About

751 days remaining… at Jan 22nd 2009.

We are on a journey to improve customer service (for citizens, customers, and employees), advance entrepreneurship using our web platform, and contribute to good causes.

We are:

by Jan 11th 2011. This is close now. You can read the official company website here. This blog/site is our musing on progress and the bigger issues, like how can we do business differently to how anybody has done it before, how can we contribute to the global knowledge on customer service , and exactly how would you choose to distribute $1,000,000 per month to good causes.

Creating the fully open organization

We want to engage with customers directly and honestly at all times. Our systems are open such that customers have the same information that we do, involvement in our innovation processes, which translates into a say in where the product goes next, and in what the company does next. Some of this is discussed in the company white paper on Customer Service 2.0 in which we outline the key principles of self-service, transparency, personalization and community.

We eat our own dog-food, and it tastes good. Sometimes it tastes better than others. When it needs improving we do that too. Our web platform helps, but more important is a culture where customers are at the core of our activity, and individuals can engage with each other to deliver what is needed. Great Customer Service sets organizations apart from each other.

Innovating a new business model

Command and control is necessary in factories, and in certain big organizations (like the military and microprocessor manufacturers). For the rest of us, there are better ways to work. We want to lead the way in new ways of working. For team members this is about having the mandate to deliver great service and drive change (this differs from empowerment, which suggests a granting of power by a central controller). We wrote a manifesto on that subject here.

For company operations this involves focusing on the functions that matter to the customer (innovation, quality control, customer understanding/empathy) and continually driving new ways of working through research and practice.

We have some crazy ideas, and some of them even work. As we try them out we will be talking about them here. One of the big ideas we are developing at the time of writing is open innovation, where customers are able to fully control the direction of the platform.

Launching an international student competition

We are doing this for a bunch of reasons:

This will develop our understanding of large collaborative projects, such that we can feed this in to our working practices.

Generating funds for good causes

As we evolve our new working methods we expect to generate profit from the activity of third parties and customers. We have no intent to exploit this goodwill, and we are committed to channeling an appropriate proportion of profit to good causes. The focus of this activity and methods will be developed over the coming period and discussed on this blog.

How can we improve customer service?

We know that Customer Service can be improved in most organizations (including our own) and we will blogging on this subject regularly, as well as giving updates on our progress. The first step is addressing our weaknesses every day, researching and advancing the current knowledge. We can help customers improve customer service by sharing the things that we learn, and learning from customers. Acknowledging that most people regard customer service as important in meeting some other goal means that driving customer service involves deep understanding of the customer.

Comments or thoughts…

Please comment or mail me bretthusbands@600days.com