For Contingency Planning, Use Customer Experience Management

In a recent post at TheIntuitive Life Business Blog a question was proposed. What happens when a customer gets mad or frustrated enough with a company to start a blogging campaign? What can you do fro damage control?

It is something to consider. The writer had a client that was faced with such a dilemma. I’ll let you read the post and the following comments, mine are also included. Risk is what we deal with every day and in business, contingency planning should be a first level survival task. There should be a contingency for all conceivable mishaps that can be forthcoming to any kind or type of business. Of course there is the obvious such as fire, hazardous spills, lost hard drives and the resulting data, employees gone mad, etc; but what about customers where customer policy dysfunctions create loss. One recent example of a blog campaign by two very unhappy customers that created huge loss for a company is the recent story that involved Dell Computers.

Suggestion could run from using a PR firm to gorilla war fare and subversive blog attacks. This is of course a reactionary political ploy to cover up where the real responsibility lies. If a company, enterprise or small business were to practice customer experience management and center the customer in the business process, as apposed to sales and sales outcomes the nature of contingency, in this aspect anyway, would change.

A proactive customer experience program would allow a company to create up front intervention before it became too late to control bad fall out. There are numerous ways in which this can be handled and using the blog as a feedback tool is perhaps the strongest way to address preemptive contingency planning. Please see “Feedback via The Blog”. There are interactive client management policies that can be implemented by way of your sales team or in the case of small business maybe just a sales person. These can be on the retail floor or in a B2B direct sales/marketing campaign. E-mails used not as a marketing tool, but as a customer update tool or just to say thank you. Contingency planning takes on a different position when it is preemptive and centers on using customer experience management as the delivery tool. In this case it is much easier to isolate and control damage if not just plain avoid it.

Creating rich feedback environments and fully interactive customer support environments is a effective use of Customer Experience Management for strong contingency solutions.

For more information on Customer Experience and Feedback visit The Customer Development Center.

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