Last Christmas, Carphone Warehouse was selling pre-pay mobile phones for £2.88 (yes, £2.88). This is an organisation that has made its fortune on being highly transactional and its internal culture reflects this posture. Doc Searls, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto recently said;
“Think of markets as three overlapping circles: Transaction, Conversation and Relationship. Our financial system is Transaction run amok. Metastasized. Optimized at all costs. Impoverished in the Conversation department, and dismissive of Relationship entirely. We’ve been systematically eliminating Relationship for decades, excluding, devaluing and controlling human interaction wherever possible, to maximize efficiency and mechanization.”
The impact of the adoption of Twitter (and Yammer) by Anne Wood (Carphone, Head of Knowledge Management) and Guy Stephens (Knowledge engineer) cannot be overstated. As is so often the case, someone in the organisation takes some risks, breaks some rules to try out different ways of reaching out to customers. In just a few short weeks their success in dealing with customer queries has been nothing short of spectacular. This feedback from one customer says it all.
Internally, the formidable Anabel Hoult who leads CPW's services business (that includes contact centres, the area in which Anne Wood works) has backed the initiative and has specifically brought it to the attention of Charles Dunstone, Chairman of Carphone Warehouse.
It's early days, but you have to 'hat tip' Anne & Guy because they've started something quite big here that goes beyond the use of social tools to service customers where the organisation must now start to evaluate its entire strategy for interacting with customers.
Maybe next Christmas CPW will give away pre-pay mobile phones in exchange for customer data which is worth considerably more than £2.88 per opinion. But that's another story!
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