Friday, August 12, 2005

Unilever Shows Us How to Keep a Customer for Life

Steve Rubel catches a good case of a large company doing the unthinkable: listening.

Want to keep a customer for life? Listen and respond to them. That’s exactly what Unilever did.

Apparently the consumer product giant was actively listening to the blogosphere and they tuned into one voice, Dan Entin. Dan had been lamenting about how he is having trouble getting his favorite deodorant.

Unilever – a huge company with lots of to worry about – took the time to respond to Dan directly via email. They not only let him know that Degree Sport was indeed still on the market, they suggested ways he might find the product at retail using the Unilever website and even sent him a year’s supply just for speaking up. (Hmmm. mow there’s an idea. How much free stuff can we get for the askin’?)

I believe we just witnessed the future of customer service. One day CRM systems will bolt in blog monitoring functionality so these posts automatically get funneled to the right place. For now, they need to be handled onesie twosie – but handled nonetheless. Kudos to Unilever. [Micro Persuasion]

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