Enabling customers to help each other

Grant Leboff: Adrian, one of the things you talk about in the book, which I really like, really resonated with me is improving customer service by enabling customers to actually help each other. Adrian Swinscoe: Yes. Grant Leboff: I'm not always sure people think along those lines. Can you expand on that a bit for us? Adrian Swinscoe: Let me start with a piece of research that's just come out, which adds to the argument in the book, and it’s from a company called Edelman. They're a big communications agency. They released a thing called a trust barometer. They do it every year, big globally survey, and they look at the trust that exists between individuals and institutions. Whether they're business, government, media, or NGO's. What they found, which is quite interesting finding that's been happening over the last few years, is that people are trusting less and less what companies about themselves, and their brands, and so on, and so forth. Trusting less and less what CEO's say, and Senior Exec's say, but actually trusting more people like themselves. That just makes me think it was actually people like themselves include customers. Right? Why don't you try and leverage your customers, particularly your advocates to try and help some of your new under prospective customers? There's a really interesting example that comes from Carhartt, [http://www.carhartt.com/ ] who use a really fascinating piece of technology, which on their website when somebody's sort of exploring around they have recruited a whole bunch of their customer advocates. They connect them in via this chat app, which they can do on their mobile phones, wherever. This chat window pops up when they got new customer. It says, I see you're looking at this, this, and this. Would you like to talk to one of our customers who's bought similar sort of product to get some advice around sizing, and fit, and suitability, and so on, and so forth? The customer that do this they all get vetted, and trained, and they get paid for their time, but there's no rules or incentives that you have sell Carhartt products. Just be useful. Right? In doing that, and connecting the customers with perspective customers that's, I think it's a 40% plus increase in the conversion rate. Just because people they've just gone, we can connect this group with this group, and make some magic. Grant Leboff: It's not always obvious I suppose for all companies how they would do that. Do you think a very useful question is for a CEO, for a board, whatever it is to sort of go back and say, how can we get our customers more involved? How can we get our customers more involved with our prospects? Just by exploring those you're going to uncover some really interesting opportunities. Adrian Swinscoe: I think that's right. I think would ask one question before that. The question I would ask before that is, go to your customers and/or your sales team and ask them, what are the significant challenges that we face to bring customers on-board? Of those challenges they rare probably perennial challenges, can we use our customers to help us solve risk and problems? There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.