NOTE: The wiki password/invite key is "pact". E-mail Christine if you have trouble signing in.

Front page. Clean version of the current pact. Please voice your support by signing at the bottom.

Comments page. Editable version of the pact, available for comments and suggestions.

 

Company-Customer Pact

 

The Challenge: We, customers and companies alike, need to trust the people with whom we do business. Customers expect honest, straightforward interactions where their voices are hard. Companies work to inspire brand loyalty and deliver satisfaction while trying to understand their customers better. It is evident that we all have a crucial stake -- and responsibility -- in transforming the adversarial tone that all too often dominates the customer experience.

 

A Call for Shared Responsibility: Along with open, authentic communication comes the mutual responsibility to make it work. As each of us is both a customer and an employee, we share in the rewards and challenges of candor. By adopting these five practical measures, we can together realize a fundamental shift in our business relationships:

 

Companies:

Customers:
  1. Be human. Use a respectful, conversational voice, avoid scripts and never use corporate doublespeak.

  1. Be understanding. Show the respect and kindness to company reps that you'd like shown to you.

  1. Encourage employees to use their real names and use a personal touch.

  1. Use your real identity, and foster your long-term reputation with the company.

  1. Anticipate that problems will occur, and set clear, public expectations in advance for how you will address (and redress) issues.

  1. Recognize that problems will occur, and give companies the information and time required to competently address issues.

  1. Cultivate a public dialogue with customers so they feel they are being heard and to demonstrate your accountability.

 

  1. Share issues directly with the company, or through a forum in which the company has an opportunity to respond, so it can work with you to solve problems.

  1. Demonstrate your good intentions by speaking plainly, earnestly, and candidly with customers about problems that arise.

  1. Give companies the benefit of the doubt, and be open to what they have to say.

 

Our Pact: By working together in these ways, people build long-term relationships that lead to trust, strong communities, and sustainable businesses. We, as companies and customers, support this call for change.

 

NOTE: The wiki password/invite key is "pact".

 

Want to voice your general support on this issue? Please visit the front page to add your name to the list of supporters.

 

Comments?

Just (add your name) at the end of your comment if you wish to be identified.

 

This is excellent -- really excellent. I do think that there's a piece missing , though. You have good statements about how the interaction should go (speaking plainly, candidly, respectfully, etc). But the rubber meets the road when people at the company demonstrate an accurate understanding of the problem to be solved, and make an earnest, thorough, and observable attempt to solve those problems. The counterpart to this is that customers accept the sincerity of the effort and cooperate in the process of resolution. I'm looking forward to seeing the final product on monday. What a great thing this is. (janice fraser)

 

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I think this is a great pact. I was running a few scenarios I've experienced with poor customer service and I think if the company followed the above principles, I'd have been a lot happier and we'd have found a resolution sooner.  It also reminds me about my experiences as a 'customer service champion' at Marks & Spencer (big UK reailer) when I was a student. The one thing I think might be missing here is something around the company committing to being contactable.  I do find that some companies create hard firewalls around them for post-sale customer service - purposely making you wait 30 mins to speak to someone about a billing issue (large US cell phone provider), making it hard to speak to someone who has the authority to do anything (numerous) through to having no customer service phone line or feedback, comments or complaints mechanism whatsoever and no one in their locations being authorised to do anything other than make sales (large UK cinema chain).  -- Ben Metcalfe

 

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Great stuff! I've been threatening to write a "Corporate Bill of Rights in the Social Web", but I like the idea of connecting both company & customer. Here's some random points of feedback:

 

  • RE: Point #1 for customers - I'd love to see this include something about being understanding now just of the "communication" part of being understanding, but also the "reality" part of it. Meaning, sometimes there are issues companies HAVE to face, whether we customers like it or not. SEC requirements for instance, might require a slower blog posting schedule than we'd like. Or perhaps the reality of a company having financial issues might change the reality of funding certain projects. The point is that both sides need to appropriately share their realities and their concerns and be open to the other side's issues.
  • RE: point #2 for companies, I'd  like to change "Encourage" to something like "Require". That one change alone helps to eliminate any question about whether astroturfing, etc. is acceptable behavior.
  • RE: point #2 for customers - I'm not sure how i feel about the long term reputation point. While I agree with the point, I wonder how much a customer really has control over this issue (as far as collecting reputation data). I'd love to get some clarification about what the intent of that part is.
  • I'm not sure if this is an expansion of an existing point or a new point all together, but I'd like to see the very significant issue of "jumping on the bandwagon" addressed. This is more to the customer side, where people tend to skip the research and get angry anyway. The Kryptonite bike locks story is a great one, both from company missteps but also from blogosphere bandwagon jumping, regardless of the facts.
  • Again, this may be inherent in one of the other points, but I'd also like to see something to the effect of giving a company time to fully launch something before customers start railing on how bad it sucks.
  • For both sides, I'd like to see an extra point: "Remember that there are real people with real feelings and legitimate issues on the other side of the company/customer wall."

 

Overall this is great stuff!

- Jake McKee

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Saying "so they feel they are being heard" in number 4 for companies leaves a big opening for lip service. It's not about people feeling heard, it's about re-instrumenting the company so that people actually are heard. How about:

 

Make yourself more accountable and responsive by not only cultivating public dialogue with customers, but also connecting those dialogues with appropriate parts of the company. Learn to hear your customers and act on what they say.

 

Or something like that.  -- Jerry Michalski

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Both companies and customers will win much more with mutual respect.  This is a great initiative to help make it happen.  It really isn't rocket science.  Congratulations to the initial promoters.  We must all spread the word.

- Barry Welford

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For us, we encourage people to contact us anonymously if they prefer, since people are sensitive about their identity and finances.  I'd  suggest that "Customers - #2" allow people to submit feedback "with 

whatever information the company needs to help you" -- so that the company and customer can make a decision about how much information they want to share.  -- Marc Hedlund, Wesabe

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I really like this first stab - the pact is both fantastic in content and design, and I could easily see how such a document could easily become viral.  Much like the ubiquitous Yelp sticker found in many businesses in the SF Bay Area, one could easily start seeing CC Pact stickers around ("I signed the Pact - have you?").  It's a great way to get the conversation started for many companies, and to empower citizens/customers/employees (in that order of roles, too) to remind them that they do have control and responsibilities as well.   Wondering if this document will evolve (with a wiki - great idea!) and how we can flush it out to incorporate things like Online User Rights for more tech-based companies (see this IBM example for a good example).  Or perhaps we need a discussion if this would make the pact  more of a manifesto - and if that's maybe not what's needed (sorry, I tend to Think Big).

 

Anyway, nice job as always folks.  Looking forward to seeing how this evolves, and it feels wonderful to be watching this empowerment movement as it's occuring.  Watching parts of history unfold, dare I say? ;)    - Rachel M. Murray, User Experience Designer

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You have the right idea about client side scripting, but the execution is severly lacking. On your front page you warn me I have javascript off. You're darn tooting I do whem I land on a page for the first time. If you'd like to understand my logic, then type "javascript exploits" into your favorite search engine. Or, if you'd rather a more graphic example take a look at: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2008/01/08/italian_banks_xss_opportunity_seized_by_fraudsters.html and see a real exploit even though they were using https.

 

The idea is great, but the execution lacks the follow through thought needed to truly protect the user,.

 

Allen Schaaf - CISSP, C|EH, C|HFI, CEI

Information Security Analyst - Business Process Analyst

Training & Instructional Designer - Sr. Documentation Developer

Certified Network Security Analyst and Intrusion Forensics Investigator - Certified EC-Council Instructor

 

Security is lot like democracy - everyone's for it but

few understand that you have to work at it constantly.

 

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The script that is referred to there is the type a telemarketer uses, not of the java variety.  - maiki


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