SXSW Interactive Recap: Day 2

Heading back down the Austin Convention Center on Saturday, I started the day with the opening keynote from Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com. In front of a packed house, Tony explored the notion of customer service AS marketing. Zappos prides itself on having the best customer service, as well as an open and relaxed company culture. Some of the key ideas that came out to promote these goals were…

• Training every new hire on all key tasks at the company, even if unrelated to their actual job
• Offering incentives to quit at the end of the training to retain only the most dedicated new hires
• Not monitoring/limiting customer service call times to ensure each representative spends as much time as necessary serving the customer
• Hiring slowly and firing quickly to protect company culture
• Spending plenty of time defining your corporate values, and sticking to them!

This was an enlightening talk on the value of customer service and repeat customer loyalty. But what can BeGreen learn from this? In the carbon offset industry, we are always combating customers’ feelings of mistrust and skepticism over buying an intangible product in a voluntary market. Our company integrity and attention to customer experience is one of the best answers to questions of transparency.

After the Zappos talk, I went to one of the most fun panels of the whole conference: Suxorz ’09, an “awards ceremony” for the worst social media campaigns of the last year. Panelists nominated the losers, and we helped pick the worst of the worst. Gaffes ranged from simple negligence in moderating user generated content (a la Skittles’ Twitter feed that displayed all tweets containing the word Skittles, leading to some hilariously profane tweets featured on Skittles.com) to the “combination of sleaze and stupidity” that was a Belkin employee paying people 65 cents for fake positive reviews of Belkin products on Amazon.com.

I think seeing what NOT to do just as valuable as learning the opposite. Hopefully, BeGreen can stay off the Suxorz ’10 list during our new forays into social media!