Survey Shows Customers REALLY Want Quick Customer Service Response

May 10th, 2013 | | Customer, Customer Experience Strategy
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According to a recent study conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Zendesk, customers value a quick response to an issue even if it’s not the answer they’re hoping to get. In fact, the actual outcome of a resolution scores pretty far down on the list of customer satisfaction concerns while things like having to explain a problem to multiple people irk customers like crazy.

“Survey participants who had indicated they had a good customer service experience were asked what specifically made that experience good. The most important factor cited by participants was a quick resolution of the problem (69%) followed by being helped by a pleasant person (65%). Interestingly, the actual outcome of the problem was least important with less than half (47%) indicating that their customer service interaction was good because of the outcome.”

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The survey results don’t detail what channels respondents used to access support (phone, email, online documentation, etc).  It’s clear, however, that providing users with multiple access points vastly increases the chances you’ll give them a great customer service experience.

Ideally, you’ll have a robust knowledge base filled with the most current product documentation so customers can serve — and help — themselves. On top of that, of course, you need a grab bag of other access points: a toll-free number, online chat, a dedicated support email address, and so on.  Oh, and you’ll need people to staff and manage all these various channels.

Clearly, the most cost-effective customer support methods take advantage of stuff you’re already doing elsewhere around the company. Your tech writers are assembling documentation and manuals, sales and marketing are showing customers around your product, and community managers are helping users find their way around best practices. Harness all that smart content and put it on your website!

Dimension Research’s survey tells us that a rapid response is a primary (if not predictable) desire of customers who reach out for support. You already have the answers your users need so make sure they, and you, can find it all quickly.

Read more about the survey’s results and findings on Zendesk’s website.

Does Your Organizational Chart Torpedo Your Customer Service?

March 14th, 2013 | | CRM, Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post
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Before you read too much farther, go get a copy of your organizational chart. We’ll wait.

Now, take a good look at it. If you’re like most businesses, your org chart is a pretty standard affair. Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support all have their nice linear slots, with everyone reporting to the CEO at the end of the day. Marketing shepherds your brand around the industry space while the sales team runs around gathering customers. Sales hands off new customers to Support to field post-purchase issues, and so the cycle goes.

That’s a perfectly respectable business strategy but is it the best option? Maybe not. The giant, gaping hole in this inherently reactionary process is that it doesn’t factor in customer experience. Marketing keeps busy behind the scenes building brand awareness and getting eyeballs on your product. Sales teams establish preliminary relationships with potential users but until those users become actual customers, they’re not basking in the glow of a brilliant product support experience. Support teams are fantastic for responding to user issues, but they’re not in the best position to proactively teach your users to become product experts in their own right.

Let’s dust off that organizational chart and look at who’s ideally suited to oversee a grand customer experience: The sales team. Think about it. Sales is in a great spot to help train customers to become their own product experts and position it as an additional selling point. Sales can pre-emptively show users how to get the the right answers with a minimum of hassle instead of simply handing over a toll-free number for the help desk after closing the sale. After all, if you’ve spent a bunch of time and money creating an exceptional product help system, you want people to use it.  Given a choice between diving into phone-tree hell that’s rife with bad hold music and knowing where to grab answers for themselves, which option do you think your customers want?

Getting Sales involved the customer experience doesn’t detract from the valuable input Support and Marketing brings to the table, it enhances it. Support personnel are a bottomless well of product knowledge and the marketing department knows how to capture a customer’s attention. Sales is the ribbon that ties it all together.

If you need more incentive to let the sales team lead the charge toward outstanding customer experience, consider the positive impact it can have on your revenue stream. Christine Crandall, President of New Business Strategies, says sharing the customer experience workload might seem unfair, but an all-hands-on-deck approach is critical to keeping users happy.

“Marketing should share responsibility for revenues and customer experience, but in a recent Eloqua  whitepaper only nine percent of marketers surveyed felt customer experience was the most important measurement of their ROI… Maybe Support should take more responsibility for customer’s lifetime experience, but that department is usually staffed with technical, rather than business, experts and measured on the speed of ‘one-and-done’ instead of persistent satisfaction and engagement.
“So it falls to you Sales. Whether you like it or not, to deliver on the revenue targets you’re beholden to. You’ll need to lead the entire organization to a customer-centric approach; sponsor research on the buyer’s journey, use your customer relationships to understand how the definition of value evolves over time, get the rest of your peers to change their ways to consistently deliver that value, and transform your own cold-callers into relationship stewards.”

If the thought of an org chart sea change terrifies you, start small. Come up with one or two ways Sales can tackle an aspect of your customer experience strategy and test the waters. The worst case scenario is you’ll need to retool ideas until you figure out what works right. The best case scenario is that you’ll have happy, loyal customers who love your product and the way you support it.

Image: cliff1066™

Where You Listen to Customers is as Important as How You Listen

March 12th, 2013 | | Customer, Customer Experience Strategy
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The topic du jour in the consumer industry these days is how technology is changing the landscape of the customer service experience. That’s true, but it’s not necessarily a cause for hand-wringing. Consider it the new cost of doing business. Customer experience consultant Xavier Rault says:

Because online shopping does not allow the consumer to physically handle the product before making a purchase nor is it as easy to ask questions as it would be in a brick and mortar retail establishment, people now rely on the opinions of other consumers more so than anything else. Like the shot heard around the world, consumer complaints can and do make a difference.

The typical communication methods for internet-savvy consumers are forums and social media networks. That’s where you’ll find lots of chatter about product perception, how to troubleshoot issues, and, yes, complaints. They’re not ideal environments for customers to talk about your product or service, but they’re not going away anytime soon. So what’s a CEO to do? Well, to coin a phrase, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

As we’ve mentioned before, it makes good business sense to corral consumer discourse by leading users to your environment to engage with each other. The goal isn’t to silence your customers, it’s to learn from them. Listen to what they’re talking about, what they need, and what they’re looking for so you can deliver it.

What does that delivery system look like? Ideally it provides real-time information that updates synchronously everywhere; support ticket and call center agent systems, online product documentation and knowledge bases, in-app help docs, and so on. Everywhere. It’s terrific when customers talk about and question your product so give them space to do that. At the end of the day, though, make sure the answers they walk away with are from you so they’re current, complete, and most of all, accurate. Let your help content become your customer communication channel.

If you think providing this kind of exceptional customer experience isn’t worth it, think again. The consumer playing field is nearly level at this point. There are very few ways left to stand out in the crowd so businesses are winning over — and keeping — customers with great customer service.

Do a quick mental inventory of the amount of customer loyalty programs that vie for your attention every time you shop. Every store from pharmacies, airlines and supermarkets, to home improvement retailers and gas stations want you to pledge your unending affection to them. They’re willing to cough up all kinds of incentives to keep you from shopping anywhere else. Consumers know this and they’ll take their dollars to the businesses that consistently do right by them. A superior customer experience is a loyalty program in itself because it incentivizes repeat business.

Since we’re talking about repeat business, let’s take a minute to acknowledge a very real benefit to great customer service: It gives companies a chance to offer users additional products or services. It’s gauche to suggest you should only offer great customer service as a means to increase sales or upsell to your users. Let’s be realistic, though. Companies that don’t maximize income stream opportunities won’t be in business for long. There’s nothing disingenuous about profiting from a favorable rapport with your customers — it’s all in how you manage the relationship.

If your engagement seems shallow and superficial to users, they’ll take their business elsewhere. On the other hand, if your primary focus is on helping your customer, then loyalty — and more sales — will naturally follow. Let’s take Amazon, for example. There’s really no question its primary existence is to sell things to people, yet the company’s excellent customer support landed them the number one spot in MSN.com’s 2012 Customer Service Hall of Fame. While it’s true that Amazon is really good at cross-selling to its customers, their outstanding consumer experience strategy makes it a non-issue for shoppers.

Kudos to businesses that have great social media engagement or ship detailed 32-page booklets with their products. You clearly want to be there for your users and potential customers  Now take some time to figure out what else you could be doing to bring people to your doorstep — and keep them there.

Image: publicenergy

What an Oreo can Teach You About Content Strategy

February 4th, 2013 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Featured Post
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There’s already so much to read about the importance of developing good content strategy that writing another post about it seems like walking into an echo-chamber. We keep bringing it up, though, because it’s the number one thing you must do right now if you want to provide the best customer experience you’re capable of offering.

Content strategy is not only about good documentation, smart product placement, a busy blog, or an engaging Twitter account. It’s about all those things. Are you agile enough across multi-channel customer support avenues to respond quickly when surprises crop up in your industry?

Whether you watched Super Bowl XLVII or not, you’ve no doubt heard about the two biggest one-off stories of the night. The Superdome power failure and the fascinatingly delightful response by the people behind the scenes at Oreo.

Minutes after the blackout, 360i, the marketing firm behind the cookie company’s incredibly successful social media campaign, tweeted this gem. Here’s how they pulled it together so quickly:

“We had a mission control set up at our office with the brand and 360i, and when the blackout happened, the team looked at it as an opportunity,” agency president Sarah Hofstetter told BuzzFeed. “Because the brand team was there, it was easy to get approvals and get it up in minutes.”

Well, played, 360i. Well played.

Is your content that adaptable? Do you have you what you need in place to respond to unpredictable situations during your industry’s version of The Big Game? If not, you need to be proactively thinking about how your product documentation and authoritative content can be called up at a moment’s notice, before people need it.

You may never have the chance to unexpectedly solidify your place in an industry in front of millions people but that’s no reason you shouldn’t make sure your content strategy isn’t every bit as pulled together as Oreo’s. The foundation of your strategy should be rooted in product documentation, followed by well-crafted authoritative content. Then you’ll be in a perfect position to respond rapidly to whatever opportunity presents itself.

A smart content strategy doesn’t rely solely on keeping a robust set of FAQs and blog links at the ready, then stuffing it into a digital drawer on your website. No, it also requires foresight, planning, and consideration about how you’ll use your content in unexpected ways. Do a little high-level thinking, give people authority to pull the trigger quickly when opportunities crop up, and even plan out some what-if scenarios. In short, once you have the content, don’t be afraid to use it!

Image: mihoda

Crowdsourcing, Analytics, and More: This Week’s Great Reads

February 1st, 2013 | | Featured Post, News
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As we head into the weekend, let’s take a look back at some of the news, articles, and blog posts that caught our eye over the last few days. 

GeniusRocket CEO on the importance of crowdsourcing:

Peter LaMotte announced this week he is stepping down as CEO of GeniusRocket to take over Digital Practice for communication firm Levick. LaMotte, widely regarded as crowdsourcing leader, says he learned plenty about crowdsourcing during his time with GeniusRocket. In particular, “there are far more industries that can benefit from [it] than those that can’t.”

LaMotte cautions businesses against saturating a project with so many voices that the signal-to-noise ratio becomes unhelpful:

“I will be the first to say I am biased. But this idea using crowdsourcing as the infinite monkey theorem is wrong. You don’t need a hundred monkeys on typewriters, you need a dozen really smart monkeys that have been trained to use typewriters. Ok, maybe I’m getting a little too fancy for my own good. The point is, don’t waste your time with participants that don’t understand or have the capacity to solve a problem, find people to work on a crowdsourcing project that have some measurable level of skill. It saves everyone time and effort. This was the basis of curated crowdsourcing and I still stand by its value.”

 

Overlook analytics at your own peril:

We talk a lot about the importance of crowdsourcing and multi-channel engagement, but let’s not forget the role analytics play in a good customer experience. Don Keane, VP of marketing and product strategy for Angel, says crunching customer-interaction stats is a critical component of a good help system:

“In 2012, businesses began to realize the value of real-time, actionable reporting and analytics to better understand their customer interactions and understand where and how customers are choosing to connect to their business. In 2013, I expect more and more businesses will want to see the data behind their interactions with customers in order to measure results and make improvements.”

One great thing about emerging customer-engagement technologies is how much easier it is to get into the minds of the people using your product or service. If you’re trying to think of ways to access analytics and gain a competitive edge in your industry, we have a few ideas.

 

Banking on social engagement:

We’ve noted previously how forward-thinking companies are beginning to understand how deploying social help systems reduce customer churn and increase revenue with existing customers. In that vein, MindTouch client Intuit had a busy week. It acquired social payment startup Payvment and detailed plans for more than 20 new products launching in the coming months. Company CTO Brad Smith told Techcrunch:

“Social is huge for us,” said Smith. “We are looking at trends and how they will shift in the next 10 years and how companies will operate. And what we’ve found is that we no longer want to be consumers. We want to be participants: we choose what we want so we have to make our products configurable from actions to interactions. When you have 60 million customers who can share their wisdom, it can help power people as individuals.”

Intuit is a great example of a company that used to social engagement to become a leader in the personal finance industry. It will be interesting to watch where they head in the coming years as spending and investment habits change with the economy.

 

Social business is alive and kicking:

Enterprise software analyst  Michael Fauscette ponders the timely question, “Is Social Business Dead?” and concludes that nothing could be farther from the truth:

“Why is social business so compelling and why is there an irresistible force pushing businesses down this path? There are several forces at work that create pressure to change. Fundamentally though, the Internet, or more specifically the hyper-connectivity it provides, is at the bottom of all of this. The Internet opens up new economic / business models, it changes the pace of competition, it globalizes the local, it redefines the term “relationship”, it provides an open, democratized publishing platform, it offers a new way of consuming technology (cloud / everything as a service) and redefines influence. Layer on top of that the proliferation of smart mobile devices that creates an always on / always connected society with the capability to leapfrog infrastructure and remove technology barriers, even in emerging economies. Finally add in the explosion of data and the growth of systems of decision that can take that data and make sense out of it, in support of real time, rapid business decision making.”

Fauscette nails exactly why social business has exploded and why it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Be sure to check out the rest of his terrific post to learn what strategies companies need to be thinking about if they plan to make the most of this exciting proliferation of opportunities.

Image: Chapendra

5 Ways To Radically Reinvent Product Help for a Competitive Edge

November 30th, 2012 | | Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post, MindTouch, Product, Product Help, TCS Features
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Let’s assume that product documentation and support is a major pain point at your company (for most, it is). The first step is to fix it by looking at it from the outside-in. In other words, what would you do differently if you really measured the usefulness and accessibility of your documentation from your customers’ perspective? For example, why can’t they search your documentation for the answers they need? Why can’t they easily let you know whether or not they found what they were looking for? Why can’t they use your documentation to do more than find answers, but to learn and enhance their product expertise?

Solutions to address these questions may seem costly and burdensome at first, but by staying ahead of disruptive social trends and creating cutting edge innovations, MindTouch provides cost effective tools any company can use to effectively–and profitably–turn traditional approaches to product documentation and support upside-down. Let’s take a look at what product documentation and support at your company could look like.

Imagine how you could delight your customers and leapfrog your competition if. . .

  • Your customers could access a powerful search engine dedicated to helping them quickly and easily find the most relevant information from the most credible source (your company, not a 3rd party forum).
  • Your software users could access product help when and where they need it without having to leave your application.
  • Your customers could easily provide feedback and ask a question directly from within your documentation rather than having to email you or waiting on hold for a support agent.
  • You connected every piece of product documentation customers used to an analytical service that could more quickly diagnose product and documentation problems and quickly offer customers relevant guidance.
  • You could eliminate documentation silos and distribute the latest, most up to date, documentation internally so that all product information was instantly accessible to any customer-facing employee.

With MindTouch you can!

Adaptive Search MindTouch includes a powerful search engine that indexes articles, comments and even the contents of file attachments. We call it adaptive because MindTouch learns from user interactions and continues to get better as your users score content, visit, click and interact with pages. No work on your part – just let MindTouch do its job. Site admins have access to tools for analyzing search, manipulating and specifying recommended results.

 

 

F1 Help Button: Contextual Help System In just minutes you can add a contextual help system powered by MindTouch to your web applications. This allows your users to receive screen or field level contextually relevant help within your applications. Because MindTouch automatically relates content your users will get answers to their questions and be recommended content that will help them develop their expertise even further.

 

 

Feedback Tools MindTouch offers page and search result scoring and feedback mechanisms. Scoring impacts the adaptive search and informs behavioral analytics. Also, user feedback can open a support ticket in your current ticketing system via email and MindTouch will email the appropriate author or editor who can respond directly to the user’s feedback.

 

 

Analytics These powerful reports were designed to inform content strategy: which articles need to be written or improved. Reviewing user search patterns will also help product, marketing and sales teams. Marketers and content strategists value the ability to tactically execute on search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Support and product leaders rely on these reports to identify hot-spots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CRM/Ticketing Integration.  MindTouch plugs into pretty much any support ticketing system. Support agents will receive real-time search results from MindTouch. Agents can drag and drop relevant articles and click send. Your users will get the best possible solution, will know where to return to self serve and with auto-related articles they will develop their product expertise. Agents can also publish to MindTouch with a click.

 

 

 

With these capabilities, companies in every industry have improved their customers’ brand and product experience while significantly reducing documentation and support costs.

To learn more about how MindTouch can help your company get a competitive edge, gain valuable insight into your customers’ sense of product satisfaction and improve your customers’ experience: click here.

Serenic Taps MindTouch to Create Better Product Help Experiences, Increased Brand Value and Competitiveness

November 1st, 2012 | | Customer, Customer Experience Strategy

Serenic Corporation is a leading international software developer that publishes mission-critical software products for non-profit organizations, educational institutions, and governments. Serenic specializes in integrated financial management and human capital management software solutions. The company’s products are based on Microsoft technology platforms and are distributed worldwide.

Among the reasons that Serenic leads the pack in their space is not only their rapid pace of innovation toward meeting their customers’ evolving needs, it’s their keen awareness of the necessity to provide the best possible experience with their products. Toward that end, Serenic invested in improving a keystone in the customer experience…their product help.

Serenic creates many different software products, and each of those solutions requires its own help documentation. Serenic was previously using RoboHelp to create this documentation and Microsoft Compiled Help to distribute the documentation to users. However, creating, maintaining and updating and distributing user documentation was cumbersome and time consuming and behind the curve of their pace of innovation, and they needed more agile tools to create and publish product documentation and better mechanisms for keeping their customers’ needs in focus. So they turned to MindTouch.

Now, with the new MindTouch system in place, Serenic has created a new cloud-based help site that enables all customers and support staff to have instant access to the most up-to-date documentation online, all in one centralized location. And with best-in-class search funcationality from MindTouch everyone can quickly find the information they need about any given Serenic software product. Going beyond simple searches, the MindTouch solution also automatically generates links to related help topics, leading users to answers faster and expanding product expertise among their users. Furthermore, Serenic now has its’ finger on the pulse of their documentation with robust MindTouch analytics, giving them insight into what their users are looking for, if they’re finding it, and what documents are working and which need to be improved,

Serenic’s new MindTouch-powered help site also serves as a knowledge exchange tool. Serenic employees have written new troubleshooting documentation, created a new knowledge base with informational articles, and filmed new how-to videos for their users, greatly expanding the limited help offerings that were previously available. The MindTouch system also provides a simple way for Serenic to distribute the content directly to users. In addition, MindTouch is a social solution, enabling multi-channel interchange around their documentation within the company and facilitating users to provide feedback and engage with Serenic inside their product help model.

By leveraging MindTouch to make creating and publishing product help easier for them and more discoverable and engaging for their users, Serenic has increased the value of their brand and strengthened their dominant position among their competitors who have failed to make the investment in the product help experience.

To read more about Serenic’s success using MindTouch, you can get a free copy of their case study from the MindTouch Resource Center.

RightScale’s Investment in MindTouch Powered Product Help Pays Off

October 23rd, 2012 | | Customer, Featured Post
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“MindTouch gave us greater management of our knowledge base and helped us to achieve our business goals.” - Dean Onishi, Communications Manager RightScale

RightScale has been a pioneer and leader in cloud computing management since 2006. RightScale cloud management enables organizations to easily deploy and manage business-critical applications across public, private, and hybrid clouds. RightScale provides efficient configuration, monitoring, automation, and governance of cloud computing infrastructure and applications. Millions of servers have been launched with the RightScale solution by leading enterprises including the Associated Press, CBS Interactive, Intercontinental Hotels Group, PBS, and Zynga.

RightScale offers a powerful, yet complex and highly technical product which has undergone a rapid pace of innovation and improvement fueled in no small part by their agile development process and world class product team.

Why did RightScale turn to MindTouch?

First, they recognized the need for an efficient and effective communication and learning environment for their users. Second, RightScale needed a documentation authoring and publishing tool that works the way modern product and documentation teams execute. They needed a tool to produce and update product documentation that kept pace with their high capacity to innovate. Third, they wanted to do more than just push documentation at their users, RightScale wanted to develop a customer engagement channel around their product documentation and help site.

With MindTouch, RightScale achieved all their goals and realized some other key benefits as well:

Formerly, RightScale users often submitted support tickets for fairly common questions. By enabling their customers to self-support through their MindTouch powered site, RightScale immediately enjoyed a reduction in tickets and consequently lowered support costs. And for those users who need a little extra help, the social tools included in MindTouch helps RightScale engage their users at those critical moments when they need help-boosting their customer experience value and lowering churn.

Furthermore, the quality of documentation has been improved by RightScale’s use of MindTouch. MindTouch effectively expands product documentation out static product and techcomm silos, and opens it up to subject matter experts from across the enterprise and their user community, adding currency and vibrancy to their product help.

What’s more, by employing the robust analytics and customer feedback tools inside MindTouch, RightScale gained the ability to inform their content strategy to identify what documentation needed to be created or improved. It also serves to help them keep their customers’ needs in focus while developing new features and enhancements.

And lastly, but not least among the reasons they’re glad they choose MindTouch to power their product documentation and help, their MindTouch implementation has dramatically increased their opportunities to expand their client base. MindTouch gave their product documentation a life on the web, boosting their SEO rankings and driving additional new traffic to their website, and ensuring that their customers and prospects receive the most credible information from the most credible source, their company.

For a free copy of the complete RightScale Case Study click here.

To learn more about how MindTouch can help your company provide the best product help experience to your customers watch this video and request a free trial: MindTouch: The Power of Product Help

 

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