Customer Service and K-Logs.  What customer activities have shifted to the Web (based on a Forrester study on the sales of complex goods):
  1. Researching product information (90%)
  2. Comparing product features and prices (58%)
  3. Contacting customer service (56%)
  4. Locating a store or distributor (42%)
  5. Checking product availability (36%)

Which of these activities could be enhanced by corporate use of weblogging?

  1. A weblog, built and maintained by a product manager, could provide customers with an active resource on the products they are deciding to buy. 
  2. This could be accomplished by building a spreadsheet comparing (feature by feature) several different products, and publishing to a weblog as an additional page accessed by the navigation system.  Additional comparison info could be presented in a weblog format for easy consumption.
  3. Contacting customer service on most sites is painful.  Additionally, the FAQs and resource databases seem put together by monkeys (albeit highly paid ones).  A simple way to generate an extremely valuable and organic customer service data is to have each rep publish a weblog.  The question, including keywords, is the title of the post.  The answer is the response. 
  4. Not really applicable, but for many companies the local outlet doesn't have an effective Web presence (not even for coupons, specials, etc.).  A simple weblog with a corporate template would suffice.
  5. New poducts should be hyped via a weblog.  Features, improvements, etc would all factor into the weblog's posts.  A simple countdown clock would track the days or hours to availability.
[John Robb's Weblog

Customer Service and K-Logs.  What customer activities have shifted to the Web (based on a Forrester study on the sales of complex goods):

  1. Researching product information (90%)
  2. Comparing product features and prices (58%)
  3. Contacting customer service (56%)
  4. Locating a store or distributor (42%)
  5. Checking product availability (36%)

Which of these activities could be enhanced by corporate use of weblogging?

  1. A weblog, built and maintained by a product manager, could provide customers with an active resource on the products they are deciding to buy. 
  2. This could be accomplished by building a spreadsheet comparing (feature by feature) several different products, and publishing to a weblog as an additional page accessed by the navigation system.  Additional comparison info could be presented in a weblog format for easy consumption.
  3. Contacting customer service on most sites is painful.  Additionally, the FAQs and resource databases seem put together by monkeys (albeit highly paid ones).  A simple way to generate an extremely valuable and organic customer service data is to have each rep publish a weblog.  The question, including keywords, is the title of the post.  The answer is the response. 
  4. Not really applicable, but for many companies the local outlet doesn't have an effective Web presence (not even for coupons, specials, etc.).  A simple weblog with a corporate template would suffice.
  5. New poducts should be hyped via a weblog.  Features, improvements, etc would all factor into the weblog's posts.  A simple countdown clock would track the days or hours to availability.

[John Robb's Weblog]

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