Why Blog?

After several posts, this may seem like an odd time to think about why I am blogging.

However, on Friday I went to a fantastic conference about just that... and several other things as well! :p

The Women, Business & Blogging conference at DMU in Leicester focused on the role women bloggers play in business and how blogging can be used to both reach and empower women. It featured key note talks by Meg Pickard, Eileen Brown and Jory Des Jardin, as well as plenty of space for networking and discussion about all aspects of technology and blogging.

The conference made me think about what I am actually trying to achieve here. Really, I am using this particular blog as a release mechanism for all those observations about life in a customer services department. I could just keep a diary, but I would like to share these observations and engage with other customer service workers to help resolve some of these issues - or at least have a good old chin wag about them.

In addition to this, the most useful thing I took away from the conference, which I want to share, is the potential for using blogs to interact with customers. Eileen Brown has the strange job title of "technology evangelist" for Microsoft. She spoke about how Microsoft is using blogging to open itself up to customers and interact with them - and particularly how this is helping to improve their customer image, which was pretty lousy. She even converted my friend who attended with me - a staunch whinger about anything Bill Gates related!

Following this, I intend to email our marketing department to see if they would consider letting us set up a customer services blog. I would like to gear this specifically at our student customers, as we have reached a bit of a stand off with this group. They hate our company: we hate them. All we are doing in customer services at the moment is scoring points off the students and grumbling - answering complaints as and when they come in. I hope a blog would give the students the opportunity to interact with us, see that we are human, and possibly start building a relationship so we can improve our services and the students can improve their communication skills with us.

I will let you know how it goes! The company might not be as open minded as Microsoft...