John Robb has this to say about weblogs and customer service:

What customer activities have shifted to the Web (based on a Forrester study on the sales of complex goods):

1. Researching product information (90%)
2. Comparing product features and prices (58%)
3. Contacting customer service (56%)
4. Locating a store or distributor (42%)
5. Checking product availability (36%)

Which of these activities could be enhanced by corporate use of weblogging?

Here are his answers (bullets) and my comments (follow each one):

A weblog, built and maintained by a product manager, could provide customers with an active resource on the products they are deciding to buy.

This could be accomplished by building a spreadsheet comparing (feature by feature) several different products, and publishing to a weblog as an additional page accessed by the navigation system. Additional comparison info could be presented in a weblog format for easy consumption.

Amazon is already doing some of this using their databases and technology. As a consumer, I would be leery about buying based on recommendations from the manufacturer/distributor. I'm leery about Amazon's. I would, however, take the recommendations of actually users or webloggers I know and trust.

Contacting customer service on most sites is painful. Additionally, the FAQs and resource databases seem put together by monkeys (albeit highly paid ones). A simple way to generate an extremely valuable and organic customer service data is to have each rep publish a weblog. The question, including keywords, is the title of the post. The answer is the response.

Interesting, John, but maybe needlessly complicated. In order to reap some of the benefits of the weblog environment, a company would have to boil it down to it's essence: intelligent conversations that intertwine with no central control. Web log conversations (see current RSS/Atom/SIX as example) start as a post that someone reads, then responds to. If that happens enough times in a short time frame, the company would consider it important because so many people are talking about it. What's important to remember here is that everyone is talking about it *because* everyone is talking about it. Whether or not it is actually important is secondary.

So could you do a FAQ with RSS/weblogs? Yes, but it would have to go in stages. First, questions by users and answers by staff with knowledge. Posts go into a database and are chewed on by Google-like intelligence. FAQ updates are fed to staff by RSS and staff discuss them on their weblogs. In response to the new discussions, new questions are generated by users *in addition to* the same questions that users asked before. Once again, Google-chewing on the database yields more FAQs of better quality. Repeat this cycle until you have a top 10 FAQ list. Publish *that* with RSS that feeds straight into the help system of your software (if it's finished goods, straight to that product's home page).

See what I mean?

Not really applicable, but for many companies the local outlet doesn't have an effective Web presence (not even for coupons, specials, etc.). A simple weblog with a corporate template would suffice.

New poducts should be hyped via a weblog. Features, improvements, etc would all factor into the weblog's posts. A simple countdown clock would track the days or hours to availability.

Out of mental energy to comment on these. Mostly valid. Amazon is doing the last one, but not publicized yet. See this