This blog often has posts about online customer communities for those looking for commercially oriented community tips and ideas. ...Tags: Tags: customer_communities online_facilitation online_communit

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Engage and listen to your customers. What we do Since 1999, we have created and managed more than 300 online customer communities to help our clients deeply engage with, and listen to, customers in ways that deliver extraordinary insights, generating phenomenal business results. We enable companies to operationalize what it really means to be close to the customer throughout their organization by offering full service community capabilities--from strategic planning and design to member recruitment to expert facilitation, and customer insights

think you’d have to be really really clear that you are justified in sacking a customer for a Twitter comment before you asked them to move on. How NOT to do Customer Service on Twitter Crucial Paradigm is a post from: Laurel Papworth- Social Network Strategy Technorati Tags: crucial paradigm , customer service , Twitter ...Tags: Sometimes you get frustrated and really let loose. Sometimes you just say WTF and walk away.

Earlier this week we wrote about Thomson Holidays and how a blogger can impact your brand reputation and how with social media, complaints have moved from being a customer service issue to being a branding and corporate reputation one. Earlier this week I was running a ‘masterclass’ in social media and customer service at the Call Centre Focus & Customer Strategy Conference 2009 . Image by JMC Photos via Flickr The session looked first at the different types of social media that businesses use and the reasons for and benefits of this.

For Zappos customer service has always been a critical part of the brand, indeed early on they made the deliberate decision to divert their marketing budget to customer service. They allowed customers to do things like try and return products for up to a year, only list stock that’s in their warehouse, encourage customers to call them about nearly everything, and they invest in ’surprise’ free overnight shipping for most customers. Image via CrunchBase Zappos is a well-known social media case study.

We wrote last month about the Zappos story , about how they have used customer service to extend and enhance the customer experience and how this has had a positive impact on sales, satisfaction and growth. This example highlights the power of customer service - of listening to and then rewarding customers. We know the real benefit that a brand Image by LiminalMike via Flickr Both in terms of the insights and ideas you can get from them, and also the way you can amplify word-of-mouth and build loyalty with them by listening to what they say and responding.

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One of the main reasons we can find such experiments right now is mass-customization : Open Design initiatives represent a promising way to put in practice mass-customization activities that really involve the end-user and give him/her a strong position in defining the product/service. is a very well structured project, and it addresses in a clear way the mass-customization aspects and the opportunity to generate economic value and also let people modify their homes through time. Open models are now famous for being adopted in many fields outside software development, and we can see this as a proof of their importance and a clear sign of their success.

The promise of co-creation is that getting customers involved in the innovation process, and letting them inform the design of new products, will mean that you develop a product that is better suited to their needs and will ultimately perform better in the market. Often customers don’t know what they want. Image by Darren Hester via Flickr Of course, it is not always this simple.