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Upcoming Interactive Webcast: Mark Russinovich on Windows Vista security 6/18/08

Put this on your calendar: Mark Russinovich Technical Fellow from the Windows COSD will host a live Springboard Series virtual roundtable discussing Windows Vista security on Wednesday, June 18 at 9:00AM Pacific Time.

Go to Visit https://ms.istreamplanet.com/springboard to register for the Springboard, and submit your questions in advance by sending an e-mail to vrtable@microsoft.com.

Of interest:

Tags: Microsoft, Mark Russinovich, tips, Vista, Windows.

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Speak Your Mind: Dynamics hears the voice of the customer, with video, too

As I posted yesterday in Hearing the voice of the customer- learning how to listen and respond, I reflected that sometimes it’s more difficult for larger, more complex and diverse companies to nimbly listen and respond.  And it seems that as you get larger and more global, it is a challenge to continue to inject customer service into the DNA of the organization. 

What’s amazing to me is how in touch many of the exec at Microsoft are with the voice of the customer, and how they keep in touch with that feedback.  Some of it through direct emails sent to execs, feedback from enterprise customers and MVPs,

imageOne interesting way that one of our teams has made the voice of the customer (aka “VOC” or “VOTC” around campus) is through the efforts captured by the Dynamics CPE team. 

At the Dynamics Convergence Conference last year, the team had installed “Speak Your Mind” booths in the Convention Center to capture real customer and partner feedback on video. (Note that the team just returned from the latest latest Convergence held in Orlando.) 

Similar in concept to the infamous Rogers Cable Speakers’ Corner booth (my Canuck friends will no doubt recall, and hat’s off to friends/readers at Rogers), imagine if you will a computerized video photo booth…  In this case, all you had to do to leave feedback for Rogers was to step into the Speakers’ Corner, push the green button and to speak your mind.  With this, people could stand on a proverbial soapbox, give live performances (as the Barenaked Ladies did early in their career, as legend has it) and espouse their personal and political views, all from the comfort of a space not much larger than a phone booth. 

Well, as went the early makings of reality television, so goes Microsoft with Speak Your Mind…

imageSpeak Your Mind – This is your opportunity to provide your feedback in the first person. Tell us about the features, the functionality, the integration, the upgrade, the Implementation—whatever is on your mind as we are ready to listen. Go ahead and Speak Your Mind.

Partners and customers that attended Convergence were invited to step into the Speak Your Mind booth, as Infoworld covered in an article last year.  In the booth, they were encouraged to provide direct feedback to the Dynamics team (and sometimes feedback on other products) to “help drive changes for future product releases and service plans,” according to the info on the Dynamics site.  In their coverage on the page “Speak Your Mind Videos Put to Good Use“, Norma Smith (featured at right) said in a blog post last summer that the feedback is heard, and put to good use: 

“Well, I’m pleased to tell you that A LOT has happened to these 1200+ videos.  Here’s the scoop.  Within  about four weeks after Convergence these feedback videos had been individually reviewed and posted to a keyword-searchable internal site accessible only by Microsoft team members. 

“Now here’s the cool part.  As of May 31st, five weeks after initial posting, MBS team members have watched over 2,000 Speak Your Mind videos.  Collectively, that’s a lot of knowledge and a lot of insight getting into the hands of the folks who can influence change.  The videos are being incorporated into strategy planning, product reviews, etc. 

“Our Technical Support teams have taken the videos quite seriously and really gone the extra mile.  I’ve heard about a few cases where a Dynamics customer has received a personal phone call from Support – wherein the Dynamics Support Engineer identified him/herself, advised them that they had heard about their product concerns from the Speak Your Mind video, and then proceeded to show them how to resolve the issue.  Proactive outreach from Support.  Super happy customer.”

Many managers and executives in customer service, product development, marketing and sales have heard and seen the feedback and read transcriptions of the videos to help the division improve on our products and services.  It’s one way that we take customer comments to scale and make them accessible to employees in the company.

Tags: Microsoft, Dynamics, customer support, Rogers, feedback, customer service, Norma Smith.

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Hearing the voice of the customer: learning how to listen and respond

Before we prepared lunch for the kids yesterday, I was forwarded an article from Advertising Age this week, A Digital Conference With Some Humility: Day 2.  In it, editor Matthew Creamer highlighted some of the action at the recent Ad Age Digital Marketing Conference, including a brief report of Linnea Johnson’s comments in a panel session.  Johnson is an exec focused on consumer services at Unilever, the large manufacturer “of food, home care, and personal products including margarine, tea, and Dove soap,” as noted by Live Search.

“[Johnson] was on an energetic panel moderated by Nielsen’s Pete Blackshaw about the intersection of marketing and customer service, though her experience suggested that intersection maybe hasn’t happened yet. The very candid Ms. Johnson said she wouldn’t feel comfortable putting Unilever brand managers or agencies in a call center and that she even once offered her offices as a place for an executive committee off-site, provided the committee members manned a phone. “Not one of them did it,” she said.

“The flip side of things is Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com, a site I haven’t used but am now really curious about. He said Zappos takes the money it would have used on paid media and pours it into the customer experience. That means free overnight shipping, call centers and warehouses open 24/7. It’s a bet that growth will be driven by positive word of mouth and loyal customers. It seems to be working. This year, Zappos will do more than $1 billion in gross sales.”

I’ll also be willing to bet that Hsieh is in touch with what his customers are saying about Zappos.  In fact, I know he does, as noted in this interview…

“Most call centers measure average handle time and essentially what that means is people are trying to get off the phone with the customer as quickly as possible. At Zappos, if someone spends an hour on the phone with a customer and it doesn’t result in a sale, all we care about is that they went above and beyond for the customer.”

And as noted in Businessweek, “every new hire spends four weeks as a customer-service rep and a week in the Kentucky warehouse before starting work.”

Essentially, this is a question of how much of this is engrained into the way employees listen and respond to customers.  Ultimately, this attitude is in the DNA of the staff and the company: if you’re Unilever, or any large company, you need to find ways for the voice of the customer to make it to your ears at every level.  Employees need to feel and be empowered to act on customer feedback.  And such methods need to scale. 

Many companies have customer call centers (or contract the services out), and offer ways for employees to hear the voice of the customer as it comes in, or in an edited form. David Pogue of the New York Times recently noted in a blog post, Tech Support Gets a Reprieve While Users Take a Hit, about how customer service personnel will not only take calls from customers having some difficulties, they share them with others in the company.

“Several years ago, I had the chance to visit a tech-support call center for one of the big computer companies. The technician gave me a second pair of headphones so I could listen in on his conversations with the hapless users.

“I learned so much that day. I learned that all computer companies outsource tech support to dedicated call-center companies. I learned that the Users can be outrageously rude to these hapless tech-support reps, taking out their built-up frustration on somebody who had nothing to do with causing the problem.”

At Microsoft, we take our fair share of customer calls – via phone, web, mail – FedEx or UPS Overnight mail… And we try to do more than just listen to customers, and strive to listen and respond to customer needs.  Sometimes it’s difficult to see examples of this on a Microsoft-sized scale, but it does happen.    

Back in 2006 on Microsoft.com, there was an interesting story about how Kathleen Hogan, our corporate vice president of Worldwide Customer Service, Support and Customer and Partner Experience (aka CPE at the company) and the team in the “revamped its infrastructure and processes in the effort to improve the quality and supportability of Microsoft products.”  Kathleen said…

“While we’re very aware that we will always need to provide reactive support to customers, we also know that a customer’s favorite support call is the one they never need to make. From a customer perspective, there’s much to be said about proactively identifying support issues and trends to improve the health of our customers’ environments and the quality of our products.

“For example, we analyzed customer and partner support incidents related to Exchange Server and found that the majority of the support calls were related to configuration issues. These issues were difficult for customers to identify within their environments, and CSS responded quickly, working with the Exchange product team to create the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA) tool. Based on further implementation analysis and in partnership with the Exchange Server product team and Premier Field Engineering, the Exchange Risk Assessment Program (ExRAP) was established, which incorporates the ExBPA tool. This combination of service delivery program and tools provides best practices to our enterprise customers around how they should implement and optimize Exchange Server.”

(And more info on the Exchange Risk Assessment Program on Doug’s blog here.)

We’ve taken customer feedback in many different areas and in different ways. This coming week, I will highlight a few of the ways that we’re listening and responding.

Tags: Microsoft, Exchange, customer support, Kathleen Hogan, feedback, customer service, Advertising Age.

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Online search, ChaCha and customer service: there’s always room for improvement and innovation

In the article “The Future of Customer Service” on msnbc.com (from  – Entrepreneur.com), writer Sarah Pierce looks at the impact of the Internet and now-ubiquitous mobile technology on consumer expectations of customer service.  We’ve come a long way in the last few years since PC World’s report a couple of years ago that found “one in four online merchants either don’t, won’t, or didn’t answer basic product questions.”  But apparently there is still room for improvement.


Pierce notes that online chat and instant messaging systems have helped to connect customers eager to get some face time (or would that be screen time?) with knowledgeable customer service representatives and solve a variety of technical problems and answer their questions.  According to Nielson Mobile, more than 46 million people in the U.S. used mobile search just between July and September 2007.



“Whether it’s information on a product, questions about a service or simple driving directions, consumers want answers, and they want them now.”


I don’t think that the desire to get an answer ‘now’ is any different than it has been in the past.  My assumption is that we expect more as we are doing so many things and ultimately have more demands on our waking hours. 😉


Back to our story.  In this piece, Pierce takes a quick look at ChaCha, a web-based search and mobile text answering service that allows you to text 242242 (‘ChaCha’) on your SMS phone and get answers to your text questions from a <gasp> real, live person. 


ChaCha is the brainchild of serial innovator Scott Jones, the man behind Boston Technology (the voicemail system company) and Gracenote (originally Escient), a behind-the-scenes company that provides the Gracenote MusicID service to many providers, allowing the automagical recognition of CDs, digital music and streaming audio. (A personal note: Ty Roberts of Jam Session fame and my old friend Jim Hollingsworth from ReplayTV are both execs at Gracenote.)  Scott has 17 patents pending for ChaCha.


ChaCha’s search engine is provided by InfoSpace, and returns results from a number of different search engines, including Google, Yahoo! Search and Ask.com.  (Also visit the ChaCha Underground page to see the most recent ChaCha results.)



“It’s sort of like asking a really smart friend, except at the end of the day, you can ask anything and get an accurate answer,” says [Brad] Bostic [co-founder of ChaCha.com, a people-powered search engine that, unlike Google, uses real people to provide search results]. To test it, Bostic suggests asking an obscure question, such as whether or not camels have eyelids. The answer, three eyelids, is delivered within two minutes, followed by a single link to the source web page.

“Other mobile services like Yahoo! oneSearch, Google Mobile and 4INFO.net, use an analog search engine that provides a convoluted list of web links or answers, forcing the consumer to dig around for the answer they need.”


Let’s put that to the test. 

First, what’s an ‘analog search engine’?  Is that like the analogue recordings record albums, grainy 35mm films and cassette tapes?  😉

To start my quite unscientific test, I used the traditional Internet version of the ChaCha service, using a ChaCha guide.

image

For my query, I typed in “what is Microsoft’s customer support phone number in South America?”

Whoops:

image 


Contrary to IE’s advice, I clicked thru to the ChaCha web page, and found that I had to register for a new ChaCha account.  Registering will give me “access to searching with live guided experts and other great features of ChaCha.”


OK, done.


Now, another couple of minutes to check my email for an activation email that allows me to verify your account.  Unfortunately the resulting confirmation mail was found in my Junk mail folder, so some work to do here as I have my spam filter set to a very basic level. ;(


imageAfter confirming that I had a valid email address, I was able to quickly log on to the service.


I was welcomed to a “Guide Session” with Michelle.  After welcoming me to ChaCha and asking how I was, Michelle went about finding an answer to my question.  Assuming that this pretexting was a strategy to engage the customer and buy Michelle some time, I received an update to the real-time status noting that “Michelle has found results!” 


Quickly, the links popped up in the right-hand nav of the web page.  So, after only a couple of minutes, Michelle found the information I asked for, including this accurate one on TechNet.



“There ya go,” typed Michelle.


In my own effort, I found a link to the phone numbers on the Microsoft International Support using the Live Search Toolbar in just a few seconds.  I’ll admit that — as is often the case — you do have to hunt and peck for an answer through pages of search results to find the answer.  But often times the answer is in the top few results, and this result was in the top three.

As a further comparison, I entered the obscure question that Bostic suggested and quickly found the answer in a few seconds on my mobile device, using Live Search Mobile.  The answer was also displayed in the query search results on Live Search:


Howstuffworks “Do the humps on camels hold water?”

Do the humps on camels hold water? … maturity in five years, a female in three to four years. Camels actually have three eyelids!

OK, one more shot.  To try my best at a ChaCha version of stump the band, I asked a more obscure question as a follow up:

“Where can I find an English owner’s manual for the Sony DVP-CX850D?”


It took ChaCha about 15 seconds to find a guide to help me with this search.  My new guide, Sakina, asked: “Hello I will be helping you with your search? Just to clarify, what can I help you find today?”

I retyped my original question in plain English: “I am looking for an English owner’s manual for the Sony DVP-CX850D CD DVD player.”


Sakina is connected and finding results for you.  Your results will begin to appear below.


Each ChaCha guide has a ChaCha ID number, and Sakina’s was 53363.  First, ChaCha’s Sakina found the service manual for the Sony player, which also comes up in many search engine results.  But Sakina wasn’t done.

Sakina took just a couple minutes more to find the manual on Sony’s US site (which is not obvious, let me tell you) at Sony eSupport for the DVP-CX850D.  (In case you have one of these old tried and true multi-disc changer/players, the manual is available here for direct download as a PDF.) 



Results



  1. Service Manual free download,schematics,datasheets,eeprom bins,pcb,repair info for test equipment and electronics – Sponsored Listing.  This link has been recommended by a ChaCha Guide and Certified through our GuideRank process. ChaCha brings human power to search results.

    http://www.eserviceinfo.com/index.php?what=search2&searchstring=DVP-CX850D


  2. Sony eSupport – DVP-CX850D – Manuals / Specs / Warranty  – DVP-CX850D 

    This link has been recommended by a ChaCha Guide and Certified through our GuideRank process. ChaCha brings human power to search results.  http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/model-documents.pl?mdl=DVPCX850D


A little under ten minutes, Sakina wished me a nice day and we were done, with search results in hand (so to speak).  Both were “ChaCha Guide Recommended Results” — the first I noticed was a sponsored listing.  Not only are the search results listed on the results page, but they are also saved under “My Searches” in your ChaCha account, remaining there for 60 days.


imageI was given the opportunity to rate my guide, and I gave Sakina a “great” rating. 


And overall a thumbs-up on ChaCha based on this limited experience.  Once again, the power of a community to provide better service.


As a side note, I found this manual before Sakina did in a little under a minute using Windows Live Search.


Overall, I find that web search (no matter which engine you use) is much better as a whole than I have experienced in the past, as companies continue innovate and refine their services. 


But wait… there’s more. (with a nod to Ron Popiel)


On Scott’s blog in his post titled The phone number that changed the world…, he invites readers to “try experimental 1-800-224-2242 from your mobile phone.  ChaCha for your mobile phone, which returns results via a text message.


In short, it just works. Try it… it’s very cool.


As noted on the Live Search blog last fall, the Search team focused on some key areas to improve:


“We pored over your feedback, analyzed the data and talked to thousands of users.  How major is this?  It’s our biggest update since our debut in January 2005.”




    • Relevance, relevance, relevance.  We’ve quadrupled the size of our index, which means we can return the right results for your searches.  Improvements like enhanced ranking algorithms, auto-spell correction and better stop word handling help us return the best results. 
    • Speed.  Pages load much faster than before.
    • Streamlined look and feel.  We focused on the end-to-end experience from the homepage throughout the site.  For example, search results are now easier to read thanks to work on typography, contrast, colors and spacing.
    • More high-interest content.  You asked us for more in Entertainment, Shopping, Health, Local and Video search and we’re happy to deliver it.

For complex issues, ChaCha may be a step up, with 30,000 live, trained guides (each complete “a special training program called Search University to ensure their answers are as accurate and locally sensitive as possible”) to answer questions. 

In addition to the comprehensive corporate support websites that many manufacturers offer today, many companies offer online chat support.  These sites go beyond the basic hunt and peck approach for finding old manuals, drivers and FAQs.  I’ve written here about Dell’s online customer service and support, having successfully used Dell’s Hardware Chat to diagnose and get repair tickets submitted for hardware issues.  And I’ve personally had success with HP’s online support options and (as a customer) Microsoft online customer service and live chat. 

(A plug, in case you missed the link: Microsoft Online Chat is available for customers in the States Monday through Friday, 11 AM to 8 PM (Eastern); international customers, please visit our Microsoft Worldwide page to choose from our Microsoft sites worldwide.)

Some manufacturers are including real time systems built-in to their products.  Aside from the diagnostics packages and software built into many computers these days, I read in gizmodo’s CES coverage of the Sharp press conference of the new Aquos Net.  With it, customers can get online customer support via the Aquos Advantage Live tool: Sharp customer service agents connect directly to the TV and remotely optimize picture quality or diagnose problems. Very cool.

imageYou may also find the answer you’re looking for with a rudimentary Wiki search, which you can simply do by entering the search term in your favourite engine and appending the word “+wiki” at the end.  More often than not, this will turn up any Wikipedia articles on the topic, as my son found whilst researching Admiral Byrd.  

More info:


Tags: Microsoft, Customer Service, Customer Support, Windows, Search.


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Seven Years and Seven Habits…

A lot can happen in seven years. 

Nice to receive a cake, as it were… I received several notes and a couple of IMs today congratulating me on my anniversary, as today is my 7-year anniversary at Microsoft, a little less than a third of my career.

So before my next discussion at 5pm, I leave you with Seven Dirty Habits of Highly Effluent People, courtesy of Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame…

Obviously, I’m ripping off Stephen Covey, whose seven better-known habits got my attention not so much for their content, which I find suspicious, but for their surprisingly modest number, which I find manageable. Here then, are my “Seven Dirty Habits,” each gleaned from a worker I met on the show, and bolstered by true stories of personal enlightenment and lingering humiliation.

  1. Never follow your passion, but by all means bring it with you.
  2. Beware of teamwork.
  3. Vomit proudly and whenever necessary.
  4. Be careful, but don’t be fooled–safety is never first.
  5. Think about what you are doing–never how.
  6. Ignore advice such as “Work smart, not hard.” It’s dangerous–and moronic.
  7. Consider quitting.

One good turn deserves another, so here are seven manageable habits for maintaining focus on the customer experience and ultimately satisfaction…

  1. Know that customer service is really everyone’s job
  2. Make your customers feel like they are your top priority
  3. Understand the customer’s needs
  4. Jump through hoops for your customer
  5. Listen — and be willing to take a whack sometimes
  6. Learn from others (these are a few of the lessons from the Xbox Team)
  7. Most of all, Be Nice (one of Dalton’s Three Rules 😉

Have a good afternoon.

Tags: tips, satisfaction, customer experience, whack