Last year, he wrote an ebook, The 6 Laws Of Customer Experience. I read it then and recently uncovered a copy on my desk and read it again. It’s a quick read — only 10 pages — but each page is gold.

Here are some highlights.

1. Every interaction creates a personal reaction. Experiences need to be designed for individuals. Employees need to be empowered.
2. People are instinctively self-centered. Don’t let the company organization drive experiences.
3. Customer familiarity breeds alignment. An external focus is an antidote to internal politics.
4. Unengaged employees don’t create engaged customers. Make it easy to do the right thing. Customer experience depends on the employee experience.
5. Employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated. Don’t blame the employees, fix the environment.
6. You can’t fake it. The best you can do with marketing is to reinforce the truth.

Download it now. Read it. Thank me later.

1. * And subscribe to his work at Forrester. Unfortunately it’s too rich for my blood.

If you don’t know the answer, don’t make it up. Especially in a crisis.

It’s common sense, but this advice often seems to take people by surprise when it comes up in media training or crisis communications.

I try to take a common sense approach to crisis communications, and while the crises I usually deal with are not life-threatening — mostly service interruptions for enterprise solutions — I think the principles are applicable in many situations.*

Building on Cori’s point, here are a few simple admonitions for communicators next time the flux discombolulaters go offline or the wheels fly off the flywheel.

1. Don’t make things up. Despite best intentions, you’ll look bad when the truth comes to light. Will people think you’re ignorant or a liar? Which is worse? At that point, does it even matter? Either way, you’ll look bad. There’s no shame in admitting you don’t know something.
2. Stick to the facts. As a corollary to the previous point, talk about what you know to be true. I know it’s tempting to float a theory, particularly when your audience is demanding answers. Don’t speculate.
3. Keep it simple. I’ve written about simplicity before. Don’t try to bury your message in a lot of mumbo-jumbo. Ditch the jargon and acronyms. Explain how the situation affects your audience using terms they will understand.
4. Be human. You’re talking to people, remember? Show some personality, or at least a little empathy. Does anybody trust faceless corporations anymore?
5. Apologize like you mean it. Don’t offer a milquetoast apology laden with passive, conditional language. Take responsibility and acknowledge that people are upset, inconvenienced, whatever the case may be. Let them know you’re going to make things right.
6. Focus on what’s relevant. Don’t spam your audience with useless updates. Tell them that you know something is wrong and that you’re working to fix it, then tell them you fixed it.** This isn’t the time to show people how your sausage is made.

This isn’t an exhaustive list or a definitive guide to crisis communications — just a few rules of thumb for communicating about minor crises in the business world. If they’re helpful, you’re welcome. If you have other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

1. * If your situation is life-threatening, look for help elsewhere. Go! Now!
2. ** Granted, if your situation persists for a long time, you might want to consider periodic updates, but use common sense.

People end up reaching out to whoever they can find on a company’s web site because phone trees are designed to address (I hesitate to use the word “resolve”) as many situations as possible without costly human intervention. When the situation doesn’t fit neatly into the available options, people get desperate. They want to be heard.

I had to deal with another angry customer this week (through e-mail this time) who, like so many others, threatened to call the media and sue the company. I was able to turn around the situation with two simple e-mails.

• In the first, I responded saying that I’d received the message. 
• In the second, which I sent a few hours later, I confessed that I still hadn’t managed reach anyone who could help (they’re in another city and state) but that I hadn’t forgotten them.

The reply to the second message was, “I know it will get handled now you’re a GODSEND!!!”

That struck me as a being very telling response. I hadn’t actually done anything to help yet. I hadn’t solved the problem. I hadn’t even managed to speak to anyone who could solve the problem. I’d forwarded e-mails and tried to draw attention to the customer’s problem, but I hadn’t succeeded yet. However, I did acknowledge them and let them know that someone cares enough to respond.

Sometimes that’s all it takes.

I was even more pleased when I was able to reach a senior member of the customer service team about an hour later, and the customer’s problem was quickly resolved.

I like writing about happy endings.

Um… wait. That’s not exactly right. (But it would be deliciously ironic.)

The call, in several intertwined variants

There is a very specific category of public interactions that rakes my soul with its fiery talons: dealing with customers who have had bad experiences with customer service.

Maybe you’ve had the pleasure of dealing with this situation. If not, feel free to imagine.

Your cell phone rings — it’s Sunday morning, it’s the middle of the night, it’s the middle of a family event, it’s some form of personal time, you’re in the middle of the road in heavy 75 mph traffic or in a snow storm — but you have to answer the phone. It could be a reporter from the Wall Street Journal. It could be the babysitter. It could be urgent.

Unknown number. As soon as you answer, a stream of invective pours through the phone and fills your ear, gushing bilious accusations and threats. Someone seems to have had a bad experience with your  company and is threatening to call the media, his attorney, the Better Business Bureau, all his friends and his mom. Or your mom. That part’s not clear. There’s always one part of the story that’s not clear.

The only consistent part of the story is that the customer service agents were rude and hung up on him. (And yes, it’s almost always him, and they always hang up on him. Twice. Three times!)

So you take down his name, contact information and details of the problem, which takes about two and a half minutes, including phonetic spelling (Sierra. Mike. India. Tango… um… Hockey? Hotel? Just one H. Underscore. One. Niner. At…) then spend the next twenty minutes apologizing over and over again and trying to get him off the phone so you can actually try to find someone who can do something about the situation. He claims he wants speedy resolution, but more than anything, he wants to vent his spleen.

Venting complete, he demands that you resolve his issue on some ridiculously tight deadline that you can’t commit to because the call center (hundreds of miles away in another state) is closed until sometime after the deadline and the escalations supervisor probably won’t respond to calls and e-mails until the office opens. Then he keeps calling back to harangue you for not solving his problem in a timely manner. More time spent apologizing….

I’ll stop there. If you’ve been through it, you know how it goes.

Why do I get these calls? I have nothing to do with customer service, but my name is on the corporate web site. Sometimes, I’m the only human being listed on the web site, and that is perhaps one of the root causes of the problem. These people just want to be acknowledged and treated with respect.

The dread, in its several incarnations

I dread getting these calls because I empathize. I know what it’s like to be treated poorly by some faceless corporation. We’ve all been there. I’ll do what I can to address the situation.

I also dread consumer complaints because I’m powerless to make any real change. I can make a few calls, send a few e-mails and nag the customer service team to resolve the issue in a timely manner, but ultimately I have no ability to fix the problem. I’m just the PR guy. But I’ll do everything I can to get someone to help you.

Finally, I dread consumer complaint calls when I’m aware of the problem but we haven’t fixed it yet. I know that we’ll do the right thing and I’m sorry we haven’t done it yet.

So, sir, whoever you are… I’m sorry. Now let me get off the phone so I can help you. Please.

On the Forrester Groundswell blog, Josh Bernoff zeroes in on the key problem.

…treating people as a mass is more efficient than treating them as humans. Being part of an organization is harder than behaving like a human. And while that isn’t likely to change any time soon, I think some of the most valuable things that a company can do come from being human and talking to people as humans. And some of the most awful things that companies do come from being inhuman to customers.

Then Josh puts companies on notice. It’s time to do some lessons in being human.

Those lessons are going to be hard, particularly in this depressed economy, because the type of service Josh identifies isn’t always easy to measure. Employees need to be trained to make service decisions that meet both the customer and the company goals.

Policies and procedures encourage repeatable behaviors, which promote consistent and measurable results, which in turn form the basis for performance evaluation.

But what about the times when you rescue a customer with exemplary but unconventional service? How do you track that? No gold star if you don’t color inside the lines. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.*

Yes, companies need to learn how to be more human. This is the essence of social media and the future of business. But they also have to learn how to measure and evaluate what it means to be human in business, because business are run by the numbers.

1. * I’ve seen this attributed to Peter Drucker, but I don’t know the source.