Cus­tomer ser­vice is the new black. The Cus­tomer Ser­vice is the New Mar­ket­ing panel at SXSW talked about how “online busi­nesses that pro­vide supe­rior cus­tomer ser­vice are earn­ing fanat­i­cal devo­tion … Doing busi­ness online is any­thing but imper­sonal and an obses­sive atten­tion to cus­tomers *after* the sale is a killer advan­tage.” The panel fea­tured Thor Muller, Man­ag­ing Dir, Sat­is­fac­tion Unlim­ited, Heather Champ, Com­mu­nity Mgr, Flickr, Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com and Nick Wilder, Prin­ci­pal, 30 Boxes

Heather spoke in good detail about how Flickr man­ages their community:

• They keep dif­fer­ent chan­nels of com­mu­ni­ca­tion open with their mem­bers. They have a help link at the top and footer of every page, a help by email with a drop-down topic selec­tor and links to forum top­ics and activ­ity. Flickr’s team can access this help and feed­back sys­tem on the fly from wher­ever they are and they use a sitewide sta­tus mes­sage to let peo­ple know what’s happening.

• Flickr has three forums: Flickr Help, Bugs and Ideas — that pro­vide imme­di­ate feed­back on the mood of the com­mu­nity on any par­tic­u­lar day. Com­mu­nity man­agers, includ­ing com­pany founder Stew­art But­ter­field, mon­i­tor these daily to take the tem­per­a­ture of the com­mu­nity. About a mil­lion pho­tos are uploaded every day, so a lot of peo­ple actively par­tic­i­pate on the site and in the forums.  For exam­ple, the com­mu­nity recently flared up over Yahoo!‘s deci­sion to con­vert “Old Skool” Flickr users were not happy about this and within a few weeks of the announce­ment, 2,650 com­ments had been posted on the forum thread about the change.

• Even as things get heated in the forums, Heather’s mantra is to use a “soft pleas­ing tone of voice”; she even taped this sen­tence to her lap­top, as a core prin­ci­ple to fol­low. The point is to cool things down by being level-headed at all times. She will let mem­bers be abu­sive to her, but never to one another.

• When they know of a new fea­ture or a bug, they will put a notice on the top of mebers’ home page with a link to the discussion

• Every Flickr empoyee is an active mem­ber of the site with their own pho­to­stream: they are who they say they are and you can see their pro­files. In fact, the peo­ple who built Flickr really par­tic­i­pated and actively engaged with the community

• As an online ser­vice provider, you can­not assume noth­ing is going to go wrong … but you can pre­pare for when things do. For exam­ple, on July 19th 2006, they had to take site down to fix a nag­ging issue. On this occa­sion, since they didn’t know for how long the site would be down, they replaced the stan­dard “flickr is hav­ing a mas­sage” error page by a col­or­ing con­test with a way to win a free pro account. The con­test details were on the flickr blog, which is run on a sep­a­rate sys­tem and is not con­nected to the Flickr site. Within 24 hours, they had 1100 pho­tographs. They gave away 14 pro accounts to the top entries as well as a 3-months pro account to all con­test entrants. They did this because they didnt know how long it would take them to bring Flickr back up, so they wanted a way to engage with the community.

• They remain hon­est, trans­par­ent and they ‘fess up when they do things wrong, in par­tic­u­lar Stewart

• How do you deal with cra­zies? It’s impor­tant to real­ize that peo­ple are very pas­sion­ate about cer­tain things and you have to remind your­self not to get angry and to under­stand when to step away and take a breather. The key is to have a firmly estab­lished com­mu­nity guide­line, so that you can take the appro­pri­ate action when peo­ple step over the line. Some­times there’s “trout slap­ping” going on between mem­bers, and the com­mu­nity man­agers have to posi­tion them­selves as ref­er­ees: “step back from the abyss and if not, we’ll lock down the forum”. You can have peo­ple rail against you, but not against other peo­ple in the com­mu­nity. They only delete spam­mers out of the forums and infre­quently block peo­ple from forums, if they’re being real jerks. This action is not irre­versible and gives peo­ple time to reset. Accord­ing to Heather, it’s good to wear “asbestos under­pants” when deal­ing with hot topics.

• It’s impor­tant to hire the right peo­ple and their employ­ees have been inter­viewed by 8 or 9 peo­ple. You need to find peo­ple with the same val­ues. Also, every­one has to answer 10 to 20 cus­tomer care ques­tions every­day to under­stand the inter­ac­tion with the com­mu­nity. “We’re all in this together”.

• Is there a can­cel­la­tion pol­icy? Flickr has a firm, no refund pol­icy. Because a year’s mem­ber­ship costs a mere $24.95, it’s more expen­sive to deal with refunds, so they’re not given. But you want to make sure peo­ple are there because they want to be there, not because you’re hold­ing them hostage, so it shouldn’t be hard for users to can­cel their accounts. In fact, every addi­tional minute mem­bers spend try­ing to can­cel their account cre­ates unnec­es­sary hatred, so the advice is to make it easy for mem­bers to dis­con­tinue their mem­ber­ship if that’s what they wish.

• Finally, it’s impor­tant to sub­scribe to watch­list feeds to see what peo­ple in the blo­gos­phere are say­ing about the com­pany in blog posts and comments

Tech­no­rati Tags: flickr, cus­tomer ser­vice, mar­ket­ing, com­mu­nitysxsw, sxswi, sxsw2007, sxswi2007, sxsw07, sxswi07

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