Audaxium Blog

This article was prompted by this post by Michael Fauscette, an analyst at IDC who’s blog I read.  Frankly, his post has been bothering me all day.

NetSuite Cases

Michael comments about how Salesforce.com has announced that customers can sign up for a service that will tie in a customer support application to facebook, google, etc.  He seems to validate that “Salesforce.com claims that over 2/3′s of all customer service conversations will take place in the cloud” and then describes how the application works.

Michael begins his article by saying that he hates calling IVR or voice recognition systems and this is what drives him to social networks for support.

To me it seems like the problem that needs to be solved is not, “How do I give support to customers on Facebook” but how do I build a great support system for my customers.  And it is this topic I’d like to address, along with my thinking on why this announcement by Salesforce will mean little to the vast majority of small and medium sized businesses.

What to do

Don’t use voice recognition exclusively - Lets give us all, including Mr Fauscette, a break.  Those systems don’t work well enough yet.  Always give your caller an out to get to a live person in one key press.

Have multiple support points of entry – Different customers want different methods of contacting you.  These will obviously include phone, and email but should also include a web form, perhaps live chat, and social media pages and contact points.

Have enough Resources – It may not be easy to provide the people you need to answer questions in tough times but just remember its about expectation management.  If you make it appear like you can get a person in 5 minutes, and it takes 60, people will be angry.  If they know it will take 4 hours for a call back, at least they’ll know.

Consider managing your inbound support calls in a way that spreads the demand out over time and makes better use of your support teams time.  Collecting cases via email and calling customers back actually can help manage this quite effectively. 

Track all issues – This might sound obvious but many smaller companies don’t have a system like NetSuite or one of it’s competitors to capture all the emails, phone calls, and web form submissions.  If customers know their issue is being tracked then they’ll feel better that someone has got the ball.

Build a Knowledge Base – Don’t waste your teams work by not capturing what they learn.  As time goes by, and the knowledge base grows, your team should be able to respond faster and faster to issues.  This takes some time to manage, keep clean and up to date, and polished, but the ROI is significant.

Measure the full Experience - Many companies measure how long a case takes to close, or the time of the call.  Make sure that you have a way of measuring how long it takes a customer to find you, get through your menus and get to a live person, or to the answer they need.   Monitor this often!

Provide Visibility – When building a support team you have 3 groups who need visibility on cases and their status.  Your own team should be able to see the big picture of open and inbound cases. Your companies management team should be able to see, in real time, what’s happening in support land.  And your customer should be able to see case statuses online, update them, close and reopen them.

How? - There are a lot of systems that can help you do this.  Obviously NetSuite has been able to do these things for quite some time.  

What not to do

Turn off a point of contact – A number of companies, for some reason, end up turning off one point of contact or another.  Sometimes it’s email, sometimes it’s phone.  Doing this is very rarely a solution.  If your system can handle the multiple inbounds, change the system. Don’t railroad customers. It sucks

Dead End a Path – My pet peeve is when I go down a path to get help and it stops. Nothing says “go away” to a client than having your phone system say “Goodbye” or “this email inbox, support@company.com is no longer monitored”.  The other day I called a company and the message came on, “Our call times are longer than normal, please call back again later.  *click”  At least let me leave a message.

Ignore the Web – It is true that your customers are talking about you.  Online.  But if you’re reading a blog you get that.  Monitor the places your customers are talking and get engaged.  I recently got help from a rep of Polar, the heart rate monitor makers, online via twitter, and it made me a superfan instantly.

Getting online and joining or building communities is where we are headed, and where many customers now expect you to be.  Get there.

Why Automating Social Media Support may not work

It’s too broad for effective capture - Support works best when customers have confidence that where they are leaving a question is going to get an authoritative reply. Perhaps if this is on your company facebook page, this might work.  

Noise to Signal Ratio - Customers talk about a lot of things.  If you monitor twitter for NetSuite, you’ll get lots of random comments, or even “netsuite help”.  It’s better to direct customers to a support mechanism that works via these tools then try and filter out the random comments from the customers that need assistance.

Entitlement - As much as we all want support to be “free” it rarely is.  A good support system will ensure that the customer getting help is identified and is entitled to help, or, is encouraged to do what is necessary to get official help.  It’ll be difficult to do this on the cloud.

Size Matters - Obviously if you’re a SME your customer base is similarly sized.  This is true for the vast majority of companies.  Picking them out of the crowd online in an automated way will be difficult.  Build a good system, and they will come, mainly.  This announced integration will only be truly valuable for a few large companies who want to offload a vast number of customers onto the web to chat amongst themselves and help each other.  Not a bad thing, but not for everyone.

Conclusion

In this day and age there’s no excuse for bad customer support.  It’s a choice as to how good your company is at it.  Don’t make people like Mr Fauscette swear at a phone system that’s not recording their voice.