The Best Customer Strategy: Fire the Manager, Not the Employee

Networks are powerful things. It doesn't matter if you reject Metcalfe's Law (that says the value of a network is in proportion to the square of its size) as inflated, or Sarnoff's Law, or Reed's Law, or any other law — as Galileo supposedly whispered before his death, "Eppur si muove!" (and yet it moves!). The Internet, and especially formal and informal social networks (such as YouTube, Bebo, Facebook, MySpace or Gawker), ensure that any mistake a company makes, at any time and in any place, will become fodder for the daily regiment of trivia, pique and vented spleen.

What does this mean for customers? Well, it means cable technicians can't fall asleep on the couch. It means customer service representatives cannot berate the customer for dropping service. It means that when a customer calls a bank in the U.S. to drop a credit card, the bank doesn't scare him or her (for example, "Life's circumstances can change in an instant, and although you have not used the card in seven years, there may come a time when it is the only protection you have").

Customers are recording you, videotaping you, uploading and downloading you, and scrutinizing and berating you - in front of millions of people, at zero cost to them. It is no longer one to one to one: one letter of complaint in, one letter of "sorry and tough luck" back. Customers will no longer bother with the complaint letter. They will simply pass the experience on to a friend.

Until now, we have been firing the "bad" employee. Why fire the employee? Who hired them, trained them and coached them? Are we firing them because they followed protocol or got frustrated at the company's awful policies and practices? If you really want change to happen - and you should - begin scrutinizing how the processes were created that got you into this position in the first place. Although it is much simpler to blame the agent, they are likely the symptom, not the cause of the problem.

We don't see this situation getting better; we do see it becoming more severe. What is your strategy?

The Best Customer Strategy: Fire the Manager, Not the Employee

Networks are powerful things. It doesn't matter if you reject Metcalfe's Law (that says the value of a network is in proportion to the square of its size) as inflated, or Sarnoff's Law, or Reed's Law, or any other law — as Galileo supposedly whispered before his death, "Eppur si muove!" (and yet it moves!). The Internet, and especially formal and informal social networks (such as YouTube, Bebo, Facebook, MySpace or Gawker), ensure that any mistake a company makes, at any time and in any place, will become fodder for the daily regiment of trivia, pique and vented spleen.

What does this mean for customers? Well, it means cable technicians can't fall asleep on the couch. It means customer service representatives cannot berate the customer for dropping service. It means that when a customer calls a bank in the U.S. to drop a credit card, the bank doesn't scare him or her (for example, "Life's circumstances can change in an instant, and although you have not used the card in seven years, there may come a time when it is the only protection you have").

Customers are recording you, videotaping you, uploading and downloading you, and scrutinizing and berating you - in front of millions of people, at zero cost to them. It is no longer one to one to one: one letter of complaint in, one letter of "sorry and tough luck" back. Customers will no longer bother with the complaint letter. They will simply pass the experience on to a friend.

Until now, we have been firing the "bad" employee. Why fire the employee? Who hired them, trained them and coached them? Are we firing them because they followed protocol or got frustrated at the company's awful policies and practices? If you really want change to happen - and you should - begin scrutinizing how the processes were created that got you into this position in the first place. Although it is much simpler to blame the agent, they are likely the symptom, not the cause of the problem.

We don't see this situation getting better; we do see it becoming more severe. What is your strategy?