I have a couch and table that need to be repaired under warranty. I called and scheduled them to come pick them up. They then called me no less than 7 times over 3 days to confirm that I would be there. Then when they got here they were only going to swap out the table, and didn’t know about the couch. A few hours later another guy comes by to get the couch. I was ridiculous how disorganized it was.
Maybe that recent experience is why Doc Searls’ thoughts on vendor relationship management are resonating with me today.
Our problem is that relationships with vendors don’t work both ways. What we have had for decades are “relationship” systems that aren’t, because they live entirely on the vendor side. They’re all silo’d. Isolated. And they handle everything, but only for the one vendor. The customer relates to that vendor through a few hunks of authentication data (login, password, answers to questions for recovering lost logins and passwords…) and then interacts (”relates” is a gross exaggeration) inside a narrow and highly confined system that totally controls what the customer can do — and utterly cuts off any possibility of useful contributions to the company other than in through repeated purchases and whatever secondary data might be gleaned from the transaction and customer history. “Your opinion counts?” No way. They don’t care what I think. They care what their survey results tell them. Huge difference. One relates. The other doesn’t.
Before I have tended to dismiss that idea because I see it as too impractical from a technical standpoint. I must admit, I would love to have an autodialer that called up my credit card company and said ‘please hold for an important message from Jackson Miller’.
I am glad Doc is passionate about infrastructure 
