This is a blog entry by guest blogger, Reena Kapoor of Conifer Consulting.  Reena is a pre-eminent marketing strategist and this entry shows some of her key values in the work she does with clients.

Many companies fear social media.  But the good ones have less to worry about than they might fear. While SM can be intimidating (especially with all those lawyers out there chomping at the bit in our sue-happy America), the truly good companies will find that social media is a friend.  In fact it is their key ally. Why? Because Social Media may expose your vulnerabilities but it also amplifies the good.  GREATLY! Here’s why.

Four companies in the past month have so impressed me with their service that after just this one experience with each of them I am probably a customer for life!  So what did these companies do?  Simply put they:

• indulged in good old fashioned customer service
• delighted me, the customer, especially when I was down /stressed
• simply kept the promises they made in all their ads and promotional materials when they signed me up or attracted me to their business.

Sidenote; If you know my philosophy of marketing then you know I simply call this marketing.  Everything else especially when people say “yeah it’s all just marketing…” is very simply, lies.

So how did this good get amplified?

1. I am a customer for life. And what’s my life time value compared to what they gave me in terms of goods and service?
2. I am so impressed that the competitors can quit calling or writing me. No matter how good their marketing they are wasting their time — not until there are exaggerated instances of bad service from my current companies in the future — highly unlikely! A good culture, like a bad culture, sticks!
3. I am telling everyone – on Yelp, Twitter, on my blog here, everywhere… And where I used to tell 10 friends I am telling all my followers in Twitter, I have told everyone on Yelp and this blog post even shows up on LinkedIn since my posts on this multiple through all my networks.

Some old fashioned stuff is not a fashion after all; it’s a classic.  Know how to recognize it, preserve it, cultivate it with great care AND let social media amplify it for you!!

In case you’re wondering, those companies are:  Geico, America’s Tire, Enterprise Rent A Car and Zappos.

Reena Kapoor, of Conifer Consulting, (www.ConiferInc.com) helps organizations with new product & marketing strategy.  She brings over 18 years of new products & brand management experience from Fortune 100 CPG companies and venture-backed Silicon Valley companies.   Reena has deep consumer brand, product management and marketing leadership experience and brings this background to her work in helping organizations define their businesses based on a strong marketing/customer focus.

I had a great customer service experience recently and think it’s only fair to share that since, like most of us, I’m more than eager to share the BAD ones.

I traveled with my family on a Carnival cruise to Mexico 2 weeks ago (yes, we had fun and gained a cumulative 11 pounds among the 3 of us!).  We were all prepared for a sub par cruise experience since, after all, it WAS Carnival (and not the higher priced Royal Caribbean or Princess lines which we have cruised before).

Our actual experience was not that much different from our experiences with other lines…there were little things that were different, however Carnival did a great job of spoiling us and ensuring that everything was in place to have a great time.  We walked away from the cruise thrilled that we had done the trip and ready to recommend Carnival to anyone that considered cruising an exorbitant luxury.

But what absolutely DELIGHTED us was the level of service we encountered when we reported my son’s passport missing (it actually wasn’t MISSING…we knew exactly where he left it!).  Within 24 hours of filing an electronic ‘claim’, we received a personal email from the Guest Relations department, telling us that they had, in fact, located the passport and that we would be hearing back from a designated representative within a week (they had to get the passport from the ship to a post office…at that time, it was back at sea on its way back to Mexico!).

Even better than hearing back from someone, less than a week later, we actually received the passport in the mail!  I was shocked…we had the passport back only 9 days after we had left it on the boat.  And no one was hitting us up for a ‘handling fee’ of some kind—I was totally prepared to pay $20 or so to cover the extra effort required to return the passport.

What this experience reminded me of is that even though all of the work that organizations do on their ‘core product’ is important, it’s the LITTLE things (like how you handle your Lost and Found department or your Returns process or your Tech Support desk) that are opportunities to exceed customers’ expectations and really wow them.  Those situations can go a long way to helping your customers really understand how devoted you are to making it easy for them to do business with you and that you really care about their business.

It sure worked for me…I’m now a loyal Carnival Cruise Line customer!

This week is vacation planning week, apparently: I’m doing last-minute logistics planning for a cruise over spring break as well as scoping out private tours to take in Italy/Greece/Turkey for our honeymoon in the Fall and I have had two very different experiences.

I have emailed about 8 small tour companies in Europe and in every case, received a response in less than 10 hours (and in a few cases, an immediate email auto response indicating that I’d definitely get a response within 24 hours)—no small feat since there is at least an 8 hour time difference.  The responses were personal, customized to some degree to respond to my specific questions, and very thorough.  I had all of the information I needed within 10 hours of my request.

My experience trying to find a shuttle to the airport in San Diego for my Mom was entirely different.  I still haven’t gotten a response to 3 different emails after 48 hours!  And I have no idea whether I ever WILL get a response, meaning that if I’m really serious about needing a shuttle, I’ll need to get on the phone and probably will book the first company I talk to vs. making an intelligent decision based on several choices.  Someone is going to get my business only because I don’t have the time to do more work on this…not necessarily because they deserve it.

In the case of the European ‘service delight’ examples, after the first response, I thought it was an exception…but when I received consistently amazing service from all 8 vendors, it made me think “Maybe they are really hurting for business there…”  And then after the consistently disappointing experience re: the airport shuttle, it made me think that there may be something bigger at work here.

This challenging economy we are in has shaken companies up, however, I’m concerned that many companies are responding by slashing prices vs. providing more value.  Understanding what your customers value and delivering on that very well is much more effective when it comes to customer loyalty than price cutting (see this great article on the topic).  But, obviously, not all companies practice that approach.  Is it possible that Europeans in general, or at least those in the European travel business, understand this better than American companies?

Note: I definitely did not get the impression from the travel vendors I heard from that they were ‘desperate’ for my business and ready to bargain on price…they were proud of what they had to offer and eager to provide an exceptional experience, not only in the ‘shopping’ process, but extending to the actual tour.

I tried doing some Googling to see what I could find on European customer service levels vs. American customer service levels, but came up empty…perhaps some of you have personal experience to either confirm or deny my hunch?  Would love to hear from you…and would love to see some major focus from our U.S. companies to make it easy to work with them vs. slashing prices.  It may be key to our long-term recovery…

Yesterday I spoke rather spontaneously during the final session of the 2010 Silicon Valley P-Camp - the third annual Silicon Valley ’un-conference’ focused entirely on Product Management topics/issues.

Spontaneous talks are not uncommon at an un-conference…the whole concept is that anyone can submit a topic for consideration and attendees vote on what they are most interested in. I came to the conference with a topic I thought of that morning and 20 handouts that I printed before I ran out the door (I thought that bringing any more than that would be a bit presumptuous!) and lo and behold my topic was chosen by popular vote to be one of the 12-15 afternoon sessions!

When I say ’spontaneous’, I really mean that…this is the first time I have EVER facilitated a 45 minute session with absolutely NO agenda, just a broad idea of the topic: “Choosing the Right Methodology for Gathering Customer Input”.

We ended up with 30 people all crammed in a small meeting area to explore this topic, specifically focused on using customer input for product development/marketing/launch purposes.  The session was very interactive and one of the things we discussed before getting into the meat of the topic was why product managers so seldom actually integrate any customer research into their work to launch great products.

I came with my own theories, but we had an active dialogue and below is a list of some of the reasons that came up…I’ll be blogging about some of these in the future, but wanted to provide a summary list here:

We talked about each of these obstacles, and debunked most of them, but it was important to ‘go there’ before talking about how to choose the right tools.  According to The 280 Group’s 2009 Product Management survey, the top 3 sources of influence on product management decisions are: