Results tagged “products” from experiential thoughts

There's been a bit of an uptick in chatter lately around Customer Service and Product Value:

Joseph Jaffe has been tweeting & posting about his experience (miserable) with Delta—aka Delta Skelter
Jon Burg recently wrote about Defining Fair Restitution as it relates to unhappy customers and companies.
Sharon Jaffe @sharonjaffe recently tweeted: 

Had 3 positive customer service experiences this week and am blown away. The problem is now I'm worried about next time, CONSISTENCY is key.

It was Jon's set of tweets and related blog entry that got me thinking about how the value of the product as perceived by the customer is related intricately to the end-to-end brand/product/customer experience. The worse the experience, the lower the value of the product. In some ways, this almost justifies the way that Delta treated Jaffe -- they were merely confirming that their product no longer has any value, even though they may pretend that portions of the product do by charging thru the nose for them.

It seems that there are two options for them in a case like this:

1. they can do what they did and confirm that throughout their organization there is little value given to the brand and product
2. they can provide extensive restitution and recompense to Jaffe, and do several things to ensure that such an event is less likely to occur again (public apologies, employee training, and new formal policies.)
   

Unfortunately, I don't think Delta can afford to do the second one under their current structure, as they failed to factor that level of investment into their restructuring plans. But, by failing to make that investment, they have sabotaged their chance to "premiumize" their product and retain the likes of Jaffe as customers. Given that their current product price structure relies upon the Jaffe's of the world to stay in business, this continued policy will likely lead to their eventual demise.

My conclusion from all of this is that fair value and restitution means nothing unless it is representative of the brand, company and product as a whole. Simultaneously, the offered restitution in the case of a grievance can fail to restore a consumer's brand faith even if the restitution is over-compensatory. If the product and/or brand experience continues to fall below the promised standards, the brand faith will evaporate. And in the "Age of Conversation" evaporation of brand faith leads to vocal brand opponents, and a negative conversation.

An interesting new side to the the Prosumer trend is the development of professional services that allow individuals to design and purchase and/or sell physical goods via the web. In other words, take physical outsourcing and make it available at the individual consumer level. It's pretty straightforward, you design something, put digital working drawings into their templates, upload to the site, they laser cut everything according to your lists and ship you the goods. You can refine and tweak (obviously the more rounds you do of this, the more you pay in cutting and materials) and then keep for yourself or place into their marketplace.

The short view of this is the initial reaction I had "hmmm, maybe I'll finally make that table I sketched out" (although not the one w/ steel legs, since they don't yet work in metals.) Then, after thinking for a minute I started thinking about: what if IKEA or Target contracted with these folks or someone like them? Upload a few templates from their designers, allow users to customize, and make selected custom designs available on their website. If something you customized sold, you'd get either some more store credit or perhaps even some cash. Maybe there's a sales level below which you get credit, above which you become a "registered" designer and can start collecting checks.

What's the risk to them? I don't see much of one except perhaps "taste pollution/dillution" due to poor or "off brand" designs. They can always refuse to "publish" designs that don't meet their standards -- while still allowing the creator to purchase said designs for themselves. Additionally, by giving their consumers the ability to become involved in the production & design process, thereby becoming prosumers, they are allowing for brand engagement and growth. It seems a bit like a win/win to me. I get to not only make my own table, but if it's cool enough, I'll make some cash and be able to tell people that I have a product at IKEA/Target/whereever.

Are there downsides I'm missing?