After months of promises about MMS (multimedia messaging service) coming to its networks in July and an uproar in the social media when AT&T announced the service would finally be available at the end of September, AT&T came clean about a broken promise. Enter Seth the Blogger:

Seth explains why AT&T hadn’t given its users the MMS capabilities they said would be ready when the iPhone 3Gs came out in July.  Seth says it boils down to the 300% growth in the smart phone use and the inability to keep up with the infrastructure needed to provide the service despite a $38 billion investment on AT&T’s part.  His story is essentially “business was better than expected, so we weren’t ready.”

What’s going on here?

I’ve said before that every customer experience starts with a person who has a need (or problem or desire) they’d pay money to have solved. As customers, our definition of “success” in any experience really boils down to whether or not – and how well – a company solves that triggering need for us. The company’s measure of success should be the same, with revenue and profit the two ways this success is measured financially.

Using my definition of customer experience, this story is a classic example of the “solve/prove” step, where AT&T customers are using mobile services to solve their need, and a company‘s goal is to prove its promise.

For AT&T the “what do we solve for whom,” or triggering need to be solved with its mobile services might be defined as urban mobility for early-adopters of ultra-hip mobile devices. Seth fessed up that they weren’t quite meeting that need. At Aveus, we know from our research that companies who focus on solving a need well – or delivering an ideal customer experience – are twice as likely to exceed their profit targets as those who don’t.  So when we see confessions of this scale, we can guess what it means from a performance perspective inside the company.

To fess up or not to fess up…

So I’ve been wondering: when things are bad and you know it, is it always better to fess up? Judging by the 788 (and counting) comments on YouTube, one wonders if Seth has had a positive or negative impact?

I think fessing up in this case was a positive step. IF. If AT&T keeps the dialog with consumers open and remains engaged, rather than purely a social media appeasement of frustrated customers. As Cluetrain Manifesto authors Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger said 10 years ago, conversation is powerful.  And Seth has started one. AT&T has given itself the opportunity to measure how well it solves the need for urban communication mobility. It can use what it’s learning to anticipate emerging needs of customers (which fits nicely into the final step of my customer experience definition, where customer needs evolve and your organization’s goal is to anticipate new needs to solve next).

If they don’t, it will be another promise broken.

It’s worth noting that AT&T met the September 25th date Seth promised in this conversation. What do you think will happen next?