Movements and ownership – employees and customers behind the wheel

Posted on July 22nd, 2010 by Eric Dodds and currently 2 commenting.

On Monday we talked about why movements require ownership – putting employees and customers behind the wheel. Today we’re gonna look at a few really practical examples.

First, if you missed the last episode, here are a few highlights:

• So many well-meaning businesses initiate use of social media tools and conversation with their employees and customers, but never let them out of the passenger seat.
• If you want to build real community, though, you can’t just invite your advocates along for the ride, you have to let them get behind the wheel at some point.
• Without letting them drive, you’ll never see your employees or customers let out their full potential - which also happens to be the full potential of your brand.

Example 1: Engineering and letting the people who use your products help design them.

Fiskars is an amazing client of ours. Their willingness to let the people who love them most play an active role in the brand continually amazes us. One of the coolest examples, though, is the magic that happened when the brand let some of their biggest fans meet the product engineers – and tell them what they liked and disliked about old products and what they’d like to see in new products.

That’s right – Fiskars let the people who use their products on a daily basis get together with the engineers to help them brainstorm on how the products could be better. And the engineers loved it – end users giving them practical and useful product improvement ideas. What’s more, one of their meetings even resulted in a new product.

Example 2: Using customer artwork in company marketing.

Pabst Blue Ribbon has held an annual art contest for the past 4 years. The rules are pretty simple: any art created had to have the Pabst Blue Ribbon can or logo and any sculptures created had to be constructed solely of empty PBR cans. How’s that putting customers behind the wheel?

Pabst uses a selection of the artwork to display on billboards (giving the original artist full credit). Lots of companies solicit user-generated-content from customers, and many of them display the work online. Pabst (and other companies with similar efforts) takes it a step further and actually involves artists’ work in the companies marketing and let’s the world know it.

Example 3: Asking employees to be the brand of good customer service and putting your money where your mouth is.

The Ritz Carlton has an incredibly strong commitment to the quality of their customer experience. That customer experience is delivered by their employees, so they obviously have very high standards for their workers. (Sidenote, their employee motto is really cool: “We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen”.)

But The Ritz doesn’t just ask make customer service a job requirement or simply ask their employees to provide an optimal stay for guests. They give them the power live the brand of customer service. With cash.

…they’re empowered to deliver the level of service Ritz mandates… Sixty-seven percent of customers leave you because of indifference with how they’re treated. Customers judge the quality of the institution, he said, by the responsiveness of the first person they come in contact with to discuss their problem. Given that, the Ritz empowers and trains the front-line service to resolve conflicts. Part of this entails allowing employees to spend up to $2,000 per guest per day to “fix” any problems, as well as giving employees ongoing problem-resolution training.

–Milla D’Antonio