Strategy in Principle

A case study in excellent (and not-so-excellent) customer service processes.

I'm starting to hate Twitter and love Facebook. Here's why, and here's what we can learn from Twitter about customer service.

"I Email, Therefore I Am."

I learned that the hard way on November 7, 2011 when I couldn't log in to my @kcren twitter account. Sometime before that, @kcren, @priacta, @totalrelaxed were all hacked and imaginitively renamed to @Shamus851, @Shamus852, and @Shamus853.*

Thousands of great tweets (in my history) were lost, sort of a professional mini-journal. Thousands of followers lost. Hundreds of Twitter listings lost. Online reputation lost. Hundreds and hundreds of hours, lost.

Was it my fault? Partly, for sure. See the Epliogue for hints about my/our mistakes. But that's not the lesson at hand. Fiirst, let's try to reclaim that hacked account...

Support to the Rescue? (Facebook: Yes!  Twitter: Think Again...)

Not Twitter. Twitter only gives you one email address per Twitter account, and it must be unique. Forget or lose access to that email account, and you're toast. If you forget which email address you used, tough. You need to guess and guess and guess. (Exception: If you associated a phone number with your account, you can use that. Unfortunately, I didn't out of privacy concerns. Does anyone know if a phone number has to be unique for each account? Do I need separate phone lines for multiple Twitter accounts?) 

After waiting three weeks for any human reply from Twitter support, a battle started over proof of ownership (based solely on my ability to communicate with them via the "associated email address" on the hacked Twitter account), the Twitter support rep** finally said:

Unfortunately, if you don’t have access to this account’s associated email address or mobile device, we are unable to continue troubleshooting. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause, but we insist on going through this ownership verification process in order to prevent malevolent users from accessing Twitter accounts that aren't theirs.

(**The rep was always named "dino" in at least 10 separate tickets over two months. Is only one human being helping people recover their hacked Twitter accounts?)

Customer Service Lesson 1: Never let attorneys create your customer service processes. The only safe answer a lawyer can give is "no."

The Common Sense Test

Twitter's processes just wouldn't help me. Never mind that:

• The old picture on the account was my face (Facebook knew that!).
• The pictures on ALL THREE hacked accounts were changed at once (to the same picture!)
• The names on the accounts were SEQUENTIALLY numbered.
• My account used to point to my web site, to which I could prove owership.
• ALL THREE hacked accounts pointed to bizarre, questionable web addresses.
• I still had access to my accounts via 3rd party apps [like Posterous - K] and could tweet to them as proof of a connection.
• Many of the links on the Tweets pointed to my (or my company's) sites.
• Twtrland even knows it's me (as of the date of this post).

Anyone with an ounce of common sense could tell that those accounts were hacked, and that I was the rightful owner of (what used to be called) @kcren.

(download)

Click here to download:

the-great-twitter-identity-theft-caper-FvyExxobrEeEHeCJpFiq.zip (55 KB)

(Quiz: There are several differences between these two photos. Can you spot them? First photo: @kcren profile photo (before). Second photo: same account profile photo (after renaming to @Shamus851). Photo 1 is also my current photo on Facebook, Assembla, my new @kcren Twitter, and other places image searches turn up. Gee, I wonder if somebody seized control of that account?)

Customer Service Lesson 2: Great customer service is impossible if employees aren't empowered to exercise common sense. No script can cover everything. To handle risks, set reasonable boundaries, then let your people act as much as possble within those boundaries. Empower them to be merciful. Your customers will love you for it, and your workers will love their jobs more.

The Final, Outrageous Dead End

After dozens of failures to guess the right email address, it hit me...

The first thing a hacker will do when stealing an account is change the email address!

So was I wasting my time? Were they asking me to prove access to the new (hacked) email address? Do they even have a record of prior email addresses? I asked for reassurance on ANY of these questions, but they wouldn't give a straight answer. When I pressed as hard as I could, they finally said:

For security reasons, I can not reveal the specific aspects of our internal work-flows about which you are asking.

No hope. As far as Twitter is concerned, you have no identity if you lose access to your email account, or maybe even if the hacker changes the email address on your Twitter account after hacking it, and if you previously chose to withhold your phone number for privacy reasons.

So now there was nowhere else to turn, not even "advanced support," (I would have glady paid $300 per incident if I had hope of resolution.) It was just me and the immovable, unempowered "dino." He/she seemed nice enough--as nice as his/her script would allow.

And then he/she cancelled my support tickets without recourse. Try again, dude, and wait another three weeks. (No wonder they have a huge backlog.)

Customer Service Lesson 3: Provide a final escalation path, even if you charge for it. In tough cases, let them esclate processes that aren't serving the customer. Create someone to review desperate cases, your own "Supreme Court" to inject humanity, common sense, and self-improvement into the process.

Good Support = Empowered, Humanoid Workers, Not Lawyers or Scripts

At least you and I benefit from Twitter's failures here:

1. Lawyers aren't service reps. Lawyers don't create assets--they only protect them. The only safe answer an attorney can tell you is "no," and "no" doesn't win they hearts of customers.
2. Empowered support workers = common sense support. Strict scripts are the kiss of death.
3. Give me somewhere to turn. Besides my blog. Remember United Breaks Guitars.

Epilogue

@kcren exists again, but only because the hacker renamed my stolen account, which left the @kcren name open. I grabbed it ASAP and started rebuilding from zero followers. @priacta too. Ouch.

Lessons in corporate and personal security come from all this. Maybe I can help you not lose your accounts like we did:

1. Use highly secure email passwords. Passwords you can't even remember, 12 characters long, with digits and special characters.
2. Use LastPass to generate your passwords, share them securely (if you must), and keep them all straight.
3. Never use the same password on multiple accounts, no matter how secure the passwords are.
4. You ARE your email address. It's your proof of personhood online. If you use it to log in, keep access to that email account at all times!
5. If you are a company, only use corporate emails for access to company accounts and services. Never let employees to use personal accounts or webmail accounts. What if they quit?

*UPDATE: LOL. This post auto-tweeted to the hacked @Shamus851 account--Posterous still had an old connection to it. If you are following the hacked account, I recommend UNfollowing @Shamus851 and FOLLOWING @kcren again. My old content was recently deleted there; future content cannot be guaranteed.

 A Simple Blueprint for Any Organization

The most essential element of leadership and management is... communication. To be effective, you have to understand the impact of what, why, and how you communicate--personally and as an organization. Fortunately, great communication comes down to a few simple principles. Master them and you get amazing organizational focus and vigor.

Here are the most crucial laws of communication for any organization--from a family to a Fortune 500 firm. I've identified these from decades of experience with start-ups to multinational Fortune 500 corporations to nonprofits to families. Regardless of the size or setting, these principles apply.

Do you know of more laws? Do you disagree with the order? Let us know below.

Law #1: Communicate the strategic vision to everyone, often. 

Where are you headed? Decide, then focus everyone on it, over and over and over. Constantly tie short-term actions to that long-term vision. You can't get organizational clarity any other way. As Yogi Berra said: "If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there."

Law #2: Keep it clear and simple. 

Less is more. If they won't read it or can't understand it, you didn't communicate.

Law #3: Distinguish leadership from management, and communicate accordingly.

Managing = Delegating and following up.
Leading = Encouraging, lobbying, focusing each other on the common vision.

Everyone leads. Only direct supervisors manage. Violate this rule and you will confuse the troops, stifle initiative, and micromanage a lot.

Law #4: Ensure excellent, constructive engagement on all the issues. 

Internal contention destroys organizations. So does its opposite, groupthink, as the Lehman Brothers collapse attests. Therefore, keep communication abundant and effective by emphasizing the need for feedback with mutual respect and mutual purpose.

The Crucial Conversations model gives excellent results. 

Law #5: Create accountability, but don't kill initiative.

What you measure, improves, and in the best organizations, everyone is accountable to each other regardless of level or seniority. HOWEVER, excessive follow-up stifles initiative, and if you measure the wrong things, the wrong things improve.

So, be careful what you ask about, and when. But do ask.

Law #6: Add permanent value.

Convert discussions and decisions into long-lasting, easy-to-use stores of knowledge. Let all participants do this together, especially new team members, since that reinforces learning and formalizes decisions. Do it during meetings in a shared document that everyone can see (a Google doc displayed overhead, for example).

Law #7: Involve others freely, but beware TMI. 

By involving more people, you get great benefits:

• Communicate whole-organization issues directly to the whole organization for precision and efficiency.
• Include others when it can create collaboration and shared responsibility. This breaks down information silos and creates essential systems thinking.

However, you need to avoid TMI ("too much information"), which can paralyze people. Therefore, limit communication to what really matters, when it matters, and only to the parties who will benefit.

Law #8 The Golden Law of Great Communication: "Never reach a negative conclusion without carefully clarifying."

This one should really be first. Violating this rule destroys teamwork by damaging mutual trust and mutual respect. Visibly honor this law and insist on it in others. It will establish trust, which is the foundation of great teamwork and world-class communication.

Now, stop a moment and look over the items above. Seriously--do it right now.

Imagine your organization communicating this way, all the time. How would it feel? What would you accomplish together?

It is surprisingly easy to do with the right tools.

"We need to be the change we wish to see in the world." – Ghandi 

Prepare to be surprised. This poem isn't about what it seems...

What happens when a true leader, facing a crisis, honestly collaborates with all parties to find a group solution?

• Use your influence as a leader to be a catalyst for responsible consensus.
• What common ground can you find?
• What ideas does the "other side" have?
• Avoid finger pointing. Focus on issues, not people. (I think this article only scores a C+ for that.)

I'd like to start off by asking you: Are you one of the people who are sick of seeing this message?

We do keep our contact information public, including our leadership. Our GM, Emil Sayegh, publicly responds to customers and posts his contact information freely, and frequently. You can reach him at emil.sayegh@rackspace.com or via Twitter @esayegh. All of our contact information is here as well: http://bit.ly/8utwKW.

USA Today recently featured an article about the entrepreneurial spirit that family businesses inspire in the children of the parents who run it. Consider this:

The Rub: "It's Not a Real Job" Syndrome