New Yorker screws innocent bystander
Trying to renew his New Yorker subscription, Doc Searls has a great screed about the difficulty of getting satisfactory service, illustrated with a perfect image from despair.com:
Ironically, despair.com almost immediately follows up with:
Doc’s post describes the confusing details by which marketeers go to such lengths to squeeze another few dimes out of you every week. We’d like to think this is just an artifact of company divisions not talking to each other enough, in their perpetual struggle to delight & amaze their customers with their caring and imaginative service.
But there’s a darker side to the cruelty: maybe it’s purposeful.
Why would rational sales managers intentionally piss off their customers? Maybe they can’t help themselves, because they’ve been training for years for the opportunity. Business School grads are among the most competitive and focused people in the enterprise, fighting fiercely for a seat in the C-Suite. The irony is that they can’t help competing with their customers.
The opportunities they see, and seize, are to wear down a customer until it’s just not worth the fight any more. Doc explains:
See, with most subscription systems, FUBAR is the norm. A matter of course. Pro forma. Entrenched. A box outside of which nobody making, managing or working in those systems can think.
This is why, when an alien idea appears, for example from a loyal customer just wanting a single and simple damn price, the response is “Never gonna happen.”
This is also why the subscription fecosystem can only be turned into an ecosystem from the outside. Our side. The subscribers’ side.
I’ll explain how at Customer Commons, which we created for exactly that purpose. Stay tuned for that.
Doc lists eight separate annoyances that can only be solved from the customer’s side, by inverting the dominant role of companies’ Customer Relationship Management systems. That’s why he coined “Vendor Relationship Management”:
There is also no shortage of of business problems that can only be solved from the customer’s side. Here are a few examples:
Subscriptions. Nearly all subscriptions are pains in the butt. “Deals” can be deceiving, full of conditions and changes that come without warning. New customers often get better deals than loyal customers. And there are no standard ways for customers to keep track of when subscriptions run out, need renewal, or change.
Internet of Things. What we have so far are the Apple of things, the Amazon of things, the Google of things, the Samsung of things, the Sonos of things, and so on — all silo’d in separate systems we don’t control. Things we own on the Internet should be our things. We should be able to control them, as independent customers, as we do with our computers and mobile devices. (Also, by the way, things don’t need to be intelligent or connected to belong to the Internet of Things. They can be, or have, picos.)
Loyalty. All loyalty programs are gimmicks, and coercive. True loyalty is worth far more to companies than the coerced kind, and only customers are in position to truly and fully express it. We should have our own loyalty programs, to which companies are members, rather than the reverse.
Terms and conditions. In the world today, nearly all of these are ones companies proffer; and we have little or no choice about agreeing to them. Worse, in nearly all cases, the record of agreement is on the company’s side. Oh, and since the GDPR came along in Europe and the CCPA in California, entering a website has turned into an ordeal typically requiring “consent” to privacy violations the laws were meant to stop. Or worse, agreeing that a site or a service provider spying on us is a “legitimate interest.”
Privacy. We’ve had privacy tech in the physical world since the inventions of clothing, shelter, locks, doors, shades, shutters, and other ways to limit what others can see or hear — and to signal to others what’s okay and what’s not. Instead, all we have are unenforced promises by others not to watching our naked selves, or to report what they see to others. Or worse, coerced urgings to “accept” spying on us and distributing harvested information about us to parties unknown, with no record of what we’ve agreed to.
Identity. Logins and passwords are burdensome leftovers from the last millennium. There should be (and already are) better ways to identify ourselves, or to reveal to others only what we need them to know.
Customer service. There are no standard ways to call for service yet, or to get it. And there should be.
Advertising. Our main problem with advertising today is tracking, which is failing because it doesn’t work.
RE Advertising, Doc offers a list of intentcasting providers on the ProjectVRM Development Work list.
Coincidence Alert: Tomorrow is this fall’s online VRM Day. Anybody can join these experts tomorrow at 10:00 PDT: http://vrmday2020b.eventbrite.com. They’ll send you the Zoom link tomorrow morning.
