I have not made any New Year’s resolutions yet, preferring doing over promising myself to do (not sure how far that’s gotten me in the past). One thing on my mind as I enter the new year, though, is putting my money where my mouth is. I’ve spent several days over the last week and a half desperately trying to get Chase to send me a replacement credit card to the correct address while I’m traveling over the Christmas break. The days spent waiting for a UPS delivery that never arrived, the hours spent on hold trying to find out if the card is actually coming today, in order to know if I can end my vigil and go on to my next family visit stop here on the east coast, the unnecessary adrenaline dumped into my system the fourth time a new customer service representative asks the same irrelevant question while I try to explain the situationThis is not how we were meant to spend our lives, and certainly not our holidays. I resisted cancelling the card — it’s convenient and I get a lot of United miles on this card that I use quite frequently and then realized I was valuing a relatively small amount of money (or miles, same thing when you travel a lot) over quality of life. Isn’t that what money is supposed to be for?  To increase our quality of life? Then why so often do we go for the bargain that isn’t really a bargain, stand in long lines to buy cheap merchandise made in China, and put up with horrible customer service? And why do companies feel it’s okay to treat their customers with such disregard, even contempt? Because we let them.

I have thinking about this dynamic quite a bit since I saw Lane Becker speak on the topic "Customer Service is the New Marketing" a few months ago in London. (His company, Get Satisfaction, is holding a Summit on the topic on February 4^th in San Francisco, which I plan to attend and has a fabulous speaker line up.  Lane’s also scheduled to speak on this topic at Web 2.0 Expo in April.) Lane talked about the call center at Zappos, where the customer service reps follow no scripts, are not measured by the brevity of their calls, and are instructed to both solve the customers’ problems and connect with them as human beings. Now that’s refreshing! If I weren’t already a Zappos customer (and one who’s never needed to call because their whole operation works so smoothly), I’d certainly become one. Much has been made of the horrible state of customer service, and it’s great to start to hear positive stories and a growing awareness of the power of connecting with customers, but the point is that I am seeing a pattern, a groundswell, if you will, that connects a number of topics germane to Web 2.0: trust (particularly in the form of data security), social capital, customer service, conversational marketing, and ecological and social responsibility. I’m hoping that consumers’ increasing desire for these attributes will propel this trend, but I also think the nature of the goods and services we buy, especially on the web, will naturally contribute to the emergence of an "integrity economy."

More on this later. In the meantime, cheers to 2008. May it be the year of new beginnings, and a year of great integrity, in politics, the economy, the community of the web, and in our personal lives.

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