I run a social net­work­ing com­mu­nity for cus­tomer ser­vice peeps freaks in north­east­ern PA (between con­nect­ing tal­ent and oppor­tu­nity) and so I’m always on the look­out for great con­tent. You see, for as social as one would think cus­tomer ser­vice freaks should be, appar­ently they’re not that way in my neck of the woods. I’m hav­ing a dif­fi­cult time engag­ing them.

To be hon­est I have a hard time under­stand­ing why (so if you have some great ideas I’m all ears). I worked as a cus­tomer ser­vice man­ager, a sales man­ager –> had to be HIGHLY engag­ing (it was time­share), owned suc­cess­ful busi­nesses where  I had to engage cus­tomers, I have engaged tons of can­di­dates as a recruiter and as an HR wear many hats per­son, engage­ment and reten­tion is always on that eval­u­a­tion… I just don’t get it.

I will have to say — for the most part they aren’t into tech­nol­ogy, even though the major­ity of the group work for tech based com­pa­nies. Go fig­ure right? I thought they would love to share best prac­tices, ask and answer ques­tions, chat, blog, yada, yada. Wrong O. Any­way, I’m not all that upset because my real goal is to pro­vide more expo­sure to using new media to engage inter­nal and exter­nal cus­tomers.  I think maybe other com­pa­ra­ble MSA’s like Harrisburg-Lebanon-Carlisle, PA, Baton Rouge, LA and Toledo, OH — not exactly places known for being on the fore­front of tech­nol­ogy, are prob­a­bly in sim­i­lar situations.

That’s why we cre­ated a cus­tomer ser­vice con­sor­tium in the first place.  We need it. We would like to be known for cus­tomer ser­vice so we took a stab at cre­at­ing an orga­ni­za­tion to pro­mote it locally.

So any­way, I found this video I am in love with. It is the embod­i­ment of my feel­ings on engage­ment of inter­nal and exter­nal cus­tomers. I see prospec­tive employ­ees as exter­nal cus­tomers and cur­rent employ­ees as inter­nal customers.

Don’t you?

If com­pa­nies took the phi­los­o­phy of this video and made HR and man­agers, C-Level suits and board mem­bers watch it I think we could change the world.

Do you agree???

P.S. I mean “freaks” with much love =) as in freak­ishly pas­sion­ate about what they do.