On Communities, Cheese, and Ciboodle Launching a New Product

Intriguing title, right?  Promise, there is a method to the madness… stay tuned.

One of my clients (Ciboodle – officially known as Sword-Ciboodle) launched their community platform yesterday (Ciboodle Crowd).  You can read more about it and watch a video here.

That is the “official press-release” part of this post — but it is also related to the rest… read on.

Now, when I was at Gartner last week I stopped by their booth and we did a short video where they asked me for the relationship between cheese and customer service.  They did the same with other wonderful friends like Paul Greenberg, Michael Maoz, and Mitch Lieberman (there may be more, they are being stingy and releasing only two each day).  You can go here to view the rest, they are all quite remarkable and creative in how they establish a link between cheese and customer service.

My answer, in case you don’t want to see my beautiful face and hear my sultry voice: there are many types of customer service you can provide and, just like cheese, not one will please everyone.  Some prefer a sharp Cheddar, some a blue Stilton, and some an American radioactive orange (trust me, that is not cheese — ask anyone outside of the US).

There is not a single way to do customer service.

And that is the key to this launch, as well as what few  other smart vendors are doing in customer service.  It is not about how many channels you have, how you create knowledge knowledge, do integration, or manage rules.  Nor is it  about being able to do Twitter, Facebook, or even communities — it is about leveraging all those resources and channels and doing it equally well for all segments.  It is about effectively delivering to customers the proper solution.

I talked about segmentation before and how it is the secret to doing cross-channel and multi-channel CRM.  But until recently, there was no technology platform that would allow an organization to do that.  Now Ciboodle joins the ranks of the handful of vendors that allows any organization to serve Camembert next to Ementhaler.

How cools is that?