The ROI of Trust: I’m Scared to Let Employees Blog
Posted by Liz Strauss · 5 Comments
How Do I Safely Let My Employees Blog?
I think if you’re in a business where talking to your customers is important, blogging is a great way to do that. — Matt Mullenweg, WordCampDallas 2008
At the end of March, I had the honor of being part of the exceptional business blogging panel moderated by John Pozadzides. John brought up fabulous and important questions that businesses raise daily about blogging. In this series, I’ll take those questions and step back to apply them to the larger company culture.
Playing devil’s advocate John said, “I’m scared to let my employees’ blog.”
What a power-packed sentence! A blog is a tool. In this case, it’s a relative unknown, but is the blog the problem?
Look to the people. Isn’t the issue one of trust and control? The employer is concerned about what employees might write on the blog.
We let employees talk to customers daily — answering email, answering phone call, answering questions at exhibits, and answering letters at the office. We trust what they write on behalf of our company. We once worried in the same way about the telephone and email. Still today any of those customer conversations could be shared internationally or in a court of law.
It comes down to hiring and training employees who make good decisions.
If we trust our ability to choose the right employees and to let them know the values that we hold for our company and our customers, the question of whether we should let them blog falls away as an issue.
A blog is a powerful, customer-facing tool. Like a computer, it’s as strong as the people we choose to use it.
Liz Strauss
Liz puts the people back in business.
Liz, I think you really hit the nail on the head here–so much so that I had to come back and comment on it with an experience I had last week.
It all began innocently enough–my husband and I were feeling lazy, didn’t want to cook, and were craving pizza. Pizza Hut had a good deal, so although we don’t normally order from them, we decided to try it out. Fast forward to almost two hours later, and we don’t have a pizza. My husband calls to find out why, and they had arbitrarily canceled our order, were incredibly rude to my husband, and did nothing to offer to make it better.
I called the corporate hotline to file a complaint, and although they did take our information down and send out a free pizza coupon, the girl on the phone could not have cared less. She very obviously read from a script, interrupted me, laughed, and was generally quite rude.
I Twittered about my experience (heat of the moment!) and also blogged about good vs. bad customer service, as I have been on the receiving end of some really poor service lately. To my surprise, someone from YUM! Brands (the corporate entity that owns Pizza Hut, among many others) was listening. He found my tweets, he found my blog post, and he offered a sincere apology.
I was flattered AND flabbergasted! That was all I wanted–someone to apologize for the poor customer experience–and the blogging world made that happen. I believe that companies should allow savvy employees to blog and also to do a little reputation management on their behalf. If they don’t, they are missing out on the power of the Internet community! It was clear that Nick (the YUM! employee) really cared about his company’s service levels and what his company stands for. I wish more companies were paying more attention.
Liz, What an interesting and thought provoking post! You raise an important point – employees interact with customers on behalf of the company all day long…why not blog as well? Perhaps because they can’t sweep a blog post under the rug. They can’t ignore that it happened. It becomes a permanent piece of history.
Truth is, as Jess’ comment illustrates, poor customer service becomes a permanent piece of history as well.
Perhaps if more companies encouraged blogging by their employees, they would be forced to hire more carefully, provide better training, and treat their team members as they want their customers treated.
Hmmmmmm….