Yesterday, I attended Forward '08, an excellent conference that the Oregon Chapter of the American Marketing Association organized. The event focused on non-tradtional marketing approaches. The keynote speaker was Andy Sernovitz, one of my favorite word of mouth experts. In his presentation, Andy stressed that companies need to be much more cognizant of what bloggers are saying about their products and service and react quickly when necessary.
I've seen firsthand that Snapfish gets the importance of the monitoring the blogsphere and reacting appropriately. On 5/14, I posted a critique about a customer service experience that my wife had. If you scroll down in that post, you'll see that Dean Cookson, Director of Systems and Support Operations for Snapfish (a division of hp), provided a detailed response to my wife's complaint. I like the tone and content of Dean's message. It's not defensive. Instead, he simply explained what happened and how the company is working to compensate customers who experienced a similar situation and what they're doing to avoid future problems. He also pointed out how the company is working with an interesting new platform called Get Satisfaction to address customer complaints. I'll be checking out that service soon and reporting back to you.
