Support tagging
Christopher Carfi threw out a interesting idea yesterday...
- "When an organization puts out a product, the organization defines and publishes a particular tag that they will listen for in the blogosphere when there are customer questions (for example, "office2007question" would have been a good tag the MS could promote with its Office 2007 product)
- If a customer has a question with a product, he posts the issue (just like Shel has done) with the tag(s) of the associated product(s)
- The vendor organization, which is theoretically listening for posts tagged with its "support tags" takes notice, and addresses the issue on the customer's turf."
The post Christopher refers to by Shel is here. It's classic blogger behaviour: I have a problem and hopefully one of my readers can help me out.
I do this from time to time myself and it works. Many do this.
Adding a support tag as a call for help mechanism reminds me of the Structured Blogging concept and edgeio. Earlier this year, I commented on the edgeio's distributed publishing and aggregation model for classifieds:
"Edgeio is a good example of how this aspect of information distribution can become more efficient and convenient for the selling party, and how the data can remain the seller's data. As a seller, all you need to do in order that edgeio lists your product on its site is to post your listing content on a blog, or a site that outputs an RSS feed and include tags for that item. If other marketplaces also decide to go down this route, the seller's item can be also listed by these marketplaces using exactly the same means. So for the seller, they can publish once, run anywhere and maintain control of their data. In this context, edgeio is acting as an infomediary leveraging the distributed power of RSS and giving control back to the user. In this scenario, the act of the seller creating an feed RSS with an item to sell won't achieve a great deal unless something picks up the listing, and does something with it, like distribute it to potential buyers. So edgeio is acting as an infomediary."
Naturally, there will be those who scoff and respond to the support tagging idea along the lines of "Why? Customers should come to our support site, and open a ticket there". And that's how it's done today - make your customers come to you.
But why not reverse this completely? In one sense, this already happens today: customer conscious companies are trawling the RSS search engines and blogs looking for customer feedback / gripes / issues and post comments on those blogs (or post a blog and pingback). This is how these companies win the hearts, minds and loyalty of their customer. Its amazing customer service - a true differentiator.
By providing a support tag, it could allow for further structuring around this 'listening to the blogs customer support' approach. A kind of tagged post RSS aggregator feed could be plugged into existing customer support systems - so instead of email or forum post, it's just a blog. Of course, not all your customers would use it, but if there is a real benefit to the customer in doing so (i.e. faster response times, quality of response, etc), then why wouldn't they? And the benefits to the company providing support in this way? Well, happy customers for one - but if the support is provided via a comment then this provides evidence to prospective customers of the quality of service who happen to come across the blog post.
The more I think about this (and I admit, I've not about it much), the more it makes sense - great idea Christopher.
I'll do my bit and the send idea around within Microsoft for consideration by the powers that be.