What Customer Service and Groundhog Day Have in Common

I'm not talking about this groundhog day, although it will be nice to see what he says. I'm talking about this one. In short - often the same issues with a product or service come up a lot, especially when the service is technology-related.

If you're trying to solve that very same problem by phone, you know that you'll have a great number of inbound calls that will need to go pretty much the same way.

The tech community has been using forums and discussion boards for this kind of thing for a number of years now. It's become a cultural trait of the profession to be able to support each other and share.

You know that when customers help each other instead of calling the company, both your number of inbound customer requests and product returns decrease. With a publicly available community, customers may also be able to find out which products or services best suit their needs more readily.

There are other ways to avoid groundhog day for your customers with social media:

• When you display reviews on your site, positive and negative, customers may feel the information you provide is more reliable. You know that we all research online before making a purchase. One point that many companies struggle with is that of displaying negative comments or reviews on their site. Customers are more than capable of finding that information on their own. Transparency actually goes in favor of your company.

• When you either build or join a community, which is more likely to help you solve recurring problems in many ways. And it's a place where you'll be returning more often, especially when the community is organic and developed around customers needs and not the company's services. The archives in such sites are more easily maintained and refreshed by a group instead of a person - this was the idea behind Wikipedia and wikis. The side effect to you is that a community may increase loyalty to your brand.

• Start a blog and share the commonly asked questions and known issues on a rolling basis. You know the issues that surround your product or service from inbound calls and emails. Why not share the learning publicly? If a blog is not an option, how about finding out where your customers go to talk about the issues and respond there?

Many companies may feel they don't really need to dedicate resources to customer support. That's a shame, as their brands will suffer in direct proportion to their unwillingness to incorporate what they learn from customer conversations into their way of doing business.

This is especially a challenge for those companies that provide services that are free to users. How does customer support for free services work? We're exploring that question today at Fast Company expert blog. There are several options:

1. Make users wait for the service to come back online - the risk is that they may go elsewhere
2. Sign up at Get Satisfaction and use that service to communicate with customers - the upside is that you are being seen doing something
3. Blog about it - pros it becomes a destination for customers to learn about potential issues and you can engage in a discussion there; cons you may need to wait to find out yourself what happened before you post lest you seem to have no clue and customers may speculate elsewhere on what happened
4. Build or join a community or a forum

These are just a couple of ideas to get you started. Once you experiment with and search for existing forums or communities that your own company could join, you will hone into what works for you. There is a happy ending to groundhog day - both for your customers and for the bottom line.

[perhaps we can modify the Wikipedia entry of "Groundhog Day" to include a definition for customer service?]

Comments

[pascal bouvier]

i have been particularly interested in get satisfaction, and may implement for my startup. the only trick is how to and when to scale for a startup, which i have not figured out yet. presumably there is a method to the madness in terms of providing for customer support in a social media context. first start with a simple feedback form, then slowly add various features a la get satisfaction - just don't know yet, and maybe depending on the size of the biz, the process may be different. my point is that there are costs and required resources associated with providing a full fledged online social media flavored customer support platform -the company employees whose time and salaries will be dedicated to monitoring, moderating and sometimes answering customers being one of the main costs for example. next to a groundhog day for customers, there is nothing worse than a poorly scaled and executed customer service based on a community platform.

[Valeria Maltoni]

There absolutely are costs associated with social media - that is one of the biggest misconceptions companies seem to have. I like the fact that you're thinking about the process, which is so very important.

The other great point you make is that one should not undertake something to do it poorly. I provided an example of that with Skype on Twitter a couple of weeks back.

[Mike Cichon]

At Helpstream we've found a community approach to customer service can result in a 20-50% decrease in case volume. Some of this comes from customer Q&A -- in other words, customers helping customers. But as much as 40% or so of self service issue resolution comes from open access to a knowledge base. Providing customers a way to contribute content is key however because most service teams tend to be so busy working with customers, they don't have time to develop content. With the right tools you can not only capture content from customers, but also from your case system and Q&A threads. The combination of all these elements working together (community, knowledge base, and case management) is a key enabler. For more information on this topic, check out John Ragsdale's (Research director of the SSPA) Eye on Service blog -- 1) Support’s Perfect Storm Rages on, and 2) 2009 is a bad year to be a cost center. I'm certain you will find that making self service work via community collaboration is a critical ingredient to lowering cost to serve while providing an excellent customer experience.

[Linda Forrest]

Another way that customer service, BAD customer service, resembles groundhog day is when one calls a customer service hotline, jumps through the IVR hoops, inputting phone numbers, account numbers, selecting what branch of customer service you'd like to speak with, holding indefinitely to be met with an agent whose first question is... your phone number, your account number, why you're calling... This repetition is enough to drive an already frustrated customer away. We work with an award winning company, ciboodle, whose CRM software aims to eliminate these headaches. I mention it not simply to promote my client but also to express my personal frustration as a consumer at knowing that there is a better way and it hasn't been implemented by every company everywhere!

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Mike - most of the content in the community knowledge base saves a company time and funds that would have gone to address routine questions. The content helps bring people back to the site - being user generated, it's relevant. Thank you for the resources, I will definitely look into both.

@Linda - we can all relate to your scenario, I'm sure. In my experience, making a decision in an organization, especially a highly layered and hierarchical one (does the phone tree suggest that is the case? I think so), is at best difficult. It starts with whose decision it was to go with that, the investment already made, the systems that support it (or not), etc. My educated guess is that breaking through to provide a different experience can be a challenge.