How well do Technology companies use Technology?
Using Technology to Delight Customers
One would assume that companies in the forefront of technology would be using innovative ways to respond to and delight customers. Not necessary, as a 2007 Accenture study among consumer-technology companies demonstrated.
Conventional Systems Are Poor at Fighting Spam
Spammers are everywhere!
All e-mail users, whether individuals or corporate find that spam is one of their biggest problems. Over 150 billion e-mails are sent out by spammers every day! As soon as businesses list their e-mail addresses, they find that they are flooded with spam. Spam is not just irritating – businesses end up spending time and resources to ensure that genuine customer e-mails are not lost when spam blocking systems are involved.
Conventional systems look cheap, but are they?
Why Companies Don’t Look for Smarter Systems
One of the reasons many businesses go in for e-mail based systems, live chat support orsimply include an FAQ section on their site is that these are easy to implement, and socheap! The initial low cost looks very attractive. But, over time, the cost of such customer service solutions actually piles up.
Conventional Systems don’t scale very well
Single-serving responses make more work for everyone
Let us imagine that we have access to all the customer queries that a solar-heating equipment manufacturer receives over a month. To our surprise, we find that 30% of them are variations on one question, “Do your heaters store energy for rainy or cold days?” Even though the company’s website has an FAQ section detailing how the product works on non-sunny days, customers continue to ask the same question. And its customer support desk wastes valuable time answering this again and again, due to the ‘single serving’ nature of responses.
