Customer service is mostly viewed as cost head by most businesses. While paying lip service to customer service, secretly marketers dread the additional investments that need to be made and the processes that need to be changed.

Sustainable Growth vs. Short term Profitability

While cost control can provide short term profitability, it is not enough to assure a business of sustainable growth in the long term. Here is where customer service comes in as a weapon that a business can wield. Great customer support services create a bond that makes it more difficult for customers to switch providers. Loyal customers have a far superior lifetime value, besides the lower cost of retaining rather than acquiring new customers.

Smart Query Technology, a means to retaining customers

In contrast to conventional systems, SQT offers three key benefits:

1. The need to answer questions only once (since each time a new question is asked, the answer is added to the Q&A database)
2. The ability to combat low attention spans and long waiting times (as each question is directed either to the Q&A database or to the appropriate CSR, it is answered efficiently and immediately) and
3. The ability to manage expansion with ease (no need to keep adding CSRs as customer query volume grows)

The best customer solutions are simple for the team to learn, deal with customer issues quickly, are easy for the customer to understand and highly effective in managing costs. Use them and watch your bottomline grow!

James Heavey, the CEO of Respond, reveals some research that is definitely food for thought. Only 4% of the customers who reported a poor experience with a company ever complained! 96% of customers simply did not bother to tell the company.

The Impact of the Silent Customer

Although silent customers may not make much noise, they vote with their wallets. This research also showed that of the 96% who did not complain, 55% nevertheless ended their relationship with the company.
That is a significant number of customers to lose!

How to catch the angry customer

One reason many customers don’t bother to complain is because customer support procedures are so tedious. They know that they will be kept on hold or asked to wait for days before they receive an e-mail or have to talk to multiple CSRs.

Simplifying the system using smart query technology means that customers never have to interact with more than one person or wait too long for a response. This can drastically increase the number of people who complain. And customers who complain can at least be pacified, unlike an angry customer who simply walks away!
More details at: http://cdcsoftware-marketing.com/downloads/collateral/cdcrespond/20070129_Effective_complaint_management.pdf

Companies across different industries struggle to meet twin objectives that often seem at odds with each other. Customers want better service, while management dictates cost control. Are the two impossible to reconcile?

Comparing the cost of different channels

A Giga Group research* on the cost of customer service using different channels threw up the following results. Phone calls were the most expensive option and were pegged as a 100% measure. When compared with this standard:

1. Chat was the next expensive, at 50% of the phone standard
2. E-mail followed, at 30% of the phone standard
3. Self-help was the lease expensive, at only 10% of the phone standard

So, should everyone move to self-help?

Clearly, that doesn’t address all problems. There will always be customers whose queries can’t be resolved so easily. A 100% self-help system will not be of use to them.

The solution lies in using a combination of methods: self-help/automated support for those whose queries are not exceptional, while others receive more personalized support. This is precisely the approach favored by smart query technology systems.

*More details at http://www.crm2day.com/highlights/EpyEVVAyZFuVTSlcjp.php

James Gaskin of NetworkWorld says, “Although parts of technology are broken here and there, technology has become the tent pole holding up every business today. Unfortunately, sometimes we spend so much time struggling to keep the tent pole working properly, we forget to enjoy the tent”.

Multiple options, multiple voices

It is true that there are many more technology options than ever before. Technology by itself is not however a guarantee of stellar customer service. While tech pundits review many different options each day, the technology for your business has to meet your customer needs.

A match with Customer Needs

A careful need analysis will help you identify the right support system suited to your business needs. Here, the crucial thing is that it is ‘customer need’ and not just the owner’s view of what the business needs. For instance, while short term interests may dictate the cheapest system, you would like to consider the long-term implications as well – whether such a system may irritate and drive your customers away!

Research has revealed that many companies rate their customer service higher than what customers actually rate them! Such overconfidence can be disastrous. To avoid this situation, gaining customer feedback is essential.

The When and How of Feedback

Customers today deal with many different products and services over a short period. They do not have the energy to really think through each interaction in detail. Occasionally, an exceptionally poor or good interaction will make them pause. Otherwise, they couldn’t care less!

When to get feedback has only one answer: as close to the interaction as possible. As for how, ideally, the feedback mechanism should be very simple and not demand a lot of time from the customer.

Using feedback well

An ideal smart query technology based system facilitates this by allowing users to rate the answers that they receive immediately. Managers can easily check reports to see if any answers have a low user rating. This will help the business to analyze the reasons for a poor rating and give staff the appropriate training they need.

No matter how efficient your customer support team and system, there will always be a time when nobody is available to answer a query. What customers hate about this situation is that rarely will anyone get back to them quickly, if a resource is not available immediately.

Handling ‘off’ times

To handle such situations, if a question is held in the queue for more than 10 seconds, the smart query application will send the user a ‘busy’ message and allow the user to submit their name and email address. This information gets held back in the queue and the CSR can reply to the question as soon as possible.

In case a user asks a question after hours, a smart query based system will send the user an after-hours message and allow them to submit their name and email address.

When creating a new Q&A record, the CSR can also choose to mark the record with an expiry date and time. The application will check each day and hour and if it finds a record that has expired, it will remove it from the main database into an archive. For instance, if your company is organizing a free service camp for users in New York’s Staten Island on 20th June, 2009, questions regarding the time and venue of the camp would no longer be valid once the event is over. Your team could mark questions of this kind with an expiry date.

Being there for customers

Being there for customers does not necessarily mean simply having a 24X7 presence. It means having a system that anticipates down times and covers for them efficiently. Customers appreciate the company getting back to them as soon as possible rather than having to call in multiple times.

In 1950s, there was little leisure time. When television became popular, content was scarce, but people spent the little leisure time they had to watch those programs. Since then, we’ve come full circle.

We are now in a situation where media is plenty, but consumers are turning away. And their attention span towards marketers is especially low!

The Implications for Customer Service

In the customer service context too, this relentless shrinking of attention takes its toll. Where customers might once have patiently waited for a few days while companies got their answers right, now they find even a phone call lasting for 5 minutes irksome.

This is for a number of reasons:

1. Customers have many more leisure options
2. Families are smaller – the rise of single-parent and other kinds of families mean that one adult often has to do a lot more and therefore time is paramount.
3. You and your competitors have raised the bar on service!

Combating shrinking attention spans

Customers want efficient service, NOW. This is where SQT comes in. By constantly adding to the Q&A database and by automatically caching Q&A records that are frequently used, a smart query based system enables users to access answers in an instant.

Chances are you have an FAQ section on your website. What does it really do?

Most companies view FAQs as a stand-alone element on their website. FAQs are rarely updated nor are they usually integrated with customer queries. They can however be used much more effectively.

Make your FAQs dynamic and comprehensive

With technology that captures the responses to unique questions and adds them to the database, the FAQs can be updated easily and more often so that fewer customers need to write in with their questions.

Innovative Smart query software also generates an XML feed that includes questions and answers by category/ sub category and their ratings. The feed can then be sent to a dynamic FAQs page that will display the information by category and allow viewers to look for answers using a search bar.

User-friendly and SEO friendly

Instead of manually updating the FAQs once in a while, dynamic web applications make the FAQs more comprehensive and organized in manner conducive to user search. Having a more comprehensive FAQs page also ensures that your website will be more search engine (or SEO) friendly.

Every business is different; the customers in every industry are different. What works in one situation may not in another. Sometimes, businesses may have go in for a completely novel solution – if that is what will meet the needs of customers.

Kayak.com – everyone does customer service here

Kayak.com, the travel comparison website went in for an unusual arrangement where customer service was concerned. Kayak implemented an online database that divides feedback from customers evenly among all of the company’s employees.

With a small number of queries divided up among employees, each of them has the time to respond to customers very quickly. The database also tracks reaction times as well as the airlines to which the most complaints are related.

Where customers get the right resource

Using this system, Kayak has significantly reduced costs on a large CSR team. But, it’s not just about the costs.

Kayak operates in a competitive industry – there are many websites offering travel deals and comparisons. With this system, Kayak also ensured that customers are attended to by highly motivated employees who “know” the business rather than an impersonal outsourced customer service centers that use call scripts.

Small business owners, especially those who started working before the internet explosion, sometimes fear that time and money spent on technology is resources being taken away from ‘core’ business areas such as design, production or sales.

Technology evangelists on the other hand, claim it as the solution to all ills. Where is the truth?

Keeping abreast of technology

It is true that customers are savvier than ever and require faster reaction times than before. It is also true that technology by itself cannot rescue a company with a fundamental disinterest in keeping its customers happy.

However, for the motivated business owner, technology can definitely help to better meet customer needs. This means exploring many different alternatives and choosing the best possible option from what is available now, not just what worked many years ago.

Be open to the market and what it needs!

The pace of technology change means that business owners need to re-evaluate their customer support systems from time and time, and see if more efficient and cost-effective systems are available. It may also mean looking at unconventional solutions and being open to new technologies.

With smart query technology, for instance, answers are displayed to the customer in real-time in a chat-like setting, so that the user always feels a sense of live service even though the answers may be coming from a database.