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TEN SECRETS FOR SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER SERVICE The Insider’s Guide CustomerService Service on The Insider’s Guide to to Customer on the theWeb Web Ten Secrets for Successful Customer Service Ten Secrets for Successful Customer Service by Greg Gianforte, RightNow Technologies  by Greg Gianforte, RightNow Technologies © 2005 RightNow Technologies, Inc. Contents Executive Summary 1 Why Web-Based Customer Service? 2 Web-Based Service Innovators: Cases-In-Point 3 Ten Secrets for Successful Web-Based Customer Service 5 Bottom Line Benefits of Web-Based Customer Service 7 What’s Your Company’s SQ? 8 RightNow Service™: Customer Service Made Easy 10 Industry Response 12 About the Author 13 About RightNow Technologies 13 © 2005 RightNow Technologies, Inc. Executive Summary The web is a great place to do customer service. It's where people go to find answers fast. It provides a way for customers to navigate their way through lots of content to find the particular piece of information they need. It's open seven days a weeks, 24 hours a day. In fact, according to industry observers, web-based customer service is one of the biggest business opportunities on the web. Unfortunately, most companies fail to effectively exploit the web's full potential as a customer service vehicle. Some fail because they don't recognize just how powerful of a business tool web-based customer service can be. Some fail because they never develop a practical process for capturing the information their customers want and quickly getting it onto their site—or they fail to keep such information properly updated. Others fail to adequately integrate web self-service with their email and call center channels. Others leave out some of the key functions that make web customer service really "click"—such as store locators or remote web session control. There is a cost for such failure. Companies that don't develop effective Internet customer service wind up spending far more on customer support than their competitors—as much as 20 times more per incident. That’s because, without effective customer service, companies must rely on their over-burdened, high-cost call centers to answer even the most routine and repetitive customer inquiries. Companies with poor service also lose customers, since web users get frustrated quickly and head elsewhere. Web-based customer service is a great way to habituate customers to using your web site, thereby creating other opportunities to lower transaction costs, execute cross- and up-selling strategies, and otherwise leverage the Internet as a business tool. And, because it’s so scalable, web-based customer service offers an extremely cost-effective solution for dealing with the inevitable peaks and valleys in your service incident volume. That’s why web-based service has become such a hot topic for business and technology managers alike. This white paper distills the experience and best practices of successful webbased service implementers from a wide range of industries. It also provides a simple test for determining your company's Service Quotient, or "SQ." With this insider information, you'll be able to plan and implement your own customer service strategy—and join the ranks of successful Internet service pioneers who have significantly lowered their per-incident customer support costs while consistently delighting their customers and strengthening their Internet presence. 1 © 2005 RightNow Technologies, Inc. Why Web-Based Customer Service? As it becomes increasingly popular and well traveled, the web is rapidly changing. Just a few short years ago, it was enough for a business to put up a site that had a modest amount of information on its products or services, with a phone number to contact if the visitor wanted to order something or ask questions. This static "brochureware" content treated the web as an online Yellow Pages, where the main idea was to make sure you were properly listed. Things have really changed. Now, the web is an intensively interactive medium and an online extension of the business itself. Companies use the web to buy, sell, recruit staff, solicit bids and make referrals. It's also a great place to support customers and forge closer relationships with them. That means it's also a great place to lose customers, too. How do you lose customers on the web? The same way you lose them in the "real" world: you don't respond to their needs. Unfortunately, many executives who would have a heart attack if their sales and service staffs were unresponsive or ignorant about the company’s products don’t show the same concern about having an unresponsive or ignorant web site. Their web sites can’t answer customers’ questions. They take too long to reply to customer emails—or they fail to reply at all. Keep in mind that a fundamental aspect of the web's appeal is the immediate gratification it offers. When someone comes to your web site, they want to quickly find the information they need to make a buying decision or solve a problem. So web visitors are very sensitive to delays. It may be only a matter of seconds before a visitor gives up his or her search, and tries looking elsewhere. This puts tremendous pressure on the two groups who develop web content: marketing and customer service. They must somehow anticipate the possible needs of all types of visitors, from clueless newcomers to long-time customers. This is clearly a tough job, and in today’s resource-constrained business environment, it’s not a job that anyone wants to spend a lot of time doing. Fortunately, you don’t have to. Internet customer service innovators have proven that you can answer a tremendous percentage of customers’ questions online without spending money and time you don’t have. But before we look at how they accomplished this, let’s look at who they are and what they’ve been able to do. 2 © 2005 RightNow Technologies, Inc. Web-Based Service Innovators: Cases-In-Point As more companies deploy web-based customer service, their successes demonstrate the bottom line business benefits gained by effectively supporting customers online. Here is just a sampling of companies that use automated, web-based customer support to lower operational costs and significantly improve customer satisfaction. Allied Telesyn: Self-Service for High-Tech Questions When global communications equipment provider Allied Telesyn entered the home PC networking market, it found itself having to support a large number of novice users. Call center operators had to answer repetitive questions as simple as, "What's an IP address?" Because of the technical sophistication of Allied’s operators, support calls cost the company around $50. Allied needed to reduce these calls while still supporting its new products. Its web-based solution worked. Allied experienced a 15% drop in the first month of its implementation and 20% the second month. Use of the company’s online support page climbed by almost 25%, with customers commenting regularly on how much they like being able to go to the site anytime to find what they want. The company has saved $25,000 per month through the reduction of phone calls alone. New York DMV: The Web Does the Work NY Department of Motor Vehicles supports New York State’s 10 million drivers with a complete range of services including licensing and vehicle registration. The agency’s web site is its busiest “office,” receiving almost 16,000 hits per day. Its original goals for self-service were quite modest. If better use of the web could reduce email traffic by 30%, then the agency’s investment in self-service would have paid for itself. But in the first week of deployment, email volume dropped 33%. After a few small changes to the verbiage on the site, the agency achieved another 18% reduction. Further refinements eventually resulted in a total email reduction of 88%. Just as remarkable as this huge reduction in email volume is the percentage of site visitors who find answers to their own questions without having to send an email or make a phone call to DMV personnel. A full 99.2% of all site visitors who look for answers are now able to find them without any assistance. The result: Huge operational cost savings for the agency and significantly improved service to the state’s drivers—who can now get immediate answers to their questions 24 hours a day. 3 © 2005 RightNow Technologies, Inc. Wolters Kluwer Health: Saving the Call Center International medical publisher Wolters Kluwer Health was moving its business online to cut costs and streamline distribution. Online customers, however, ask lots of questions via email. Wolters Kluwer Health couldn’t respond to those emails quickly enough, so customers began picking up the phone. The call center got swamped and customer service began to suffer. Fortunately, they quickly implemented web self-service to address the problem. Visitors to the Wolters Kluwer Health site were able to successfully find answers to their own questions. Within weeks, they experienced a 22% reduction in call volume. That brought phone response times down under a minute—which, in turn, meant that 7,000 fewer calls were being abandoned before they could be answered. That’s a huge improvement in the quality of the company’s customer service. 4 © 2005 RightNow Technologies, Inc. Ten Secrets for Successful Web-Based Customer Service As these companies and others prove, effective customer service is actually a very achievable goal—even for companies with relatively limited resources. It simply requires the right principles, practices and tools. By surveying today's most effective customer service practitioners, RightNow Technologies discovered ten basic attributes that make web-based customer support work: 1. 2. Make sure your web site "listens" to customers Every successful salesperson knows the most important part of their job is listening—both for explicit and implicit messages from the customer. Web sites should do the same. Explicit messages are clear requests for specific information. Implicit messages are patterns of queries or usage that imply a difficulty in finding some type of content. Effective customer service requires mechanisms and/or practices that ensure an attentive ear to both types of messages from customers. 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 responding to incoming emails, your service solution must enhance your ability to respond quickly. Don’t confuse this with the rapid posting of information marketers want to put on your site. Quality customer service requires the rapid posting of customer-driven content. 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 content has to be well-organized into hierarchical “containers” that reflect the way users actually think about and search for content—not how a web site manager guesses they might. It’s also important to always give customers the ability to turn to email, live chat or a live operator. 4. Integrate all your communications channels Different customers will use different communications channels at different times. So it’s important to be able to leverage your knowledge base across all channels and to be able to track incidents across all channels as well. That way, when customers call you after exchanging emails with you, they won’t have to repeat everything they explained in their emails—and vice versa. The result: happier customers and faster problem resolution. 5. The "80/20" rule Successful customer service doesn’t require the ability to answer every conceivable customer question online. More than 80% of all customer questions are usually answered by just 20% of a support knowledge 5 © 2005 RightNow Technologies, Inc. base. In fact, studies show that web-based customer service implementers have been able to answer 86% of all customer queries online with a relatively small, focused set of knowledge items. It’s more important to get started with a web-based customer service solution than it is to develop the “perfect” service/support knowledge base. Smart companies get the most important information up first, and then add to it over time. 6. Let your customers rate you You can’t improve what you don’t measure. That’s why it’s important to let users rate the effectiveness of the knowledge items they find on your web site as well as any email replies received in response to their requests for help. Using this feedback, you quickly weed out content that’s not helpful—thereby improving your site’s effectiveness as a service/support resource for customers. 7. Leverage your knowledge base It’s worth creating a knowledge base just for web-based service; but you can achieve even greater return on investment (ROI) by leveraging that knowledge base across all your customer interaction channels (i.e. web, email, chat and phone). For example, the same knowledge base customers use to get their questions answered online can also be used by new call center operators as an information resource—helping them become more productive more quickly. 8. Connect the online world to the real world One of the most important strategic imperatives for retailers, companies that sell through distributors and many others, is to link online operations with real-world facilities. After all, many customers come to a web site as a prelude to visiting a store or service center. And one of the best ways to do this is to include a searchable database of real-world locations in your online service resources. It’s also important to supplement street addresses with maps and driving directions to ensure that your customers can get where they want to go without getting lost! 9. Consider hosted applications At a time when companies have a limited ability to buy, implement and manage new technologies, many successful web-based service implementers are turning to a hosted model. This approach eliminates the capital cost of software and hardware as well as the staffing requirements associated with implementing and maintaining a web-based customer service solution. Hosted systems let companies rapidly reap the benefits of web-based service without disrupting their existing IT operations. 6 © 2005 RightNow Technologies, Inc. 10. Buy experience along with your technology Online customer service technologies can be very powerful. But you have to know what you’re doing to get the most out of them. That’s why the smart web-based service implementers look for a source of substantial customer service experience to complement the technologies they acquire. Best practices like those listed here are extraordinarily valuable. So it makes sense to partner with someone who can apply those best practices to your company’s online/offline customer service initiatives. These ten simple principles can make the difference between successful, high-ROI customer service and a failure to take full advantage of the Internet as a medium for superior customer service. In a market climate where every competitive advantage counts, few companies can afford to miss out on the outstanding bottom line benefits that effective web-based customer service offers. Bottom Line Benefits of Web-Based Customer Service Companies that implement effective web-based customer service solutions find they benefit in numerous ways—many of them totally unexpected. The bottom line rewards they’ve experienced include: Reduced cost of customer service When customers help themselves at a web site instead of having to call a conventional help desk, savings can range from $10-$45 per incident. By continuously adding customer-driven content to the site, the percentage of customers who can help themselves online also increases, dramatically reducing overall customer support costs. Faster customer service and increased satisfaction People hate to sit on "hold." When they can help themselves on a web site, they can get faster answers to their most pressing questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They also develop the perception that the company site they're visiting has a good handle on its customers’ needs—thereby strengthening their overall confidence in that company. Increased use of lower cost online transaction channels For most companies, sales over the web provide lower transaction costs than those made over the phone or in a retail location. Good customer service encourages customers to use the web site more often, which means they become more likely to use it for transaction and support. Web-based service thus lowers your company’s cost of sales. The ability to scale to meet peak seasonal volumes A big problem many companies with seasonal patterns of buying often face is ramping up to support peak seasonal volumes. Usually, this means adding 7 © 2005 RightNow Technologies, Inc.