(1.)  Should we use rivets to attach the belt clip to the main body of the case?

(2.) How many should we use?

(3.) How large should those rivets be?

As accurately as I can determine, the answers to these questions as they apply to the case I purchased for my mobile phone are:

(1.) Yes.

(2.) Two.

(3.) Very small.

Sadly, this provides the customer with about 2 months of use for a $20 fee.  And if the customer happened to buy it from a Koodo mall kiosk as opposed to the Web Store, he may be out of luck in getting a replacement.  (Unless he had the foresight to jealously guard his receipt in a cool, dark place, away from pyring kid fingers and thermal-paper-damaging UV rays.)

Bravo Koodo!  You’ve been good, but I guess you can’t win them all.  =)

“…to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales related activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new customers, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former customers back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and customer service.”¹

It begs the question: why can’t consumers use technology to maintain ties and improve their experiences with the companies they buy from?  Why can’t you use social media to nurture your relationship with a company, improve the quality of service and support you receive, and entice them to do what they can to keep you as a customer?  Wouldn’t it be nice to get the services and products you really want, just the way you want them?

Well, I believe you can.  I  call it cRM with a lowercase “c”, because I am the customer trying to manage the relationship from my end.  Admittedly, it’s the less powerful position to manage from, but it’s definitely not powerless.
 
Here’s a simple-to-implement, highly anecdotal example of  Company Relationship Management (cRM) involving me, one company, Twitter, and Blogger.  Please, try this at home.

I spent months comparing service plans, hardware selection, and reading customer reviews before I chose Koodo as my mobile phone carrier.  If you read my original article about my experiences with this company, you’ll know I wasn’t completely sold on them at the time I signed up.  It was calculated risk — one I was willing to buy my way out of if things went as badly as I feared they might, but not without blogging and tweeting in order to broadcast my experiences to others as best I could.  And I did.

When I received some unexpectedly brilliant customer service from a representative at Koodo’s webstore, I tweeted about it.  Koodo noticed — well, one of their reps did, and even called my house to thank me for the tweet.  Quite chuffed by the near-instant response, I blogged about the whole experience soon afterwards, and sent a greeting / notification email to goodcall@koodomobile.com for good measure.  This is (apparently) the email of Kevin Banderk, “Chief Koodo Officer” at Koodo Mobile (a division of Telus).

Now this communication wasn’t responded to by Kevin, nor anyone else: the first and only time so far that I’ve failed to connect positively with Koodo.  Perhaps it was a simple oversight, but I consider it a major blunder given that it’s the address that Koodo specifically requests feedback to, in their customer welcome letter.

Anyway, because I’d successfully touched based with someone within the company who was aware of Twitter and thankful for the exposure they’d received on it, I tried to follow the company via @koodo and @Koodo_Mobile. No luck: these are both dormant accounts.

Undaunted, I continued to search and eventually stumbled across @koodoDave, a website employee who’d been drumming up business and offering individualized support since June `09.  Now I’m not sure what the deal is with Twitter search, but when I search for him now, he still doesn’t appear in the results.  Odd, but if you’re a Koodo customer reading this, I’d recommend following him.  He followed me back quite quickly, and when I needed him he was as willing to help as his tweet history suggested.

Specifically, I was a little troubled at missing the Christmas special that Koodo was offering because I’d signed up a month too early.  Initially Dave did point out that the special shouldn’t be a surprise; it’s something that mobile companies offer each year.  As someone who’d spent the entire 00′s cell-free, this was news to me. But without any whining or arm-twisting from me, Dave offered me my choice of some free accessories, free shipping included — not as much as I would have received had I waited a month to sign up, but certainly much more than I was entitled to (technically: nothing).  Good deal.

Subsequent email correspondence between the two of us let me know that word of my interactions with the original customer service rep (Aleem) had gotten around, and it gave me the opportunity to share with Dave that my one simple blog post about Koodo was generating all kinds of Koodo keyword traffic to my site.  Dave was interested in gathering more specifics about this to pass to the higher-ups.  Come to think of it, I still owe him an email back about this…  I guess my own cRM quality can slip from time to time.  Hopefully Dave isn’t blogging about it. 

The take-away from this experience is that it’s not only possible, but very simple to use free social media tools to praise or critique the companies you do business with.  While it may seem a bit of a stretch to think that you could exert any kind of leverage with a corporation like Telus, Bell or Rogers using a free, online service —  you can.  My first recommendation is that you quit thinking about businesses in terms of nameless, faceless commercial entities.  Behind the slick and schmaltzy advertising, and inside of the brick and glass buildings are ordinary people like yourself that you can connect with.  You don’t need to know their Twitter account: to this day I don’t know if Aleem is even on Twitter.  But my sincere, verbal appreciation paired with a tweet-as-promised set something in motion between me and my mobile brand.

It’s good for me: I feel like I can approach them with any query at any time, and know that I’ll be helped quickly and courteously.  But this is also good for Koodo: So long as I have that feeling of connectedness, what are the odds that I’ll sever my tenuous ‘no-contract’ arrangement with them to do business with one of the new Canadian market competitors like WIND Mobile or DAVE Wireless?  Pretty low, actually. Additionally, every bit of positive social media press that Koodo can stimulate in response to this type of individualized, accessible support can only help to improve the ratio of positive to negative articles floating around on the web.

So, the next time you’re on hold, on-line, or in line, why not give some thought as to how you might initiate a new relationship with your retailer/e-tailer.  Creating and distinguishing your personal brand can transcend beyond just developing a dedicated following on Twitter or Blogger.  A belief in your own power to be influential, paired with the action of writing about what you’ve experienced (even if it’s only 140 characters) can transform you from an anonymous consumer to a valued customer.

In the years since, a lot has happened, not the least significant of which was getting married and having several children.  A recent incident made me consider that a mobile phone might be worth having just for the sake of emergencies, so I began looking at the options: companies, plans, model availability, and service and hardware reviews.

It was an experience mixed with smug satisfaction and dread; while there were the expected technical advancements, it was clear that Canadians hated their mobile phone companies as much as ever.

Finding a positive review that wasn’t submitted by a shill proved impossible, and I finally elected to go with Koodo.  It wasn’t that I was impressed by what I read — one of the kindest assessments I found described them as “Telus with less Sucks” — but I felt that paying $150 to settle the cost of the phone was worth it, if it meant I could escape from the company if necessary.

With that in mind, I ordered a phone, an accessory pack and a plan via the Koodo website and prepared to be disappointed with inaccessable and rude customer support, and service that went down for hours at a time.  Seriously — this is what I read.  And I only made this calculated gamble for the financial considerations above, plus the fact that I have an extensive background in mental health care and felt confident I could contend with even the most savage customer service rep.  As for the service outages, I read another thread that suggested that the problem might be related to failing to turn off the phone once in awhile.  Another solvable problem.

My order was shipped out the same day and was couriered to my door within two days.   A promising start.  Then disappointment…  I opened the package and the “universal” kit I ordered was nothing of the sort.  The travel charger would not fit my phone’s power input, and the leather case was too small.  So, I charged the phone with the factory charger, turned it on, and received 0 bars.  The latter was not a suprise; my extended families’ phones through another provider have the same issue.  I haven’t determined whether it’s because we live in a peripheral zone, or the fact that our walls are as thick as a 50s-era bomb shelter, but we can’t get a signal without standing in the driveway.

I took several deep breaths and called customer service support.  It was 8:15 PM, and I waited for 50 minutes before finally reaching the front of the queue.  Time for one more deep breath, and a greeting that I hoped would put the rep at ease:

“Wow, that was a long wait.  I can only imagine how crazy things must be for you,” I said.

She laughed, and we shared some small talk.  I asked if I would be charged a $35 activation fee because the website was not currently able to do activations, and she assured me I wouldn’t be.  Because I was unable to get a signal she was unable to activate my phone for me, but she gave me simple instructions to do it myself.  I thanked her for her kindness, and walked out to my driveway to activate the phone.  It worked!  Then I regretted that I’d neglected to ask the representative for her name… even  with the frustrations trying to activate the phone, the experience had been nothing like I’d read about on-line.

The following day I hesitated to call the Koodo webstore to talk about the mismatched kit.  I put it off for four hours before finally deciding that I would approach them with friendliness and good humour, and be prepared to deal with anything: an RMA return at my expense, an exchange for in store credit at a brick and morter location, a %15 restocking fee… whatever.  So I called…

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“I don’t know… I really hope so,” I replied, then I described the problem I had with unmatched accessories that the webstore had suggested for me.  Then I asked if I could get a pen in case I needed to mail it in, or write down an address to drive to.

“It’ll be easier than that — you’ll see,” he said, and asked if he could put me on hold.

I waited, wondering what he’d meant, and hoping the wait wouldn’t be anything like my activation call experience.  It wasn’t.  In short order he was back on the line to apologize for the problem with the website, and to tell me that I could keep the equipment without charge.  Then he confirmed my credit card information, and told me that the full amount, including tax would be credited back to my card within the next few days.

I was flabbergasted, but not so much so that I forgot to get his name — Aleem.  I thanked him and remarked about how different this experience had been than anything I’d read on-line.  I asked if I could tweet or blog about it, and he was only too happy to comply.  So I sent out a tweet immediately, thanked him again, and added jokingly that I hoped I wouldn’t need further Koodo support for awhile.  He laughed; we hung up; I felt good.

When I arrived home later that day I got a message that Koodo had phoned me back to thank me for tweeting about them.  I’ve never been thanked by a company before, especially after they’ve been the ones helping me with a problem.

This is only my own experience, and I don’t claim that you’ll have the remarkable interaction that I had, but at least there is now one decent review on-line that wasn’t written by anyone even remotely connected to the company.  If you don’t believe me, keep reading my blogs, or my twitter and identica posts.  You’ll be bored to death with endless information about privacy, gov2.0, and open source software.

If I can offer one bit of advice, it’s this: be nice to people with power, and more importantly, know who they are.

As a former social worker who visited myriad of schools, I know that the person in power is not the principal, but the custodian (they have keys to everything) and the secretary (they’ve got files, the computer, the appointment book, and still more keys).  Likewise, the person that runs Koodo (or Telus, Rogers, or Bell) is not the president, but the customer service representative.  Their job sucks.  They’re run into the ground by people who are angry with a service, and are taking it out on the most easily accessable company personnel they can.  Don’t be the next person to treat them that way.  Instead, assume that they’re probably very stressed and proceed accordingly.  Ask about them about their day.  Make it clear that you have a problem and that you hope they can help.  Be excessively patient, respectful and thankful.  And do all of the above with sincerity.  Even with the background I possess, I’m not sure I could do the job they they do, day after day, with the patience that they do it with.  Could you?

So, again: Thank you Aleem.  Thanks helpful customer service lady who helped me activate my phone (and I do feel bad for not writing down your name).  Thanks Koodo for calling me back to thank me.

And for the skeptics still harbouring the burning question: Yes, I got my refund — on time, and exactly as Aleem promised.