CRM Buzz Interview with Hoyt Mann

I was honored with an interview by the Business Software Advisor regarding self service on the web and assisted knowledge base searching. The interview can be found here.

It is my opinion that the future of customer service and support lies in using multiple channels for customer service and yet give the customer as much assistance with their problem as possible. The assisted knowledge base search helps customers find the answers they need without sifting through a large number of articles. It guides them to pertinant articles within the knowledge base itself, in the FAQ, the forums, the notices, and other places using a single universal search and keywords garnered from the customer's issue. This negates frustrations the customer may have with attempting to use the knowledge base for help.

One of our other new features is subscription to forums so customers can keep up on topics they are interested in rather than visit the Self Service Center to determine if anything new has been posted that is relevant to them. It all comes down to creating a pleasant customer experience and being favored by their loyalty in return.

Why I Would Call It Quits Too

DestinationCRM ran an interesting article entitled Calling It Quits about the tremendous increase in contact center agents leaving their positions or having high absenteeism rates. One of the ways given to combat this trend is to empower the agent to actually be able to answer the customer's question rather than simply put them on hold for someone else.

As it happens, I had to call my internet service provider today to report a service outage. The contact center agent I reached obviously had been given a script to follow for this scenario and she was going to follow it no matter what I had to say. She insisted on going through a lot of troubleshooting steps that I had already performed before calling her but she apparently didn't believe I was capable of doing it right. I repeatedly told her it was not an issue with my equipment and that everything was fine a short time before. But because there was no notice on her end about an outage, we were by golly going to troubleshoot my system. Sad to say, I got disgusted and hung up on her. A few minutes later I called back only to hear an automated message about a service outage in my area. Imagine that!

Was this contact center agent empowered? No. Putting a script into an agent's hand to deal with specific scenarios does not empower anyone to do good customer service. Good customer service would have meant listening to me instead of treating me like I was unintelligent. Good customer service would have meant doing a simple test to see if my modem could be pinged. Good customer service would have meant recognizing that I was becoming upset and abandoning the script in favor of a more helpful approach. This agent did none of those things and probably has never been trained how to be an independent thinker; instead she is required to follow a script no matter what.

I don't know how she felt about being hung up on or if she understood what had happened. But if I were her, I would be feeling frustrated at being tied to a single mode of operation without the training to deviate when it was warranted. I would probably become just another statistic in articles like the one above. I have no doubt she will be one soon.

It's Customer Service, Not Rocket Science

I have done a lot of research lately about the customer service experience. The prevailing idea that it all boils down to is:

Providing great customer service is nothing more than treating others as you wish to be treated.

That seems simple enough. No great technical breakthrough, just plain old good manners and the desire to help. But how do you know if this is happening at your company?

In a word (well, two): Mystery Shopper.

That's right. Just like people are hired to sneak around retail stores spying on everything, you need to be a Mystery Shopper at your company.

• Try using the company website. Is it easy to use? What could be improved?
  
  
• Try to purchase something through the same channels available to your customers. Good, bad, or indifferent?
  
  
• Call in to your own customer support line and see how the agent you get treats you. Not only that, go sit in customer service and listen into phone calls for a few hours. Check out the emails customer service receives. Do anything you can think of to find out first hand how it feels to be a customer for your own company.
  

You can't fix what you don't know is broken. Define the problems. Find the solutions. Do this all over again in 3-6 months to see if anything is different.

Here is a solution to get you started:
www.phaseware.com

PhaseWare is part of the answer to Vince Kellen's "Fourth Age"

Vince Kellen, of the Cutter Consortium, blogged June 7 about a "Fourth Age" in the evolution of organizational structure. The first three evolutions encompassed the changes from owners controlling their organizations themselves to the military type top-down organizational structure to today's structure that is becoming flatter and is less manager-employee oriented; instead it is powered by individual contributors known as "information-based knowledge specialists".

The Third Age organization, as illustrated by Mr. Kellen, is cross-functional in nature. Presumably knowledge sharing comes along with it. Unfortunately it seems we haven't quite embraced this type of structure due to several issues, including the need to share information over distances. But we are getting there and as we become more decentralized, more highly connected through currently available technology we can start to move to that Fourth Age.

One aspect of that fourth age is beginning to appear. A rapidly growing component to many customer support and help desk solutions is the self service center and the web portal for mobile employees. The self service component can contain forums for customers and agents to interact, knowledge bases open to customers and agents to answer questions about common issues and operational techniques, even ways for customers to log their own trouble tickets without going through a phone agent, telling their story, and the details being input by a third party. The portal for mobile employees allows agents who are not locally based or who are in continuous movement to access the customer support system just as though they were in the office.

PhaseWare's Self Service Center and TechWeb components contain all of these functions and are easily integrated into the Tracker and Event Engine system which, in turn, is readily integrated into supporting systems such as e-mail solutions and databases. The collaborative tools of today's information technology, just like social networking, have made possible a truly decentralized business that is efficient and cohesive without losing all human contact. These technologies bring customers and business together in a way never before possible. With careful deployment, the customer can partner with business rather than simply consume a business' output or await resolutions for issues without any knowledge of their status. Remote agents can come together and access the same information as those who are at an office computer. Resources are used more efficiently which increases the ROI of the systems that make this cultural change possible within a company.

With multiple channels of contact, business and customer come closer together with the convenience of technology without wasting time and money. PhaseWare, Inc. is a place to start.