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

March 12th, 2013 | | Customer, Customer Experience Strategy
Ears-2

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

The Key to Voice-Of-Customer Program Success

September 27th, 2012 | | Customer Experience Strategy
corey

Our own Corey Ganser, Customer Experience Manager at MindTouch, has been getting a lot of attention lately as an industry CX expert. He will be a featured speaker at LavaCon this year and was recently sought out by the Waypoint Group to discuss the implementation, challenges and benefits of our customer experience program. In this interview, Corey discusses how he implemented a highly effective CX program at MindTouch, the results, and gives advice to those starting to put together their own CX programs.

Excerpt:

“Q: What prompted you to start a Customer Experience program? 

When I initially started with MindTouch I was leading the Customer Support department and I needed to understand how well MindTouch was doing in the customer’s eyes.  How could we improve?  As a smaller company, being customer-focused is critical, and a main competitive advantage.  Therefore the focus was on ensuring customers were happy and not on ‘tickets closed’ or other internal metrics. 

While our initial measure of customer success was focused on end-user interaction with the Support organization, we realized that was too narrow.  We leveraged Net Promoter – adding a periodic “relationship” questionnaire that also uses the “recommend” question – to make sure customers are happy overall.  We also ask what can we do to improve MindTouch, and that’s where we learn critical customer priorities:  While the majority of that feedback is around product enhancements, we also learn quite a bit about how to improve our communications, training, documentation, and processes.”

Click here to get the rest of this must-read article.

2 Easy Steps Toward a Customer Experience Victory Over Brand Bashing & “Badvocacy”

July 6th, 2012 | | content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post
scary-door

Last year only 1% of consumers surveyed reported that their expectations for a good customer experience were always met. The same survey reports that 89% said they moved their business to a competitor after a single poor experience. It should be noted that that rate of consumer defection is up 21% since 2006. Two things are clear here. First, consumers’ expectations for great customer service and experiences are rising, and second, companies that don’t invest in the customer experience can expect to lose their customers to those that do. The first step to take toward creating tangible customer centricity is actually often over-looked by a good number of companies, and it’s the most critical step: Product documentation and help. (Note I didn’t say tech support)

Consumers Want to Hold the Map

More than 75% of digital device and software users report that they prefer not to contact a support agent, but would rather have searchable access to product documentation and a community of subject matter experts. For companies that haven’t invested in a social product help umbrella for their customers, the prospect of gaining actionable insight into whether or not their customers’ expectations are being met is nil and absent the opportunity to proactively manage the consumer product experience companies are helpless to reverse negative experience trends.

The Cost of Blindness

Revenue Lost to Support Failure

The impact of remaining blind to this self-support trend is staggering. Recent studies concluded by Greenfield Online, Datamonitor, Ovum analysts and Genesys, concluded that companies in the United States lose about $83 billion annually in product abandonment, customer churn and defections due to customer support failures. Globally, across the 16 largest economies, the total loss to support failure was $338 billion annually. The main reason these losses continue is a lack of actionable insight to the consumers’ support expectations and the real customer experience with products.

The Rise of Badvocacy

Chart of Internet Universe-Badvocacy in Pink

Customer Experience experts now widely agree that companies using static support architectures, commonly referred to as Help 1.0 environments, are most vulnerable to consumer defection because they fail to engage the consumer and thus they’re blind to the consumer’s sense of product and product help fulfillment and thrust consumers into a support frontier dominated by 3rd party forums, blogs, “review” sites and communities that are anything but brand friendly and, more often than not, tend to promote competitive alternatives. Sites like these represent slightly more than 20% of the internet landscape. Product and marketing teams refer to these rat’s nests as “badvocate” sites, and on average, according to the public relations firm Weber Shandwick, reach an estimated 14 million people each.

Here’s two easy steps you can accomplish quickly to start winning against Badvocates:

1)      Give Documentation and Knowledge Base Assets a Life on the Web

Badvocates are well entrenched on the internet however their chief vulnerability is SEO. Badvocate sites prey on brands whose product documentation and knowledge base assets are closely held by their companies by filling the SEO void with huge amounts of “crowd sourced” content. The single most important step you can take to win back your search engine ranking is to give your documentation and knowledge base assets a life on the web. Consumers want information from the most credible source available, and that’s your company. By optimizing your help content for the web you’ll win critical ground back from Badvocates.

2)      Build an Engaging Self-Service Community

Over 90% of consumers report that they almost always look for the help they need on brand sites first. Clearly, the rise of badvocate sites is due in no small part to the lack of effective proprietary self-serve help sites. The key here is effectiveness. In order for your brand to win against badvocacy your help site must be effective in these key areas:

a)      Usability: Your site must be easy to navigate and powered by an adaptive search engine that surfaces highly relevant information to your customer along with other meaningful collateral information that deepens the expertise of the product user.

b)      Feedback: You need to know how engaged and satisfied your customers are with the information, help and documentation your providing them. Offering the opportunity to the customer to offer feedback around your product gives you the opportunity not only to engage the customer when they need help, but also provides a stream that feeds continuous improvement of the customer experience.

c)       Active Brand Participation: Users of your self-serve community have to know you’re actively listening to them and paying attention to their needs in your support channel. Although your customers may be served well by your documentation or your user community, you’ll magnify the consumer experience by actively participating with the community, recognizing and rewarding productive participation, even if it’s only to acknowledge a members contribution toward solving another’s problem.

d)      Analytics: Having continuous visibility into the performance of your self-serve community is a must to drive continuous improvement while keeping your customers’ needs in focus. It’s also essential because often the early warning signs of support hot-spots will surface within your analytics, enabling you to respond quickly and directly. Analytics will also provide actionable information regarding your customers’ sense of product fulfillment and provides a means by which to tune into and respond to consumers’ desires for certain product features or improvements.

e)      Escape Hatch: There will be times when either your documentation or your community won’t have the right answer or your customer simply needs someone to walk them through a crisis. When that happens your customer needs an escape route directly to you and your support team. This can be via phone, email, or live chat.

With these five elements in place along with opening up your product documentation to the web, you’re well on your way to winning the Customer Experience war against “Badvocacy”

For a quick look at a self-service help site that accomplishes all these goals, take a look at CAD software giant Autodesk. Here is a video produced by them that introduces their MindTouch powered help site to their users. Autodesk and MindTouch have won CS/CX awards for this site: 

Who’ll Stop the Rain? Social Product Help Umbrellas Protect You and the Customer

April 24th, 2012 | | CCMS, content strategy, Customer, Editorial, Featured Post, Product Help, Uncategorized
200236712-001

A recent social media customer service survey by TNS reveals that over half (57%) of consumers head directly online when they have a problem with a brand or product. That figure rises to 71% among 16-25 year old consumers and 65% among 25-34 year olds. The problems and questions of frustrated consumers are being gathered and published all across the web.

The question is: where are the answers coming from? 33% of consumers use on-line forums and chat rooms while 25% have turned to on-line video tutorials (i.e. YouTube), and nearly 20% say they turn to query websites such as Facebook Questions, Yahoo Answers, etc. 11% say they turn to popular related blogs.

Now here’s the problem. When people are facing a question or crisis with a product, they’re looking for quick answers from wherever they feel the best answer is likely to come from. However, more often than not, those answers are nested in forums, community sites, and other 3rd party web properties, among similar complaints and problems. It’s here that brands and products take a reputational beating, and the solutions offered are often off the mark. Technology, software, consumer electronics and telecom industries seem to be the most vulnerable to reputational losses in these web arenas as they report greater losses attributed to support failures than most other industries.

The report concluded, “By creating digital content that solves customers’ common problems and making it widely available online, businesses can significantly reduce customer frustration and be seen as a user-friendly brand while lowering the costs associated with live agent support. When asked what companies could do to improve the customer service experience, 35% of all respondents, including nearly half (48%) of 16-24 year olds, said “post video demonstrations, tutorials and instructions.”

There answer is simple and cost effective, and in fact saves money and increases revenue. By implementing socially enabled product help your giving your product and knowledgebase assets a life on the web. A key consideration when implementing social product help is SEO. You only win the battle for your users if your content is search engine optimized. By giving your documentation and knowledgebase assets a life on the web, you’ll make sure your prospects and customers are getting the best product information from the most credible source, your company.

Next, your social product help software must take your documentation and knowledgebase assets and optimize them with effective search and feedback mechanisms as well as social engagement tools designed specifically around product help. Nothing deepens brand loyalty more than enabling the customer to quickly find highly relevant information that solves their problem and which expands their understanding of your product along the way.

You’ll also need a robust set of analytics tools. These are essential for understanding how your customer uses your product and the kind of information they’re looking for.

To bring it all together, you should make sure that your social product help integrates solidly with your support ticketing system and CRM as well as having the ability to extend into social networks and expand upon existing authoring tools (if any). By doing so, you dramatically improve your customers’ experience with your brand because your company can quickly respond to and engage the customer at a crucial point. Consumer surveys show that effective support experiences are often weighted more heavily than price in the decision to recommend, renew, or buy again.

Implementing social product help is simple and creates a single source of truth about your products and your brand. Think of social product help as an umbrella, encompassing all the ways consumers expect to interact with your brand while protecting your reputation and the customer experience.