Adobe, Customer Support, and Malarkey
July 1, 2011
Malarkey is, according to the Free Dictionary, “empty rhetoric or insincere or exaggerated talk; “that’s a lot of wind”; “don’t give me any of that jazz”. I learned the word from one of my grandparents who squeezed pennies until they screamed. Close watchers were they. Those folks knew rubbish. So do I.
I read an absolutely amazing write up “The New Art and Science of Great Customer Experience.” I am breathless. No, I am stunned. The author is, according to the post by Eric Savitz (not the author) is written by Rob Tarkoff, a senior manager at Adobe. Now, when I hear Adobe, I don’t think, “customer service.” I think about a Web site that is tough to navigate, my numerous official Adobe user names, and the incredibly awful support for the product I use to write my mindless, vapid monographs—Framemaker.
Come on, Adobe. Tell me how to set a custom color in Framemaker 9 and avoid generating every possible RGB value when I place a JPEG. Please, please, oh, Athena, please. Image source: Morguefile.
I do not think of Adobe and customer service, customer support, or customer anything. I think of annoying updates, ponderous PDF code, and an interface to Framemaker’s custom color controls that make me and my programmers weep in frustration.
Here’s the passage that got me thinking about customer support and search:
Some companies are taking the lead to provide true customer experience innovation. Smart brands are figuring out ways to extend the conversation beyond the purchase experience, creating new customer touch points by encouraging shoppers to share ideas and stories post sales on social sites such as My Starbucks Idea and Nike+. These brands are embracing new channels and new enterprise systems are being built to support them by discarding the constraints of past practices, architectures, and business models that inhibit true CEM.
Yikes, CEM or customer experience management. Wow. Oh, wow.
Today I think that word is just another bunch of baloney. Yep, ground mystery meat in a plastic tube is a good metaphor for “customer service” and its twin “customer experience”. I get the print version of Consumer Reports. One of the write ups in the July 2011 issue is “What’s Wrong with Customer Service?” I suppose this article is online, but for our purpose the article is a report based on what Consumer Reports’ readers perceived. The survey, like any whizzy 21st century mathercise can be distorted like a fun house mirror. Even though I am skeptical of surveys, the Consumer Reports’ data struck me as interesting for three reasons:
SharePoint’s Potential for Building Dashboards
July 1, 2011
Are you on the fence on whether to use SharePoint to build your company’s web site? The web site is usually a potential customer’s first view of a company, so it is a very big decision to make. Marc D. Anderson wrote, “One of the Most Impressive Web Pages I Have Ever Seen in SharePoint” brings attention to the type of quality web site you can build in SharePoint.
“The reason I pulled this demo out of the vault was that it’s a pretty good example of the type of dashboard that you can build using garden variety SharePoint tools and a little ingenuity. No fancy BI add ons or KPIs here.”
The web site in question was built strictly from basic data view web parts (DVWPs). It was a prototype for a green organization that wanted a web site to help households track their carbon footprint. It was hosted in WSS 3.0, which despite a bad reputation, is great to solve business problems. The web site consisted of four web parts: household demographics, household size details, household’s annual data, and comparative household information. Each DVWP was specifically made to track an important part of a household’s carbon footprint and help the owners’ reduce it. And it was all built in SharePoint. After you build your web site in SharePoint, you’ll need to be able to search it. Try SurfRay’s Ontolica search solution for SharePoint.
Torben Ellert, July 1, 2011
SurRay
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