Aunty Cool Has a Fab Customer Experience

 I got an invite to Facebook a few months ago; ever since I’ve been working out what to do with it.  Uploading a planet so people can send me a space creature isn’t really my thing, and I’m not into vampire games either - well not in the full glare of online publicity!!   With social network tools, and indeed other ‘content’ devices like loyalty cards, you have,as a cutomer, to work out what they can do for you - that’s where good customer research comes in.   

So, I uploaded a respectable number of friends; a real game of trial and error to find my generation.  I ended up thinking of friends who were techies, into online communities, or under 35, and then trying to identify them from the photos of everyone else with the same name!!   I couldn’t understand how one Arab friend looked so different, until my husband pointed out it was a picture of Jack Nicholson!!

Then, I came across my nieces, nephews and godchildren: of course most of this generation are members of Facebook.  So when I next saw them I mentioned I’d found them and got the response that they’d be happy to be ‘friends’.  The only person to turn me down was my son, who didn’t think having his Mum as a friend was cool.  However, his girlfriend was quite happy to link up - a good way to soften up a future ‘mother in law’ for babysitting perhaps!!

Anyway, Facebook is now an excellent way to keep up with my ‘generation xers’ and they share their problems and triumphs - Aunties can be a better ear and allowed to be more eccentric than parents!!  But the most unexpected benefit is that after years of birthday and Christmas presents I now get thank you notes on my wall - a little bit more personal than the ‘Dear Aunty Jean, thank you for the lovely etch-a-sketch you sent me for Christmas’, that I was forced to write on squirrel headed notepaper. 

So what has this got to do with business?  Well,  researching your customer segments for a start - but most of all, the thank you letters just show that if you make something accessible and fun then ‘customers’ will take it up.  That’s how Amazon started, and that is what a good customer experience is all about.