1 TechCenter.com EXCELLENCE THROUGH EXPERTISE White paper: Customer Service Portals for Increased Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Cost Control March 26, 2013 Version 01 DRAFT By the TechCenter.com Staff
2 Contents Contents... 2 A World of Communication Options... 3 A Pragmatic Analysis of Support Communication Options... 3 Customer Preference... 3 Organizational Cost... 4 Technical Support Communication Method Taxonomy... 5 Efficacy and Applicability... 6 Customer Service Portals... 6 Guiding Customers to the Best Option... 6 The Portal as Micro-market... 7 Advanced Cost Benefits... 7 Summary... 8 Disclaimer... 8
3 A World of Communication Options Customer service operations have advanced rapidly over the last decade. Not only has the technology advanced in the realms of speed and data collection, but the ways that customers access and interact with the support that they need have changed dramatically. It used to be that customers needing support would simply call into a conventional call center. If the phone agent could not talk the customer through a solution, the servicing company had three options: Send an on-site technician Have the customer take the product to a service center Replace the product and hope that the new one worked The world of technology has entered a golden age of customer-driven progress. Incumbent in that is a persistently increasing expectation that products and services work, work well, operate intuitively right out of the box, and continue to work well. But that is not always how things go in the real world. Customers have differing levels of technical familiarity and experience requiring non-judgmental coaching and encouragement, and even well-engineered products sometimes require real-world usage to flush out the last remaining bugs and edge cases and sometimes things just break. The demands that customers have placed upon products and services has been extended to the organizations and structures that support them. This means that customers want support to be easy, fast, friendly, and intuitive. This has caused support delivery to quickly evolve as well. Today, technical support is delivered via traditional phone and written support tickets, but has also expanded to include email, live chat, searchable Knowledge Base articles (KBs), news items, and social media outlets. There are technology tools for each of the customer contact points. A Pragmatic Analysis of Support Communication Options An effective analysis of technical customer service communication options can be completed by examining three elements: Customer Preference Organizational Cost Applicability and Efficacy Customer Preference The evidence at this point is overwhelming that customer loyalty is a dominant driver in building strong, profitable businesses and that building multiple channels of interaction is one of the strongest factors in building loyalty. 1 1 The top two cross-industry indicators in establishing customer loyalty are multi-context communication channel interaction availability and the cross-selling of complimentary products and services. Both, perhaps surprisingly, surpass formal loyalty and rewards-based programs in efficacy.
4 The reasons are simple. Different customers are simply more comfortable interacting with organizations in differing ways. Understanding and adapting to these micro-market differences can yield substantial gains in market-share among the most desirable and profitable customers. Some customers, for example, do not want to ever be bothered with a phone call. For others, picking up the phone is the best and more intuitive option. More technical customers may prefer to have an abundance of written documentation (white papers, KB articles, etc.) but want the option of sending email inquiries or, in time-sensitive situations, using the phone if needed. Different customers are simply more comfortable interacting with organizations in differing ways. Loyalty is affected by these choices because customers will naturally self-segregate choosing organizations that allow them to decide the optimal method of communication and interaction based upon their own perceptions of urgency, comfort, and need. Companies that do not allow customers the freedom to make these micro-market-driven decisions will suffer. multiple channels play importantly in matching the medium (of communication) to the information or task, particularly when urgency or speed may be required, to support repeated purchases or frequent service (i.e., behavioral loyalty). Interactions over multiple channels also contribute to forming customer satisfaction and creating value that leads to emotional attachment (i.e., attitudinal loyalty). 2 In short, all other things being equal, customers have a tendency to gravitate to organizations that allow them to communicate and interact in ways that they prefer or are comfortable with. Organizational Cost There are different costs associated with different contact channels. It is not the purpose of this document to emphasize one support method over another generally. Rather, it is the opinion of the authors that not all methods are of equal value to the customer or to the servicing organization. Of the channels available to us at this time, they can be arrayed in the following order, relative to cost to deliver from least expensive to most expensive: Social media (Facebook, etc.) Forums KB articles Help and other formal documentation Live chat Email ticket Phone support 2 Ja-Shen Chen, College of Management, Yuan-Ze University, Taiwan, and Russell K. H. Ching, College of Business Administration, California State University, Sacramento (2006); The Effect of CRM Practices and Multiple Channels on Customer Behavioral and Attitudinal Loyalty in Financial Services, Frontiers of E-Business Research
5 Remote support Product retrieval On-site support Product replacement Centralized service centers Each of these has intrinsic value points to both the organization and to the customer that trade off against each other across many cost and satisfaction measurements. These include: Direct financial costs to the organization delivering support Customer convenience Time to response Time to resolution Overall customer satisfaction Technical Support Communication Method Taxonomy
6 In short, all other things being equal, companies have an incentive to provide the customer with the most costeffective method of technical service delivery. Note that in the taxonomy above there is some overlap between the types of support communication methods that are generally effective for different product and service categories. This taxonomy is general in nature and is not intended to limit the methods used or to suggest that one organization type should be prohibited from offering communication methods outside their classification. it should be intuitive that directing a customer to social media or public forums may be ideal for an open-source software project, but would likely be frustrating to an enterprise IT manager reporting resolutions to their CIO on missioncritical applications. Rather, this taxonomy is intended to demonstrate that certain types of communication are appropriate for different types of organizations and alternative types of communication may be intrinsically inappropriate, unsatisfying, or cost-prohibitive based upon cost-structures and customer expectations. When devising a technical service strategy, it should be intuitive that directing a customer to social media or public forums may be ideal for an open-source software project, but would likely be frustrating to an enterprise IT manager reporting resolutions to their CIO on mission-critical applications. Efficacy and Applicability We have covered customer preference and the relative organizational costs of technical service delivery, but it should also be readily accepted that not all methods of communication are well suited to effect satisfactory resolutions for all types of potential issues. It is not uncommon for a support team to become procedurally mired in forums or email exchanges lasting several days when a simple phone conversation or facilitating on online shared desktop session might have discovered the resolution in a matter of minutes. A well-trained, solution-oriented technical service team knows when to push past customer communication preferences and rise above temporal cost considerations to get an issue resolved before damage is done to a company s reputation and a good customer s satisfaction. Customer Service Portals Guiding Customers to the Best Option The key is to guide customers to through the process of selecting a service method that is within the scope of the organizational structure, comfortable and satisfying to the customer, efficacious, and as cost effective as possible. The method that meets all of these criteria is the best method. But the best method changes. With each individual customer and upon each interaction, the best method can change dramatically. 3 Upon each customer contact, the uniqueness of customer 3 Jerath, K., Kumar, A. and Netessine, S. (2013), An Information Stock Model of Customer Behavior in Multichannel Customer Support Services, pp. 26. Authors, respectively, Carnegie Mellon University, Warrington College of Business Administration, and Institut Européen d'administration des Affaires (INSEAD).
7 preferences, circumstances involved, and communication methods available form an instantaneous micro-market of one and like all markets, the best path is most likely found by removing as much friction as possible and letting the market decide at the point of interaction. So how do you choose which method to offer? The answer: you don t. So how do you choose which method to offer? The answer is, you don t. The Portal as Micro-market The solution is to point the customer to a centralized repository of communications options a portal. This portal will be the conduit to access all available service communications options. What was an unorganized and unrelated set of potential service channels will start to achieve organization. The portal is then arranged graphically and interactively to guide the customer across the spectrum of communications options from the most cost effective toward the least cost effective via a well-designed User Interface (UI). This funnels the customer across the communication options. The natural tendency will be for the customer to select the first option that most closely aligns with their perceived need and their preferences. Any potential perceptions of manipulation will be mitigated by the intuitive availability of real choices, and the choices are more likely to be the most cost effective for the organization without endangering customer satisfaction or compromising opportunities to foster increased loyalty. In this scenario, customers are empowered to selfescalate to more advanced forms of communication based upon their own sense of situational urgency, comfort, and importance. Advanced Cost Benefits Over time the number of more expensive interactions will slowly decline as customers self-select lower cost interactions as customers become accustomed to the portal and comfortable with communications methods displayed earlier and earlier in the process. This alignment of communication options delivers increasing, measureable value simultaneously to both the customer and the organization.
8 In additional to efficiencies and cost savings related to the delivery of technical customer service, guiding customers through an integrated communication funnel allows individual issues to be escalated effective through communication types. This improves the customer s perceived benefit, drives down costs, and makes the entire operation more efficient but always remaining in the context of customer satisfaction. The Communications portal also facilitates the capture of sophisticated metrics and business analytics without the need for costly integrations of middleware. Thus the customer service operation can effectively become an advanced, self-integrated business-intelligence collection device to deliver near-real-time information about the performance of products and services in the marketplace via embedded reports and applied metrics. Summary It is worth stressing that the use of portals should not be considered an aspect of simple customer service automation. Rather, it is perhaps best understood as an efficient method of just-in-timedelivery of technical customer support providing exactly the right intensity and amount of support, exactly how the customer wants, in a context and on a time-scale that the customer prefers. This perspective must be firmly held in order to prevent efficient customer service portals from devolving into depersonalized, customer-relationship-killing automaton. Those that do can become a virtualized trouble-shooting vending machines of stale help files and flat canned responses. It is outside the scope of this document to detail the proper design and implementation of service delivery portals that is best left to the many off-the-shelf and custom help desk software companies in existence to advise and provide. But it is the belief of the authors that the use of portals has become, and will continue to be, a leading and invaluable method of optimizing technical service delivery for increasing the mutual benefits of efficacy, performance, business intelligence, and customer loyalty for the foreseeable future. Disclaimer This document expresses the experience and opinions of the authors only. No warrantee or guarantee is expressed or implied as to their accuracy or applicability for any particular environment, organization, or purpose. If you have any comments or suggestions regarding the contents of this document or if you wish to report an error, please contact TechCenter.com with that information.