Google's Growing Pains of Becoming a Solutions Company

Things are a bit bumpy with the introduction of the Nexus One, with some customers complaining about difficulty of getting the phone running on T-Mobile’s network, slow connection speeds, and complaints over T-Mobile’s pricing policies for existing customers. The press is all over it:

Nexus One a Test of Google’s Customer Service

Nexus One Complaints Mount, Honeymoon Over

Google Nexus One Leaves Customers Sour

And so on… Ah, schadenfreude

This is the other edge of the solutions sword: when you set yourself up as a provider of holistic solutions and ecosystems, customers want one throat to choke when something goes wrong. Their expectations go way up about how everything is going to work, and they want a real person to talk to when it doesn’t.

Having people available to talk to is not one of Google’s strengths.

John Battelle as usual hits the nail on the head:

[H]ow many real live customer service reps does the company plan to have tasked to this product? That, to me, is a Very Important Question. It’s the essential human question that drives Google. I bring it up all the time. Community. Media. People. How do you make people scale?! How does Google, a company driven by algorithms and scale, find its Voice?

If I were Google, here’s what I’d do:

• Ditch my left brain rationality and get on the empathy train as fast as possible. Customers want to know they are being heard and understood, and that someone (a real someone, not an algorithm) is paying attention). We have to have real people lighting up the forums and manning the support phone lines, and keeping frustrated customers up to date on what we’re doing to fix the problem.
• Get Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer, Sergey and Larry out in front of this. Get them out there apologizing, being humble, saying that they are attending to this personally. Doesn’t matter if we don’t think Google is to blame - customers don’t care, they just want the problem solved, and we put ourselves out there with the target on our back, so it’s us who they’re shooting at
• Wrangle HTC and T-Mobile so that we can all be on the same page, and provide unifeed fixes. But Google should be the front, it’s our phone, and we own the problem. We’re promising an integrated product, we need to service it in an integrated way. All for one, one for all.

I’m confident that Google will get through these teething pains. But it is a good lesson for any company that wants to set itself up as a real solutions provider, and stretch into pieces of the ecosystem that it has not engaged in before: be prepared for a whole bunch of new issues, complaints, and expectations from customers that you’ve never had to deal with before.

This requires getting all parts of one’s own company working together, as well as all partners who helped bring the ecosystem to life. Not easy, but absolutely necessary. Especially, as is Google’s case, that they are playing catch-up to a market leader.

Brand Consulting Disruption

I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about the divergent nature of so many companies: one company finds itself under threat from completely unexpected quarters as those other companies diverge out of their established domains. (I prefer Gary Hamel’s word “domain” rather than industry because, as he points out, the boundaries are so blurry today that thinking in terms of industry or category is falsely comforting and limiting.) This one is a doosey: Zappos is going into the brand consulting business.

Adweek writes:

Over the past few years, executives from dozens of companies, including Southwest Airlines and Best Buy, as well as ordinary customers, have made the trek to see its operations up close. The tour has undeniable Zappos touches: each department has its own greeting, and in-house motivational guru Dr. Vik has visitors sit in a throne for a Polaroid snapshot.

Now the company hopes to turn the intense interest in its culture and approach to business into a moneymaker. This week, it plans to roll out Zappos Insights, a subscription video service that lets companies ask questions about the Zappos way and get answers from actual Zappos employees. It will charge $39.95 per month for subscriptions.

The Zappos Insights site is up, but is mostly locked down for subscribers. About the only thing I could find public is the reading list. Overall things look pretty sparse, and they don’t have much preview material so you can get a sense of what you’re paying $39.95 a month for, or how well their Zappos-centric experiences scale to other businesses. But if it’s like buying shoes from Zappos they’ll have a pretty flexible subscription policy so you can try it out without much risk.

Still, who would have thought that brand agencies would find themselves competing against a shoe retailer? Sure, Zappos advice is not going to be tailored in the same way, but heck it’s several zeroes cheaper and for the “Fortune One Million” size companies they are targeting, something adequate is better than nothing. And that’s the very definition of a disruptive play.

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Hat tip: Steve Portigal

Update on Monday, December 22 by Adam

Just saw that Joshua Michele Ross at O’Reilly has written about Zappos also offering a syndication of an end-to-end customer service system also:

I am fascinated by what I see as Zappos’ ongoing evolution from a simple, online retailer to a leading online innovator. A few months back I wrote about Zappos pioneering what I called “Experience Syndication” with their Powered by Zappos (PBZ) service. In brief, PBZ syndicates the end-to-end value of shopping with Zappos - from the online store experience to shipping, to returns, to the call center - everything. Clarks Shoes, Stuart Weitzman and many other online sites are providing a customer experience entirely syndicated by Zappos.

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