How are you using social media with regards to your relationships? Do you use the power of social media to connect with more people or to build better relationships? Is it both, and if so, at what point does that become unscalable?

My Facebook account (which I’ve all but abandoned) shows that I have 185 friends. Facebook’s statistics say that the average user has 130 friends, but I bet most people would find that to be a low number. In fact, a random calculation of 15 of my friends’ Facebook accounts showed an average of 293. The sad thing to me is that I can’t write down 25% of the people that I’m “friends” with. I’d have a much better chance of remembering all 50 states and capitals, an ability that vanished almost immediately after a grade school test that required it.

Facebook has turned into a tool of more, not a tool of better.

But Social Media is More Than Facebook…

Thank God for that. Take this blog for example, it has allowed me to connect with people passionate about customer experience. I have been able to start and build some great relationships that would never have materialized without it. That makes this blog a tool of more and better relationships, but how far can that go? At some point, the scalability breaks down. At some point, the number of meaningful friendships and strong relationships we try to maintain becomes overwhelming.

What About Your Business?

Are you using social media in your business? Is it to reach new customers or to build better relationships with your existing customers? Do different channels serve different purposes?

Do you want more customers or better customers?

I think it’s an important question to ask when you start thinking about your social media strategy. Lots of questions here, so let me know your thoughts.

A recent post titled, Do Your Daily Habits Include Reading a Book? by Annie Tsai got me thinking about my reading goals for this year. My plan was to read 24 books (two per month), and I felt like that was a worthy and attainable goal.

I started out the year reading about 12-15 different blogs on a regular basis, but that number has since ballooned to well over 50. Here’s a great list of the best customer experience blogs I put together a couple months ago.

In addition to the number of blogs I’m reading, I’ve also read many short e-books this year. I thoroughly enjoy reading all of that material, but I think books can serve a higher purpose. While blogs fit our short attention span and desire for the most recent subject matter, books deliver a deeper and richer experience for me. I feel like I get much more value out of my time investment with a good book.

The books I’ve read so far this year (some more than once) are:

1. Who’s Your Gladys?: How to Turn Even the Most Difficult Customer into Your Biggest Fan – Marilyn Suttle and Lori Jo Vest
2. Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force – Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba
3. Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? – Seth Godin
4. A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age – Dan Pink
5. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose – Tony Hsieh
6. I Love You More Than My Dog: Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad – Jeanne Bliss
7. The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself – John Jantsch
8. Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion – Gary Vaynerchuk
9. Rework – Jason Fried

That’s barely more than 1 book per month so far and I’m busier than ever at work. That means in order to reach my goal, something has to be cut from my daily reading habit. I’ve decided it must be the amount of blogs (or online reading in general) that should be pared down. In addition to that, I know I must be more diligent in reading a book every day.

I’m planning on reading 15 more books this year in order to reach my goal. Some of these I’ve started already and some I’ve read before, but warrant a re-read.

1. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us – Dan Pink
2. Delivering and Measuring Customer Service: This Isn’t Rocket Surgery! – Richard Hanks
3. What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World – Tina Seelig
4. 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think – Laura Vanderkam
5. Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting – Robert McKee
6. Customer Experience Strategy-The Complete Guide From Innovation to Execution – Lior Arussy
7. Lessons from the Mouse: A Guide for Applying Disney World’s Secrets of Success to Your Organization, Your Career, and Life – Dennis Snow
8. Domino: How Customer Experience Can Tip Everything in Your Business toward Better Financial Performance – Linda Ireland
9. Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation – Sally Hogshead
10. Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl
11. Influence: Science and Practice – Robert Cialdini
12. Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit – Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon
13. Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality – Scott Belsky
14. Persuasion: Theory and Research – Daniel O’Keefe
15. Sh*t My Dad Says – Justin Halpern

That last one is completely off topic, but Justin is hilarious and laughter is good for the soul.

Do you have a reading plan? What does it look like? Can we help each other be accountable to reach our goals?

I visited a LEGO store opening in Austin, TX last weekend. It was a family affair, as my mom, wife, two sons, brother, sister-in-law, and their three sons were all in attendance. The line to enter the store stretched for several hundred feet and some people waited up to an hour to get in. Whatever marketing they had done for the grand opening worked famously.

As part of the promotion, LEGO also set up an area on the floor below to build an 8-foot tall Buzz Lightyear model. They assembled an area where kids could build blocks of Legos that would later be used in the construction of the Toy Story character. Once the blocks had been put together, the kids could turn in their work to receive a certificate of achievement for helping. This, of course, was a big deal to the kids. You couldn’t leave without getting a certificate. My 2-1/2 year old son made me acutely aware of this.

My nephew, Luke, working on his blocks for Buzz Lightyear.

After helping my son build some blocks and get his certificate, we braved the long line to enter the store. LEGO employees helped corral the eager kids, and they never seemed to lose their cool (although some parents nearly did). The employees handed out catalogs and offered quick and easy signups into their VIP Program. As expected, the store was extremely crowded once we got in. LEGO had planned for this though; they had two extra air conditioning units blowing in the store. I stopped by one for a few seconds of bliss during the mayhem.

After selecting some Legos for purchase, we again waited in line. Thankfully, much like the line to get in the store, the line to check out also moved quickly. It was only when I arrived at the front of the line and reached into my pocket that I realized my wallet was still in the car. I blurted out,

Oh crap, I don’t have my wallet.

I asked the young lady that helped us check out if I could run out of the store to get some money. Even with the chaos that surrounded us, she never flinched. She smiled and told me to go right ahead. Luckily, I found my mom close by and she happily bought some Legos for her grandson (thanks again mom).

Lessons from the LEGO Experience

As was shown in a post from Bruce Temkin, LEGO is serious about customer experience design.

Here are a few things I picked up on from my experience with LEGO.

• Know who your real customers are and design the experience for them
• Get your customers involved when they show up
• Give your customers something to talk about
• Hire positive and empathetic employees
• Love your work and smile with your customers

My mom and son enjoying the LEGO experience.

I wrote a post a few months ago with some thoughts on how to deal with an angry customer.

Since then, it’s repeatedly been a top-viewed post and consistently gets a lot of search traffic. It seems a lot of people are searching for advice on how to handle angry customers. That’s not surprising since it’s always awkward and never fun.

I decided to elaborate on that post and ended up turning the article into a 20 page e-book that I’m offering up for free today.

Sign up for the Deliver Bliss VIP List and I’ll give you instant access to the first official publication from DeliverBliss.com. I hope you enjoy it, and in the unfortunate event that one of your customers ends up less than satisfied, that you’ll be able to get some real value from it.

Do you have any stories of making a brilliant comeback and turning an angry customer into an evangelist? If so, I’d love to hear them!

Customer Experience is a broad and elaborate subject. Trying to manage something so complex can make you feel like Homer on a bad day at the office. Thankfully, a bad day for us won’t cause a nuclear meltdown, but sometimes it feels like that.

My last post on the Value of Customer Experience attempted to explain the three large components of customer experience, but it was a lot to chew on. Chistophe Van Bael commented,

Isn’t perception largely determined by the alignment of performance and expectations? If so, shouldn’t we primarily focus on setting honest expectations and meeting and/or exceeding them? A few (well, many) uncontrollable variables aside, one could argue that by focusing on these two fundamentals, we would already be managing the customer perception (and hence also the customer experience).

That is exactly what my post was supposed to convey, but I knew it was a little confusing from the start. In fact, the image I chose for the piece was less to do with the message and more to do with how I felt while writing it. I knew where all the puzzle pieces were; I just couldn’t seem to put them all together to clearly communicate my point.

Perceived Value and Customer Experience

My comment back to Christophe had a short summary of my ramblings, which I have slightly revised and illustrated here:

1. The messages we send to our customers must be authentic.
2. We create expectations in our customers based on our messages and past performance.
3. Our customers’ expectations serve as the metric for which our future performance is measured. We need to perform extremely well in the core aspects of our business.
4. The variance between expectations and performance creates some level of perceived value. Value can be expressed in terms of money, time, emotion, and/or reputation our customers invest with us.
5. The Customer Experience will be judged largely on our customers’ perceived value of their tangible and intangible investments.

Is customer experience more complex than this? Of course it is, but managing the value we provide to our customers is a great start to being the real leaders in customer experience.