!) sharing customers good and bad commentary and giffgaff (happy 1st birthday yesterday ! ).
giffgaff works with its customers on all facets of the business – product development, sales, marketing and service. to be able to do this it has to transparent, open and honest. How many telcos would publicise their network outages?
Look at what first direct is doing next – inviting customers to join their Beta Lab to help them develop their products. A step too far for your business? Or just a step back into history if you are an IT company who have been doing this successfully for ages.
Back at the events, we were discussing how that could work for a financial services company. Just imagine sharing your internal customer feedback and customer data on your website. Publish your NPS scores and verbatims for example?. Publish your quarterly customer research?
Let’s face it, very few people in your business get to read it, let alone act on it. So what if the tables were turned and executives had to explain to customers what they were doing about the experiences represented in the data. The pressure would really be on to show the public audience that you are serious about customers.
Today, it might look like a very brave step indeed. But imagine if in a year’s time all your competitors were doing this and you were still afraid to do it. How would that look?
Oh and by the way, whether you like it or not, customers are already sharing their feedback and data anyway. Do you think they don’t know? Your job is to help them know more and do something about it – not hide the data.
Today, corporates are allowed to be not open, not transparent. At some point soon that will become very difficult without looking dishonest.
Dare you share your customer data on your website? Discuss
