Avoiding the Death
Spiral While Reducing Operating Costs - Part 5
By
Lauren Weiss
This is the 5th
article in the series “Avoiding the Death Spiral While Reducing
Operating Costs” covering approaches to reduce operating costs
while maintaining customer confidence and increasing customer
satisfaction. Topics in this series include:
- Cease activities that provide
no value-add
- Implement efficient and
repeatable processes
- Focus on existing product
quality instead of new features and functions
- Enabling customers to
self-serve
- Perform elements of the work
with lower cost labor
- Segment the customer base and
provide “appropriate” levels of support for each
- Make informed, not random,
cuts
- Cease big, expensive projects
with long-term ROI
- Renegotiate vendor contracts
In this edition
we will cover: Enabling customers to self-serve.
When done
properly, one of the most effective ways to increase customer
satisfaction while reducing operating costs is that of empowering
your customers to self-serve. Customers WANT to have more control,
especially if it makes it easier to do business with you. Prior to
embarking on this endeavor, however, you are encouraged to make
sure that you are not implementing technology in such a way that
it becomes an obstacle to the customer getting the support they
require. An example of “ineffective” technology (from the
customer’s perspective) is that of a phone system with an
elaborate “tree” of options.
Self-serve
capabilities are best received by the customer-base when made
available as an option, and not forced down their throat. And,
there should always be an “escape hatch” providing an option for
the customer to work with a real-live human-being.
Key technologies
that enable you to increase your customers’ ability to self-serve
include your phone system and web-site. You can get started by
simply making frequently asked questions (FAQs), about your
products and services, available on your web-site. From there you
can take steps to offer more sophisticated capabilities such as
implementing a searchable knowledge base that allows the customer
to ask a question (i.e., how do I…) and receive possible solutions
(in ranked order) to address their question. A major consideration
in implementing a knowledge base, however, is that it does NOT
populate itself with useful information. You will need to assign
an administrator that is responsible for obtaining common problems
and solutions from your customer service system, and loading this
information into your knowledge base in a standard and easily
retrievable format.
To ease your
customers into the online support option have your service
personnel co-browse the FAQs or knowledge base with callers so
that they become familiar with the content and methods of access.
In addition to
having access to FAQs, and a searchable knowledge base, customers
also find value in being able to:
- Enter a
problem report or question directly into the customer service
system
- View status of
reported problems or questions
- View and
update profile information
- Place orders
and track status
- View and pay
invoices
- Request a
password reset
To determine
which of the above “transactions” would provide the most benefit
(to your customer and your cost structure) you should perform an
analysis to determine the most frequent and/or labor intensive
interactions that you have with your customer-base. These should
be targeted as opportunities to automate, enabling the customer to
self-serve.
The final
ingredients to obtain the maximum value (increased customer
satisfaction and decreased operating costs) you are encouraged to
include the following in your self-serve capabilities:
- Integration
- Motivation
- Security
- Follow-up
Integration:
make sure that you capture data about the customer’s self-serve
interaction and that your contact center has access to this
information. For transactions where the customer is not required
to identify themselves capture general data elements such as what
they were viewing, which can be useful for future analysis. When
they do identify themselves, capture the customer id, what they
were viewing, and how the transaction was completed. By doing so
you can pick up where the customer left off (as a continuous
thread), if they are not able to get what they needed and decide
to call or e-mail for help.
Motivation:
offer customers something for using the self-serve option. An
example includes putting them at the top of the queue if they end
up having to call or e-mail for support, on an item that could not
be completed online.
Security:
ensure your self-serve site has appropriate security and privacy.
Customers need to feel comfortable that no one else can see their
information (problem reports, profiles, orders, invoices, etc.)
Follow up:
at the end of each self-serve interaction BRIEFLY ask how it went,
if they got what they were looking for, and if there is anything
that could be improved.
While the above
approaches to increase your customers’ ability to self-serve are
highly focused on technology, the final comment is that this is
NOT a technical problem. Technology is merely the enabler. A major
step you will need to take, prior to investing in and implementing
technology, is that of ensuring your business processes are
designed for data integrity and that the information generated is
customer viewable. The last thing you want is someone placing
inappropriate comments about a customer into a system and having
it show up, online, for customer consumption.
Upcoming
newsletter editions will cover additional items on the topic of
“Avoiding the Death Spiral While Reducing Operating Costs”.
Previous articles in this series:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
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