Another neighbour, who lives in a £400,000, four-bedroom house, said: ‘My worry is house prices and whether they could be affected by this place being here.
Archive for 18 April 2004
Another glimpse of the possibilities opened up by RSS comes courtesy of Plusnet (I have to declare an interest here, as they’re my home ISP.) Like most ISPs that know what they’re about, they’ve got a ‘Service Status’ page that’s a quick way of finding out what’s going on with their service. Very useful if, say, you’re having a problem with their email server and you want to check if everyone’s having the same problem or if it’s just you.
But Plusnet have taken it one stage further by providing an RSS feed of their service status postings, which means that I don’t need to visit their site to see what’s going on – it simply appears in my newsreader. The advantage to me is that I can keep tabs on what’s going on in the background, the advantage for them is that it reduces the number of calls coming in to them from people just wanting to know what’s going on.
Having said all this, Plusnet are actually a great example of an organisation that ‘gets’ customer service in the first place. Take a look at what they’re posting on the Service Status page. It’s not just ‘this has gone wrong, we’re fixing it’ information – it’s proactive as well. I can see not only when things have gone wrong, but also what they’ve got planned, and perhaps most importantly what they’re doing about fixing the problems as they unfold. That takes a commitment on the part of the organisation – it’s all too easy to batten down the hatches and let the updates and information trickle out bit by bit, treating the customers as mushrooms as the saying goes. What Plusnet are doing is keeping me informed – so when things do go wrong, I cut them that extra bit of slack knowing that I can trust them to be telling the truth and be open about what’s going on and when problems are going to get sorted.
Why’s this important? Simply that the market for internet services is huge and highly competitive. I’d have little compunction about moving provider if their service was poor, because it’s relatively easy for me to do. To retain my loyalty – and better still, gain my recommendation – Plusnet have to work at it, and keeping me informed is part of that. RSS isn’t a magic bullet, and it would be no use at all if the organisation’s culture isn’t set up to regard customer service as a prioroty – but it’s a useful tool to add that elusive differentiator.
If you’ve been wondering about the practical use of RSS feeds, consider this idea from Phil Windley:
My friend Steve Fulling was recently in an auto accident–someone rear-ended him. That was no fun, but he was telling me about the awesome customer service he was getting from the body shop (Central Body in Provo). They called him up soon after his car was dropped off and said “Mr Fulling, I wanted to call you and tell you that your truck will be fixed on the day we promised and we don’t see any additional charges beyond what you were quoted.” In essense, they were reporting “on time, on budget.” They called again today to give him an update. That gave me the idea that what I’d really like is for the body shop (or anyone else providing similar service) to tell me: “Mr. Windley, we’ve emailed you the URL of a personal RSS feed we’ve set up for you. Load it into your feed reader and you will see twice-daily status reports on your vehicle.” I’m a geek–sue me.
And when you consider that the majority of organisations will have some sort of database-driven system to capture the details of each customer transaction, then the implementation of something like this becomes trivial in the grand scheme of things.
