News
 8
Secrets for Successful Web-Based Customer Service
Effective web-based customer service is a very
achievable goal with significant potential rewards.
It simply requires the right principles, practices
and tools. By surveying today's most effective
practitioners, RightNow Technologies (Bozeman MT)
offers these 8 basic attributes that make web-based
customer support work:
1. Make sure your web site can "listen" to customers
Every successful salesperson knows the most
important part of their job is listening to the
customer—for both explicit and implicit messages.
Web sites should do the same. Explicit messages are
clear requests for specific information. Implicit
messages are patterns of queries or usage that
provide clues about customer needs and interests.
Effective online service requires mechanisms and/or
practices that give an attentive ear to both types
of messages.
2. Give customers what they want—quickly
Once you've "heard" what kind of information
customers want, you have to give it to them—quickly.
The web is all about immediacy. So whether it's
getting new information posted onto your site or
making the information that's already on there
easier to understand, you must optimize your ability
to respond to your customers' needs with online
content. Don't confuse this with the rapid posting
of the information that marketers want to put on
your site. Quality customer service requires the
rapid posting of content that is completely
customer-driven.
3. Make customer service resources easy to find and
easy to use
Great content isn't much use if customers can't find
it easily. That's why it's essential to provide
customers with highly intuitive search tool that let
them pinpoint the answers they need with a minimum
number of steps. It's also smart to maintain a "Top
20" list of current hot topics that customers can
view as soon as they come to your main self-service
page.
4. Integrate all your communications channels
Different customers will use different
communications channels at different times. You
don't want them to get different answers depending
on which channel they happen to use. So it's
important to leverage your knowledge base across all
channels. Ideally, the information you provide on
the web should be exactly the same as what you
provide via your live operators, voice self-service,
email and chat.
5. The "80/20" rule
To be successful at web-based customer service, you
don't have to be able to answer every conceivable
customer question online. More than 80% of all
customer questions are usually answered by just 20%
of a support knowledge base. And many companies
achieve 97-plus percent self-service rates with
relatively limited—but highly
customer-driven—content that they've developed over
time by learning what customers need. That's why
it's more important to get started with web-based
customer service than it is to first develop the
"perfect" knowledge base. Smart companies get the
most important information up right away, and then
refine their content over time.
6. Let your customers rate you
You can't improve what you don't measure. So the
companies that are most successful with web
self-service provide customers with a way to rate
the quality of the answers they find online. Using
this feedback, content that isn't useful can be
quickly weeded out—thereby improving the overall
effectiveness of the site.
7. Use rich content wherever appropriate
A picture is often worth a thousand words.
Photographs, diagrams, and animations can therefore
be very useful in helping customers solve their most
common problems. Creating these types of graphics
can help further improve the effectiveness of your
online customer service system.
8. Connect the online world to the real world
For retailers, banks, and many others types of
companies, it's important to link online operations
with real-world facilities. After all, many
customers come to a web site specifically to find a
local store, branch office or service center. One of
the best ways to do this is to provide a searchable
database of real-world locations on your web site.
It's also a good idea to supplement street addresses
with maps and driving directions to ensure that your
customers can get where they want to go without
getting lost.
- RightNow
Technologies (www.RightNow.com)
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Melissa Data
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