(NB: this piece was written in 2017)
In the early days of CD recording, Incat Systems –- a small company in Milan, Italy –- captured most of the OEM CD-R software market, but also wanted to sell directly to consumers. This required us to provide technical support, with a small staff, from our Milan office.
To help meet that need, I became a pioneer in using online communications tools to interact with customers. There is no single innovation I can claim to have developed; I experimented with evolving and overlapping uses of new platforms and means of communication as they became available.
I began by answering technical questions via CompuServe. Then, at the suggestion of customers, I moved on to the Usenet. Instead of waiting for questions and problems to come to us via “normal” support channels, I went to where the customers were, proactively seeking to help them. This was so popular that I hired two other people to assist, and customers cited our presence on the Usenet as a reason for buying our software. OEM partners (and competitors) followed our example.
As the Usenet began to be overrun by trolls, at the request of customers I launched a moderated email discussion list. When that got too busy for some readers, I began publishing weekly newsletters with original articles, FAQs from list discussions, upgrade announcements, etc. This grew to two newsletters (Windows and Mac) with a total subscription of 180,000. The newsletters, too, got comments like: “I just bought Easy CD Creator 5 Platinum this morning. I was strongly influenced by receiving your tips on a regular basis telling me about all the cool things I could do with the product.”
The personal touch was still important: every newsletter went out from my email address, and I replied to every response (as many as 400 in a day). This helped me to know immediately what customers cared about, or were struggling with. I fed back this information to the company to help improve all aspects of the customer experience: product features, user interface, documentation, bugs, support channels, customer service.
Honesty was also crucial. I was known for being up-front about what could and couldn’t (or would and wouldn’t) be done with our software. Even the angriest customer could be turned around by listening politely and kindly, and giving answers that showed caring and respect, even when I couldn’t provide an immediate solution. I earned a great deal of trust.
In all formats, I maintained a personal, friendly tone, neither talking down to people nor overwhelming them with jargon. This style contributed to customers feeling a personal connection to the company.
Meanwhile, the web was becoming an important platform. After Incat was acquired by Adaptec, I designed, managed, and produced the CD-R section of Adaptec’s website, which grew to account for 70% of overall site traffic. Much of our technical content was driven by what customers showed us they needed; it was immediately useful to them, and therefore popular. Most customers preferred self-service help on the web to making a phone call, which saved on support costs. (This was just before support forum and knowledgebase software began to be commercially available.)
When Adaptec spun off Roxio, I had the opportunity to design a new website from the ground up. I already thought of our users (and they thought of themselves) as a community, but the Roxio site may have been the first to refer to customers as such, with a “community” section. Users valued the opportunity to contribute their own technical insights and stories about how they were using our software – sometimes in ways our development and marketing teams had never imagined.
I was blazing a trail, with no industry examples to follow. What I was doing wasn’t always understood or appreciated by my colleagues: “Oh, those are just Deirdré’s Internet people,” one once said. However, key colleagues, including the VPs of marketing and of software development, understood and valued the feedback I was able to provide.
I had decided early on that the best people to tell us what to do for customers would be customers themselves. The Internet was a powerful new way to hear from them – for any company willing to listen. In pursuit of better ways of listening and responding, I kept trying out and adapting new online tools as they became available.
Companies came to assume (for a while) that they must be available to customers via websites, forums, social media, and other online communications platforms. Perhaps a few people involved in that work were influenced by what I did back then. What about Easy CD? Through subsequent acquisitions and huge changes to the technology landscape, the software is, somewhat surprisingly, still around.
As for me: I continued to care first and foremost about the customer experience, and continued to learn (and adapt, when necessary) whatever new tools and techniques were best suited to communicate with customers and make them happy.
