February 20, 2009

Customer Learning Tool - Twitter

In Chapter Twenty Three of my book, I talk about the BE DiFFERENT practice of Customer Learning. In contrast with the more traditional marketing Market research tools, Customer Learning is a continuous process of communicating with and learning from your customers. Its about opening up your organization and letting your customers come in to advise you and guide you in your journey to be successful and survive. Rather than using external research firms to enhance your understanding of what your customers need and expect from you, Customer Learning is treated as a core competency and is not outsourced; employees are active participants in the process.

In my book I outline the many sources a company can use to feed the learning process; the one I want to discuss here is Twitter. Individuals are using Twitter more and more as one of their social networking tools in addition to Facebook, Linkedin, Palaxo and so on. But I am more impressed with Twitter’s capabilities as a Customer Learning tool for businesses and other organizations.
In fact Twitter in my opinion surpasses other in terms of the business application.

Many organizations are now catching on to its value and it is interesting to see which are capitalizing on its Customer Learning power. Organizations such as Ford, Southwest Airlines , Marriott International Hotels and Resorts , the Chicago Bulls NBA team , Starbucks and The Red Cross have ‘twitterers’ activley pursuing a number of exciting learning applications:
- announcing company events
- releasing company news
- taking customer complaints
- receiving customer suggestions for improvement
- responding to customer account enquiries
- solving customer problems
- putting out fires when service breakdowns occur
- communications channel for the organization’s leaders

I have decided to become an active Twitterer and you can follow Roy on Twitter. I am going to use Twitter as a way to keep you all updated on current activities around my book and seminars I am doing. I would welcome your engagement and dialogue with me on the events, book content, your experiences in terms of the topics I raise in my book and on any other matter you want to open for discussion. I f a certain topic garners a lot of interest I would certainly write a more in-depth piece on it and post it on my blog. Cheers, Roy Osing

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Posted 2.20.09 at 10:08 am by Roy Osing | Read Comments (0) | Leave a Comment