The PhaseWare Files:
Articles, Observations, and Ideas
about Customer Support

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Give Customers the Gift of Chat: Implementing Live Chat in Customer Service Channels

Find out the best practices for using live chat in customer service, required agent skills, possible pitfalls.

Well, there are many trends affecting contact centers these days. There has been an enormous push to improve the customer experience and reduce costs. But here are three trends that are causing significant impact:

1. process automation or optimization
2. customer lifetime value management (CLTV Management)
3. more regulations and legislation 

I  have also noted what I call trend 2.5: encouraging customers to use self service channels, but in a way that could be counted under #1.

Process Automation:

For a more in-depth look at this read my blog entry Intelligent Automation for Customer Support. The long and short of this trend is to increase productivity by looking at the processes involved in customer support and automate those that are repetitive, time sensitive, or mission critical. An example is ticket escalation according to a predetermined business rule. If the rule is met, the system takes care of the escalation, it does not depend on a person to notice.

Customer Life Time Value Management:

In CLTV, customers are judged, not only by how much money they have spent with you but a considered estimate of how much money they may spend with you in the future. As you can imagine this is a pretty inexact process because it calls for attempts at precognition, but it is a good exercise to undergo if you need an idea of the possibility of repeat business and whether the money the customer spends will outweigh what you spend to court and keep that customer.

Dealing with More Regulation and Legislation:

This shouldn't come as a surprise for anybody in the financial industry, but there are numerous areas that are becoming more highly regulated. A few always have been but the regulations have become more stringent or onerous, others have not previously been acquainted with the requirement to adhere to a succinct set of rules.

And, as long is there is law in the land, more laws will be passed that could impact your business, including how you interact with your customers, what records you keep, how long you keep them, in what form you keep them, your security plans, and on and on and on.

So along with trying to keep up with what you have been doing, more stuff is coming down the pike. And I say forewarned is forearmed. This doesn't mean jump into a bunch of initiatives to meet regs and legs. But you must remain aware of which way the wind blows and have some preparations in hand to start dealing with them.

Productivity gains are often made when a repetitive task with a yes/no decision process is automated to relieve a person from performing this task. This frees that person up to do more worthwhile work (not, hopefully, to get laid off) and the task is performed without a person having to remember to do it.

Problems occur, however, when automation is poorly planned. There are many areas that can benefit from automation, including customer service and support, but if the automation causes delays, customer dissatisfaction, or other errors, the productivity gain is nullified. This is what has happened with interactive voice response; an attempt to automate too much of the process has been made in many cases and customers are rebelling.

In customer support, the interaction with the customer is not what is automated, it is the customer record that has automated pieces of the process.

For example, a customer phones in a complaint. The customer service representative interacts with the customer and submits an incident to the customer support software on his behalf. At that point, automation can streamline and protect that incident ticket until completion.

Automation patterned on business rules can:

• send an alert to a designated support person if a service level agreement is in jeopardy 
• escalate a ticket that meets certain rules: ticket of a high value customer, ticket indicating a risk of injury or death from malfunction, ticket that is aging past a certain time/date
• enforce step-wise processes where a previous step must be completed before going on the the next step
• automatically respond to an email with an acknowledgement of receipt or even with suggested answers to questions and issues, or
  
• opening an incident ticket using the information in the email plus sending the incident number to the customer to use for status checks.

These are all processes that benefit from task, or business rule, automation. Each decision is a clear yes/no. There is no need for the customer to interact or be involved. The automation ensures that critical issues or timing is not missed due to human error and streamlines an element of the customer support process such as a speedy acknowledgement of an email.

What this does is take processes that are highly subject to human error and makes certain they get done, leaving the human to do the actual interacting with other humans.

I have absolutely no clue who said it but whoever they were, they got it right when they said, "Treat every customer as if they sign your paycheck...because they do."

A business could not exist without its customers just like peanut butter can't exist without jelly; that would just be downright criminal. In these difficult economic times, everyone is feeling the pinch and is holding on tighter to their wallet. Customers are being more cautious and picky about who they do business with.

Many businesses, large and small, send out an over-abundance of e-mail and direct mail marketing content hoping to catch a prospect's eye. If your business is considering this tactic, remember these two words: bad idea.

Inundating consumers leaves a bad taste in their mouths. You don't want to give the impression of being pushy; so how do you market and get the customers' attention in a bad economy without going overboard?

Number one: Talk to your clients. Don't shove ads at them, but actually talk to them. Get their feedback. Use surveys...online surveys. No one likes getting a survey via telemarketer in the middle of dinner.

Use the social networking sites...Facebook, Twitter, etc....and pose discussion board questions to get feedback from the customers. The more creative the question, the more discussion it creates. Such sites have made getting customer feedback more successful than having a simple comment/suggestion box in the store or on the company website.

Number two: Be visible. Do things out in the community. Be a sponsor of a little league baseball team or help host a charity fund raiser. Show the consumers that you care about what goes on in the community, and what is important to them. In turn, they will start caring about you and the services you provide.

Also, participating out in the community gets your company name out there. People will constantly see it and if you,the business owner, and your employees are present at these public events, your company is given a face; not to mention that you get to talk face to face with current and prospective customers which goes back to point number one...talk to your client.

Just think "outside the box." Be creative and make things personal. People respond better to things that are done or made especially for them. And remember, just before you put a policy in place or make a decision on various marketing tactics, think to yourself: How would I respond to this tactic? If it's not good enough for you, it definitely is not good enough for your customer.

"Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for life".

I was going through my files and came across a blog post by Calvin Sun about ways to help the customer become more self sufficient.  

Give the customer an answer with no background, he will have to call again later for more help. Teach a customer how to work with your product and you have a loyal customer who can help himself.

A couple of Calvin's tips read:

• Let the customer "drive"
• Encourage customers to teach their coworkers.

 These suggest a training method I use called:

See one. Do one. Teach one.

 See one

This step is more suited to in-person training on a new task tool. People feel much more comfortable if they see how it's supposed to work before they try. The act of watching gives them clues to what will happen and what the result will look like. Then they are much more confident when it is their turn to try.

In customer support, it is unlikely you will be standing right next to a customer for an individual training session, but in situations like software troubleshooting the "see one" can occur while you take control of their computer. Instead of zipping through all the steps without explaining what you are doing, slow down a little and talk through your steps. In other situations, using pages from the manual or images on a screen can help with the "show".

Do one

Now it is the customer's turn. This is where you "Let them drive". If you think about it, how easy is it for you to learn something just from watching? What happens when the trainer is gone?I don't know about you, but more than once I thought I understood how to do something only to stumble badly when I tried to do it myself with no back-up.

Stay available while observing the customer do it. Correct when needed but otherwise, stay out of it so the customer can get a feel for what is supposed to happen. This increases the liklihood that the process will stick with him when he has to repeat it later.

Teach one

At this point both you and the customer may feel like the lesson has sunk in and no more help is needed. But the real test of how well you know something is if you can then teach someone else to do it. Teaching makes you slow down and be very conscious of the stages of the process; not just what occurs but how and why.

This brings one more of Calvin's tips into play:

• Give the principle along with the answer.

Knowing "why" is the glue that makes learning something new stick with us. It gives us more confidence than if we were just told an answer without any background because we won't know how to adapt that answer to other circumstances or know what questions may need to be asked. Or even that there are questions to be asked.

This fits into customer support very neatly because, at its heart, customer support is about teaching. Many customer inquiries are about how to do something with your product rather than a call to say the product is malfunctioning. Some of those break/fix calls will turn out to be a needed training session when the malfunction turned out to be operator error.

You are building a relationship; creating a partnership. That customer will feel like you care because you took the time to teach.

The weather has certainly been crazy this winter. The sun will shine for a little bit and the temperatures will be mild, then a cold front comes through and it rains, temperatures plummet, and the sun hides for the next two weeks. When the temperatures finally start to hint at going back up by a single degree, they crash even farther down while curious white stuff falls to the ground. Apparently it's called snow, but I'm no expert (I'm down south as they say). Anyway, Mother Nature always has a way of making herself known in some form or fashion.

Angry customers are the same way. Not that they leave snow falling in their wake, but they have a tendency of expressing themselves in some colorful ways. Every business will occasionally have such customers and will certainly hear from them via phone and e-mail; so how do you deal with them?

A positive, calm attitude is the biggest and most vital element in the customer service arena. Without it, excellent customer service cannot be rendered. When an angry customer calls or sends a furious e-mail (or a "nasty-gram" as my friend puts it), do not take the anger personally or think the individual is overreacting. They are usually just angry at the situation and frustrated that they can't fix the problem on their own despite their 1,001 attempts which may have caused even more damage.

The customer has had time to work up to a certain level of frustration by the time they call or send an e-mail to customer support. By the time your customer service department gets contacted, the customer is at wits' end, so before you jump to fixing the issue, give the customer time to get it out of their system.

Maintain a calm attitude (breathe deeply, count to 10, find your happy place) and allow the customer to vent. Like gaskets about to burst, just release a bit of the pressure and catastrophe is avoided. Doing so lets customers know that someone cares enough to listen. Once they've vented, they are so much easier to work with. The problem can be quickly fixed without having to repeat questions over and over and over again because the customer was still deaf with frustration.

Angry customers are never fun to deal with, but they do come along and when they do, the best customer service departments will have calm and sympathetic agents who can diffuse tense situations simply through their courteous demeanor.

Actually, that is a policy which we would all do well to employ everywhere.

One of the best things you can do for your customers and for your company when providing customer support is to answer their questions and fix their problems the first time they call in.

The First Time.

How much does it cost to field a support call from a customer? SupportIndustry.com's 2009 Service and Support Mterics Survey indicated it can cost from $10 to $24. Each time. If a customer has to call more than once to resolve an issue, the amount of money spent supporting that customer shoots up rapidly. Call volumes go up, customer satisfaction goes down, and money goes flying out the window.

Here are some tips and tools for Getting It In One.

Hire and Train:

When you hire a support rep you must find a way to determine if he or she will be able to handle support. Let's face it, being a support rep ain't for the faint of heart. So this rep will need to be able to handle emotional customers, intricate products, and mandatory processes. This rep must be trained about your product or service in depth.

Training must include the hows and whys of troubleshooting, what information to elicit, what the results of troubleshooting steps mean, when to escalate. All parts of the process must be taught and the culture of the company inculcated into your newly hired person who will be the face of your company to your customers.

Create Knowledge Bases:

Create a knowledge base containing information on your products/services, solutions to known issues, steps for troubleshooting, advice from other support reps and other customers (via online forums), anything that could help answer a question or solve a problem.

Clean the data, make certain all is correct, and give your support reps access to it. This puts answers immediately at their fingertips which not only improves first call resolution, but can speed up handle time too. (Better yet, give customers access to the knowledge base from an online self service center - now you have zero call resolution aka call deflection. But that's another post.)

Give Authority:

Once your support rep has been thoroughly trained and has access to the knowledge base, you know what you have to do? You have to let them go. In other words, it won't do any good for this person to go through all the things he is supposed to and knows what to do if he cannot make decisions himself. If the rep is not going to have the authority to implement the best solution without checking with someone, or if he is forced to follow a script or set of tasks without deviation, then everyone's time has been wasted: the rep, your company's, and the customer's.

Give Support:

That said, no one is an island. That rep needs a support framework in order to continue to learn and improve. She will need encouragement, acknowledgement, and a way to measure how well she is performing, including first call resolution rates. Technical supervisors, managers, all the way up to the CEO, must find ways to help this rep succeed, be it with further training, better tools, awards, or other motivation and assistance.

So there you have it.

Hire the right reps, train them, give them a knowledgebase and a support network and get the heck out of their way! First call resolution, here you come.

Now, not every call can be handled on first contact. There will always be problems that require further work or help. But with a higher first call resolution rate, your reps will have more time to deal with those bigger problems appropriately and the customers who can get a fix the first time will be more loyal than a customer who never had a problem in the first place.

This will be a short posting because really, all I want to do is ask you, the readers:

What is it you would like to read about most regarding customer service and support, multichannel support, knowledge management, incident management,, trouble ticket tracking, customer support metrics, etc. etc.

This blog is written for you . In order to provide you with the information you need, with topics you want to talk about, I really need to hear from you. 

I hope that what I have written in the last couple of years has been helpful, but I would sure like some feedback on how I'm doing and what gaps you feel you have within the sphere of customer service and support.

 I look forward to hearing from you.

What comes to mind when you hear the term “streamline”?  I see visions of muscle cars racing in my head with deep red paint jobs, black leather interiors, smooth lines, gentle curves, and V-12 engines that scream, “I am speed! Hear me roar!”

Such powerful vehicles wouldn’t have such speed without smooth lines and gentle curves. Streamlining in this case is improving aerodynamics, reducing drag, and increasing speed capabilities.

Well, within the last few years, the business world has been adopting the term to refer to creating faster processes. If a customer service center is streamlined, operations within that department run smoothly and quickly with few issues. So how do you go about streamlining your customer support center?

Here are two tools that can help: an Online Self-Help Center and Web Chat.

Self-help centers are wonderful inventions for both the customer and the business. The customer doesn’t have to waste precious time waiting in line for eternity. At their own leisure they can look through the knowledge base, FAQ section, and forums at any time day or night. They can even do research in their PJs. On the business end, self-help centers help decrease the number of service calls a company receives, which gives agents the time to troubleshoot more complex problems.

Web chat, or Live Chat, is also a very good tool for reducing phone traffic and saving customers’ time. Live Chat allows an agent to work with more customers per hour with shorter interactions and occasional multiple simultaneous chats. Live Chat allows for a fast resolution when the customer needs a little more than a self-help center.

A Self-Service Center and Live Chat are only two ways of streamlining your business. If you want more ways to make your customer service and support run as smooth as possible, check out PhaseWare’s customer service solutions for small to medium businesses.

As with any large purchase that has a somewhat complicated implementation and affects a large number of people, you should do your homework before ever looking up "customer support solution companies" on the internet.

You need to know:

• How your process works now (it does work now, doesn't it?)
• Where the efficiencies are
  
• Where the ineffeciencies are
• What information you have and what you can do with it
• What information you don't have and what you can't do with what you do have
•  How you would like your process to work in the future.

In other words, know what you need. Set down the requirements before you go shopping. If this is your first time around the block with an application like customer support software, read up on what other customer support operations are doing, using, and keeping track of. Find out what you ought to be doing that you are not or cannot.

You need to know because if you don't, it is just like buying software off the shelf for personal use without making sure it will do what you need it to do.  That can get expensive.

Making a poor choice for your company is even more expensive because it impacts so many more people: the agents, the customers, the back and front offices. Everything that depends on the information and usability of that solution is affected.

So take your time. Educate yourself. Then start looking into solutions. A good vendor will help you by letting you know if what they offer will do all you need it to do. A poor vendor will try to make it seem like their solution will do anything.