theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

What's your customer support philosophy? And do your employees know?

I was really impressed with the help I got from Paul O at Tracker Software a few weeks ago, which I wrote about here, in Talking like a person in an age of your-call-is-important-to-us: how to earn social capital

Part of the reason I posted the original article is a guerrilla tactic I hope you will try yourself: instead of putting out blog posts when I am annoyed, I'm going to try to put out posts when brands do a good thing. Rewards are generally more motivating than punishment. So, I wrote Mr. O to tell him about the post.

He was kind enough to tell me a bit about Tracker's customer support philosophy, which he says "was drilled into me by the company founder."

"Support for the software is important."

We believe, as it seems do you, that a positive support experience can take a disgruntled user and make them a loyal return customer.  This translates directly into ongoing sales.  We want you back.

"All users get the same support."

We maintain that 'the little guy' is just as important as the global corporate clients.  We offer free products as well as licensed ones and honestly try not to distinguish between users who have not paid us a cent and those who have paid tens of thousands of dollars.  Again this is simply building good will.

"Users get a punctual support response."

We are frequently told what a surprise it is that users not only get a response when often they expected an email to drop into /dev/null (sorry for the geek speak here)  We have a policy that there should never be an email in the inbox not responded to for more than 30 minutes.  Of course being human this is not always the case but we do try.  I think it is that human element that makes the difference, we all like to feel valued."

This is a very sound approach, and the world would be a better place if there were more people doing things this way. Logical. Sound business thinking. And looks after customers. What could be better?

I was also impressed that they have created a knowledge base article on my problem, and are also going to include a "quick start" document with the next release of their products. There's no substitute for taking action to reduce the need for support.

[BTW, now that I've been using their product for a while, I have to say I really love their PDF tools. And they didn't pay me to say that.]

Winning at Customer Support: The Future

I was delighted to be Dell's guest at their recent Customer Support Think Tank held in Austin in June 2012. This is the fourth of four posts on the event and themes.

Another amazing graphic from Allison Crow

See the graphic on Flikr

Video of Brent Leary talking about how support is not a cost center.

Jackie Huba gave us a fun challenge to bring our ideas about the future of support to life using objects and pipe-cleaners. The diagram my group came up with is below.

Here's the essence of what was said:

• Technology will be used in smarter ways to help people find what they want more easily. Google does this now of course, offering you improved search based on where you are and what you've done before. These tools will come to your support site, and not a moment too soon for most of us.

• There will be less need for support, because stuff will work better and integrate better. HTML 5 is supposed to help with this. (Way over my head, what do you think?)

• Cloud data will help the company know who you are and how best to help you. Their CRM systems will be able to pull in other useful information about you

• Internal company systems will route information in smarter ways, helping employees integrate across silos more effectively, and reducing the frustration associated with hand-offs

• Smarter diagnostics will help to identify issues -- not just what element is broken, but who you need help from (Was it the router? Was it the mouse in the wiring? Or do you have a software conflict?)

• Social media tools will be used to proactively advise customers what is going on when there is a larger problem. (Yes, our servers are down, but we expect them to be back up by 5 pm EST)

 

If you are a customer, the support future looks bright. (At least we hope so.)

If you are on the company side of things, you need to be thinking about how to get to this future. (Please, we're begging you, make it better.)

HUGE KUDOS to the Dell team for a) hosting the event and treating us all like rock stars and b) sharing so much of the information and learning. Incredibly cool thing to do!

Winning at Customer Support: Four trends to consider

I was delighted to be Dell's guest at their recent Customer Support Think Tank held in Austin in June 2012. This is the third of four posts about that event.

 

Discussing mobile in a breakout group

 

Four top trends were identified, and each was chewed over by a small group who reported back. Here's what's on the minds of the people there (a smart bunch, the discussions were amazingly rich!)

Gamification

Find a consumer somewhere -- or a business person -- who thinks support issues are fun. Good luck. What is more fun is helping people not need support in the first place. And one way to do that is to make the learning experience more fun, to reward the learning, and make the whole process engaging.

It's not about making support like a game, it's about using the principles game designers use to make things simple, easy to learn, and self-reinforcing.

Metrics

Some of these sounded kind of promising to me, like measuring the overall health of a support community. For example, what percentage of questions go unanswered? What percentage of questions are answered by the community versus the company?

Customer LIfetime Value and ye olde Net Promoter Score came up, of course, but generally people were talking about the need to expand and seek new and better metrics.

Tools + Technology

This group saw massive potential for improved systems, by incorporating more information into CRM (and making that available to support systems), by helping the customer help support, by avoiding many of the things that make us all mental (giving your support number over and over, re-identifying yourself, etc.)

Triage was a concept that made sense too. Deliver support appropriate to the nature/ severity / risk of the problem, and the value of the customer.

What about technology that diagnoses the problem for you -- we have a little of that now, and it's lovely.

Mobile

I was in the mobile group.We talked about how growth in mobile technologies is going to make the support challenge more challenging than ever. We'll be trying to re-boot our houses and cars, not just our computers. Our refrigerator will have ordered too many cans of OJ.

All those smart devices talking to each other will add a lot of complexity.

So we won't necessarily know where the problem lies (as is often the case with business system failures -- it could be the server, the router, the software, or a mouse ate the wires)

What is clear is that people will expect the support interaction to cross devices easily, probably to live in the cloud. We talked about how executives might want the kind of mobile access that consumers have to support -- like texted updates or twitter access.

I also think (and said this in the session) that we are collectively going to get tired of having to download an individual app for everything. We will want help to be much more device-agnostic.

We wondered if things like QR codes could be used to good effect, for example by putting them on the hardware we buy, so we can easily capture and send the information needed.

Gamification group discussion led by Dave Gardner @gardner_dave

I hope this is giving you some food for thought as you consider your own organization and what it should perhaps do in the future.

Next up: what else the future holds for #winningservice

Winning at Customer Support: Internal Challenges

I was delighted to be Dell's guest at their recent Customer Support Think Tank held in Austin in June 2012. This is the second of four posts covering topics discussed. 

 

The video above is me talking about how executives keep in touch with front line support issues.

This video is Heath Johnson at Dell talking about the integration of social media into the support organization.

There are several challenges that organizations face in providing support, effectively captured by the octopus image in Allison Crow's graphic, below -- there are a lot of different people that need to coordinate to make support work well.

I see support as an integral part of what people are now buying. We don't want to change our own oil, for the most part, and everything else under the hood is far too complex to tackle on our own. Many consumer services are like this, and virtually all business services.

So support is central to the purchase decision. Even if we don't always articulate that to ourselves, or have a grasp of what we should pay for it. That is not the theory-in-use in many organizations, however.

I also see support as a major adjunct to sales and vice-versa. If I am buying a second monitor (which I recently did), I also want to know what i need to do to make it work on the existing system. If I call support, they should be able to sell me the upgraded video card.

This is rarely the case with a large business -- my phone company Bell is a good example. The people who make sales calls can't help with anything at all! And the support people can't sell you anything. This craziness came about to make things more efficient, but I'm not sure that's working.

From the viewpoint of the corporates in the room, what helps is feedback from customers. Everyone needs to know how the organization is performing for customers. Whatever your metrics are, share them widely. 

And if it's a horrible place to work, well ... don't expect your support area to be a world-beater.
Your staff are going to support customers about as well as you support them. My professional experience suggests most employees will actually work much harder at customer service and support than the company deserves -- they often have internal barriers to overcome, and no one appreciates their heroics.

One more word about heroics -- if you are keeping a lot of stories about heroic service efforts, and celebrating them with all sorts of awards, it's a good sign that you've made it too difficult somehow. A system built on heroics is not worthy of the name system.

Next up: Four trends to consider in support

Winning at Customer Support: Social Service

I was delighted to be Dell's guest at their recent Customer Support Think Tank held in Austin in June 2012. Let me tell you about it.

There are days it is seriously fun to be me, and this was one of them -- with no responsibilities to plan, facilitate or manage the event, I was free to just engage in some thought-busting conversations with a lot of seriously smart folks in a gorgeous setting. My definition of fun!

Being passionate about customer experience

What the Think Tank was all about

If you've ever bought anything from Dell, you know that their front-end experience is impressive. They want their support efforts to be world beaters, too, and have felt for some time that they are not there yet.

Remember, of course, that Dell is massive, and serving consumers, small businesses, and global behemoths. And within that diversity, there are vast differences in customer knowledge and ability to solve their own problems, and of course their actual situation. Consider a trading floor with a server down or my Mom trying to get wi-fi to work -- vastly different support scenarios.

So their challenges are not simple. Same thing with the challenges faced by some of the other corporate participants at the event, such as Wells Fargo, Threadless, Nationwide Insurance, Intuit Demandforce, Salesforce Radian6, Citrix and Symantec.

Multiple communication media have made this even more challenging. There were four big chunks of the day, beautifully captured by Allison Crow, graphic facilitator, and led by Jackie Huba.

Social Service - how to integrate social media in a scalable way

 

One of the biggest challenges I see to social media use by corporations in a operating setting is that access to social media is often shut down in the corporate network. While this might make some sense for some people, managers are not going to become social-media savvy without using it themselves.

Seriously folks -- you want a social media strategy from people who are only supposed to use it in their free time? And the person they are working for has read a few reports on social media, but doesn't even have a Facebook account. Total fail in my view.

It seems that the reason some customers are turning to places like Twitter is because they are unwilling to navigate the complexities of finding someone to help, whether it's the IVR or the website. Future support needs to be a lot more intuitive.

I think most of the people encountering support have already tried self-help. They have looked at the FAQ, they may have phoned a friend. If their problem was that simple, they wouldn't be calling you, or desperately shouting out on Twitter.

There are a lot of things working today, however, and we talked about a few of these.

Among the things that are working well today, IMHO -- a lot of companies are making good use of video, especially YouTube ("Here's how to install a widget").

Support communities are also working, when they are well managed. It's not fair to expect your customers to do the job for you, though. You need to pay attention to the community and USE the information. Buff up your FAQs as a minimum, improve your installation instrucftions, and fix things that are just not working. Then tell the community, "hey, we listened."

Next post: managing the internal challenges.

 

Full disclosure: yes, Dell did pay for my airfare and put me up in the lovely W Hotel, but my opinions came free of charge.

 

Talking like a person in an age of your-call-is-important-to-us: how to earn social capital

I had an unhappy interaction with some new software yesterday, leading to a desperately written support e-mail, and a calm and pleasant response that turned it all around. (Thank you Mr. O at Tracker for being such a class act.)

In brief, I needed to convert some large Word reports stuffed with scintillating graphics into a PDF so the client's team could read them. Converting using the built in Word tools wasn't giving me the result I wanted. So I went searching for the paid tools over at Tracker.

Well... it's all in the graphic below

The bubbles show what happened from the customer point of view. The commentary to the right is my professional analysis. Look how complicated this simple set of events is!  How quickly a promoter changed into a potential detractor (in Net Promoter Score speak).

When I upgraded, how would the internal company metrics look at that event? As a mistake in the first purchase? Probably not. Most metrics treat additional purchases as evidence of loyalty in some way. ("x% of customers go on to purchase a second product within x days ...")

When real helpfulness is rare, it should be measured

Where it gets interesting for me is the incredible response from support. Incredible because it is so rare. Incredible because this is a way to earn real loyalty. They can earn it through their product and their people.

I'm wondering if any organization has started recognizing (in an HR sense) earned media or social media. They should. When this post gets picked up by the company's social media tracking tools (surely they are tracking socmed?) what will happen?

One of the reasons I'm pondering this whole thing is that I've been invited to participate in Dell's Customer Support Think Tank event in Austin on June 25th. And this little incident will be one of the things I'll be thinking about, talking about and deconstructing.

 

Resources

You can find out more about social capital in a few places. Here are a couple that I found useful.

Definitions and key academic influences

Social capital and winning back lost customers. Heavy going, but very interesting.