I was reading an article about Intel’s recent launch of their ‘Intel Newsroom‘. The idea behind the online newsroom was to make it into ‘a social media hub that integrates the company’s Twitter feed, Facebook posts and blogs’.
Quoting directly from the article: ‘The goal was this: Build a news site that, while inviting, is built to enable every piece of Intel news to reach as far and wide as possible, carried by any means possible’.
In making the site, two areas were focussed on – social media widgets and search engine optimization, thereby enabling their’ audience to help carry the story wherever they go’.
My thought this morning was simply: what if this approach was applied to customer service? What would your online help and support look like?
I then thought, actually instead of just limiting it to customer service, what if it was simply called – ”[Company name] Customer’. So, for example, instead of ‘Intel Newsroom’, it was called something like ‘Intel Customer’.
My other thought was: what if you went an extra step further, and instead of always being the originator/creator of the content, you simply created the platform and like your customers, you were just another participant, just another contributor, just another facilitator of a conversation?
What if you allowed your participants to create not only their own ‘[Company Name] Customer’ homepage that is specific to them, but what if the actual components of the homepage that appeared on the company site, were determined by the customers themselves. Perhaps the ten most commonly downloaded widgets for the day or week determined what appeared on the ‘customer’ homepage.
End of the day as long as a search box is there, sometimes the rest of it doesn’t matter too much.
Just a thought…
