The Insider''s Guide to Customer Service on the Web: Ten Secrets for Successful E-Service
Summary
The Web is a great place for customer service. It's where people go to find answers fast. It provides a way for customers to navigate their way through lots of content to find the particular piece of information they need. It's open 24/7. According to industry observers, Web-based customer service (also known as "e-service") is one of the biggest business opportunities on the Web.
Unfortunately, most companies fail to effectively exploit the Web's full potential as a customer service vehicle. Some fail because they don't recognize just how powerful of a business tool e-service can be. Some fail because they're slow to respond to customer needs. Others fail because they never develop a practical process for capturing the information their customers want and quickly getting it onto their site — or they fail to keep such information properly updated. Others leave out some of the key functions that make e-service really "click" — such as store locators or remote Web session control.
There is a cost for such failure. Companies that don't develop effective e-service wind up spending far more on customer support than their competitors — as much as 20 times more per incident. That's because, without effective e-service, companies must rely on their over-burdened, high-cost call centers to answer even the most routine and repetitive customer inquiries. Companies with poor e-service also lose customers, since Web users get frustrated quickly and head elsewhere.
E-service is a great way to habituate customers to using your Web site, thereby creating other opportunities to lower transaction costs, execute cross- and upselling strategies, and otherwise leverage the Internet as a business tool. And, because it's so scalable, e-service offers an extremely cost-effective solution for dealing with the inevitable peaks and valleys in your service incident volume. That's why e-service has become such a hot topic for business and technology managers alike.
Why E-Service?
As it becomes increasingly popular and well traveled, the Web is rapidly changing. Just a few short years ago, it was enough for a business to put up a site that had a modest amount of information on its products or services, with a phone number to contact if the visitor wanted to order something or ask questions. This static "brochurewar" content treated the Web as an online Yellow Pages, where the main idea was to make sure you were properly listed.
Things have really changed. Now, the Web is an intensively interactive medium and an online extension of the business itself. Companies use the Web to buy, sell, recruit staff, solicit bids, and make referrals. It's also a great place to support customers and forge closer relationships with them. That means it's also a great place to lose customers, too.
How do you lose customers on the Web? The same way you lose them in the "real" world: you don't respond to their needs. Unfortunately, many executives who would have a heart attack if their sales and service staffs were unresponsive or ignorant about the company's products don't show the same concern about having an unresponsive or ignorant Web site. Their Web sites can't answer customers questions. They take too long to reply to customer emails — or they fail to reply at all.
Keep in mind that a fundamental aspect of the Web's appeal is the immediate gratification it offers. When someone comes to your Web site, they want to quickly find the information they need to make a buying decision or solve a problem. So Web visitors are very sensitive to delays. It may be only a matter of seconds before a visitor gives up his or her search, and tries looking elsewhere.
This puts tremendous pressure on the two groups who develop Web content: marketing and customer service. They must somehow anticipate the possible needs of all types of visitors, from clueless newcomers to long-time customers. This is clearly a tough job, and in today's resource-constrained business environment, it's not a job that anyone wants to spend a lot of time doing.
Fortunately, you don't have to. E-Service innovators have proven that you can answer a tremendous percentage of customers questions online without spending money and time you don't have.
But before we look at how they accomplished this, let's look at who they are and what theyve been able to do.
E-Service Innovators: Cases-in-Point
As more companies deploy e-service, their successes demonstrate the bottom-line business benefits gained by effectively supporting customers online. Here is just a sampling of companies that use automated, Web-based customer support to lower operational costs and significantly improve customer satisfaction.
Allied Telesyn: Self-Service for High-Tech Questions
When global communications equipment provider Allied Telesyn entered the home PC networking market, it found itself having to support a large number of novice users. Call center operators had to answer repetitive questions as simple as, "What's an IP address?" Because of the technical sophistication of Allied's operators, support calls cost the company around $50. Allied needed to reduce these calls while still supporting its new products.
Its e-service solution worked. Allied experienced a 15 percent drop in the first month of its e-service implementation and 20 percent the second month. Use of the company's online support page climbed by almost 25 percent, with customers commenting regularly on how much they like being able to go to the site anytime to find what they want. The company has saved $25,000 per month through the reduction of phone calls alone.
Ansett Australia: The Rebirth of an Airline
Despite its importance as a regional carrier for Australia and New Zealand, Ansett Australia had struggled financially and was temporarily grounded. To make a comeback under receivership, the airline had to control costs across the board. In addition to its other cost-cutting measures, the company brought its total number of call center operators down from 1,600 to 200 — a reduction of almost 90 percent.
But how would the company deal with the huge load of customer inquiries it would face when it reopened its doors — questions about previously purchased tickets, frequent-flier miles, and the like?
Fortunately, Ansett had already begun an e-service implementation. Its online knowledge base was quickly seeded in support of the relaunch. And when the re-launch began, the site received as many as 10,000 visits per day, compared with the 1,000 or so it had before the grounding. The good news was that customers found the answers they needed, taking a tremendous burden off of the company's call center operators, who were fully able to field the balance of customer phone inquiries.
Just as importantly, the helpfulness of the e-service content kept customers glued to the site, leading a large percentage of them to make their ticket purchases there. This helped Ansett reduce its cost of sales. Within 19 days of its rebirth, the company sold 100,000 tickets and was well on its way to financial health. "E-Service was absolutely instrumental in Ansett's return to the air," says E-Commerce Manager Hans Van Pelt. "We were very fortunate to have an e-service solution in place at this critical moment in our history."
10 Secrets for Successful E-Service
As these companies and others prove, effective e-service is actually a very achievable goal — even for companies with relatively limited resources. It simply requires the right principles, practices, and tools. By surveying today's most effective e-service practitioners, RightNow Technologies discovered 10 basic attributes that make Web-based customer support work:
1. Make Sure Your Web Site Can "Listen" to Customers
Every successful salesperson knows the most important part of their job is listening — both for explicit and implicit messages from the customer. Web sites should do the same. Explicit messages are clear requests for specific information. Implicit messages are patterns of queries or usage that imply a difficulty in finding some type of content. Effective e-service requires mechanisms and/or practices that ensure an attentive ear to both types of messages from customers.
2. Give Customers What They Want — Quickly
Once youve "heard" what kind of information customers want, you have to give it to them — quickly. The Web is all about immediacy. So whether it's getting new information posted onto your site or responding to incoming emails, your e-service solution must enhance your ability to respond quickly. Don't confuse this with the rapid posting of information that marketers want to put on your site. Quality e-service requires the rapid posting of customer-driven content.
3. Make E-Service Resources Easy to Find and Easy to Use
Great content isn't much use if customers can't find it easily. That's why e-service content has to be well-organized into hierarchical "containers" that reflect the way users actually think about and search for content — not how a Web site manager guesses they might. It's also important to always give customers the ability to turn to email, live chat, or a live operator.
4. Provide Multiple Contact Channels
Remember not all customers are alike and they prefer different means of communication. Provide a variety of methods such as self-service, email, and live chat. One size doesn't fit all and you need to remember when defining your customer service strategy that you need to include multiple channels of communication.
5. The "80/20" Rule
Successful e-service doesn't require the ability to answer every conceivable customer question online. More than 80 percent of all customer questions are usually answered by just 20 percent of a support knowledge base. In fact, studies show that e-service implementers have been able to answer 86 percent of all customer queries online with a relatively small, focused set of knowledge items. It's more important to get started with e-service than it is to develop the "perfect" service/support knowledge base. Smart companies get the most important information up first, and then add to it over time.
6. Let Your Customers Rate You
You can't improve what you don't measure. That's why it's important to let users rate the effectiveness of the knowledge items they find on your Web site, as well as any email replies received in response to their requests for help. Using this feedback, you quickly weed out e-service content that's not helpful — thereby improving your site's effectiveness as a service/support resource for customers.
7. Leverage Your Knowledge Base
It's worth creating a knowledge base just for Web-based e-service. But you can achieve even greater ROI by leveraging that knowledge base across all your customer interaction channels (i.e., Web, email, chat and phone). For example, the same knowledge base customers use to get their questions answered online can also be used by new call center operators as an information resource — helping them become more productive more quickly.
8. Map it Out
For retailers, manufacturers selling through distributors, and many other types of companies, some of the most common questions that customers have when they visit your Web site will have to do with local store or office locations. The best way to provide this information is with an easy-to-read map and driving directions — not just street addresses. Maps not only provide customers with the information they need, they also help ensure they actually arrive there without a hassle!
9. Consider Outsourcing
At a time when companies have a limited ability to buy, implement, and manage new technologies, many successful e-service implementers are turning to a hosted model. This approach eliminates the capital cost of software and hardware as well as the staffing requirements associated with implementing and maintaining an e-service system. Hosted systems let companies rapidly reap the benefits of e-service without disrupting their existing IT operations.
10. Automate, Automate, Automate
Without automation, the work required for successful e-service — developing customer-driven content, posting it in a well-organized manner, responding to customer emails — can become overwhelming. As site traffic increases, the situation only gets worse. Many sites are spoiled by their success, as the volume of customer interaction via the Internet exceeds the human resources available to supporting that interaction. It's critical to deploy an e-service solution that automates tasks such as content development and posting. Effective e-service solutions eliminate time-consuming knowledge management functions — functions that, if neglected over time, result in out-of-date e-service content and dissatisfied customers.
These 10 simple principles can make the difference between successful, high-ROI e-service and a failure to take full advantage of the Internet as a medium for superior customer service. In a market climate where every competitive advantage counts, few companies can afford to miss out on the outstanding bottom-line benefits that effective e-service offers.
Bottom Line Benefits of E-Service
Companies that implement effective e-service systems find they benefit in numerous ways — many of them totally unexpected. The bottom-line rewards theyve experienced include:
Reduced Cost of Customer Service
When customers help themselves at a Web site instead of having to call a conventional help desk, savings can range from $10-$45 per incident. By continuously adding customer-driven e-service content to the site, the percentage of customers who can help themselves online also increases, dramatically reducing overall customer support costs.
Faster Customer Service and Increased Satisfaction
People hate to sit on "hold." When they can help themselves on a Web site, they can get faster answers to their most pressing questions 24/7. They also develop the perception that the company site they're visiting has a good handle on its customers needs — thereby strengthening their overall confidence in that company.
Increased Use of Lower Cost
Online Transaction Channels
For most companies, sales over the Web provide lower transaction costs than those made over the phone or in a retail location. Good e-service encourages customers to use the Web site more often, which means they become more likely to use it for transaction and support. E-Service thus lowers your company's cost of sales.
The Ability to Scale to Meet Peak Seasonal Volumes
A big problem many companies with seasonal patterns of buying often face is ramping up to support peak seasonal volumes. Usually, this means adding call center operators temporarily. But how many do you add? If you add too many, youll waste money on excess capacity. If you add too few, you won't be able to respond in a timely manner to your customers. An effective
e-service system — especially a hosted one — can easily scale as needed to meet any volume of traffic, without requiring guesswork or potential over-spending on additional infrastructure.
Freeing up staff
One of the main constraints on most companies' e-commerce efforts is the limited number of staff members who understand the business and the Internet. By automating the generation and management of online support resources, e-service relieves these precious employees of having to perform many repetitive, yet critical time-sensitive tasks, thereby freeing them to support other strategic projects.
The bottom-line? Responsive, automated, e-service delivers concrete business advantages, day in and day out. e-service is also rapidly becoming a competitive necessity, as more and more companies make their Web sites a primary channel for low-cost, customer-pleasing service, and support.
What's Your Company's EQ?
Because e-service effectiveness has become an important factor in every company's overall business strategy, now is a good time to assess the quality of your own company's e-service quotient, or "EQ." This simple test will help you determine just how healthy your company's e-service strategy really is, and allow you to pinpoint where it could use improvement.
Figure 1 — This simple test will help you determine just how healthy your company's e-service strategy really is, and allow you to pinpoint where it could use improvement.
If you were able to answer "Yes" to 10 or more of the questions above, congratulations. Youre well on your way to becoming another e-service success story. If not, then it's probably time to re-evaluate how youre using the Web to support and service your customers — before your competition gets too far ahead of you!
