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BEST PRACTICES IN CUSTOMER SELF-SERVICE
Ten Ways to Make It Easy for Your Customers to Do Business with You
By Mitchell I. Kramer, May 31, 2007
MAKE IT EASY FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS TO DO BUSINESS WITH YOU
We know customer self-service.
Customer self-service has been one of our key consulting and research focuses
for the past several years. Along the way, we've evaluated the technologies and the products that deliver self-service, developed case studies about how organizations deliver customer self-service. We've tried out customer self-service facilities in our Moment-of-Truth Test-Drive reports. We've spoken with many organizations that offer or plan to offer customer self-service facilities. And we've
spoken with hundreds of the customers of those organizations, customers who
have used or who want to use self-service facilities.
With all our self-service
experience, we have developed significant customer self-service expertise.
And, through this experience, we've come to understand what makes for not-so-good, good, better, and best customer self-service. Driven by our axiom, "make it easy for your customers to do business with you," PSGroup's
10 best practices for customer self-service are:
1. Support the customer lifecycle
2. Support key Customer Scenarios
3. Make it easy for customers to learn about your products and services
4. Make it easy for customers to select your products and services
5. Make it easy for customers to compare your products and services
6. Make it easy for customers to manage their accounts with you
7. Make it easy for customers to get answers about installing and using your products and services
8. Make it easy for customers to solve problems with your products and services
9. Make it easy for customers to escalate to assisted-service
10. Make timely and relevant offers
In the sections below,
we'll define and describe each of these best practices and present our "dos" and "don'ts" - good and bad examples of their implementations. Note that these best practices define what you should do to deliver the best possible customer self-service. We'll
describe how to deliver them in another report.
1. SUPPORT THE CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE
Your customers' activities with you follow the phases of a lifecycle, from their first visit to your Web site to explore the products and services that your offer through the day when they stop using your products and services. Between those points, customers perform activities that we can associate with phases of a lifecycle. Generally, these phases are those listed below, although the phases may differ with the kind of business that you're
in and the kinds of products and services that you offer.
- Plan
- Explore
- Select
- Buy
- Use
- Maintain
- Renew
Any customer can be simultaneously
in multiple phases of the lifecycle. This simultaneity holds true for both
B2C consumers and B2B accounts. A customer can be in the process of exploring
offers at the same time that she is fixing problems with products already
purchased, while she's waiting for a P.O. to be cut to renew her company's
service agreement with you. In Table A, we list examples of the activities
in each of these phases. Illustration 1 shows these phases around the core
of the customer.
Customers Need Your Help to...
PLEASE DOWNLOAD THE FORMATTED PDF TO SEE THE TABLE AT http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=828.
Table A. Customer lifecycle phases and examples of activities within each phase are presented in this table.
Cross-Lifecycle Customer Service
Illustration 1. This illustration shows the phases of the customer service lifecycle around the core of the customer.
These phases typically
occur in sequence. It's a natural order of doing business. But it's also common that customers' behavior won't always follow this order. Customers who need help using your product, for example, may hop back in the lifecycle to select and buy a complementary product. Customers who are exploring possible solutions may test the facilities you offer for product maintenance before they buy. It's also important for you to try to influence your customers' behavior. For example, once a customer purchases and deploys one of your products, the customer will likely perform the activities of the use and maintain phases for some period of time. You'd
like the customer to make additional purchases. So you might make a marketing
offer to the customer that will drive the customer back into the select and
buy phases.
Whether the phases are followed in sequence or whether customers act less predictably, customers need service for every activity of every phase of their lifecycles. If you want to build long-term, profitable relationships with your customers, then you must create a cross-lifecycle customer experience that delivers excellent service at every phase and every activity of the lifecycle.
Do
Understand your customer
lifecycle. Identify its phases.
Know what activities
your customers want to or need to perform in doing business with you.
Don't
Don't try to support all the activities of all the phases of your customer lifecycle via self-service channels. Certain activities like "the drawing fluids" activity of the buy phase for life insurance companies, requires assisted service. And you probably won't
support all phases in a single application system. For example, activities
of the explore, select, and buy phases are a nice fit for ecommerce systems.
Activities of the install and maintain phases are best supported by customer
support systems.
2. SUPPORT KEY SELF-SERVICE CUSTOMER SCENARIOS
Customer Scenarios are the sequences of activities that customers want to or need to perform in order to accomplish their work in doing business with you. Customers want to perform the tasks of many of their Customer Scenarios using self-service facilities. For example, customers would like to research, select, compare, complete an application for, and receive approval on their application for a new credit card without assistance. Or they would like to be able to identify, configure, order, receive, and successfully deploy the latest engineering change to the CNS controller for the vertical milling machine that they purchased from you three years ago.
The lifecycle of your customers'relationships
with you, and the typical activities in each phase of the lifecycle that
we described in Best Practice 1, provides a framework for the customer service
activities that you should support across all of your customer service channels.
Self-service Customer Scenarios specify the activities that you must support
in order to deliver the self-service that your customers need.
Do
Ideally, speak with your customers to understand their objectives in doing business with you and the activities that they perform to achieve those objectives. (We can help you. Our Customer Scenario Mapping methodology can help you understand your customers'objectives,
the activities they need to perform to achieve those objectives, and the
services that you should offer to support those activities.)
Deliver self-service
that supports the activities that improve the effectiveness and efficiency
of your customers in their businesses (B2B) and/or in their lives (B2C).
Monitor and analyze
customer self-service behavior to understand the activities that your customers
are performing and the sequence in which they perform them. Continuously
refine and improve the services that support those activities.
Don't
Don't deliver customer self-service to automate and improve your internal business processes. Customer service is all about improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your customers. It's also about your effectiveness. Your efficiency is a bonus. For customer self-service - actually, for all customer service - always take the customers'perspective.
3. MAKE IT EASY FOR CUSTOMERS TO LEARN ABOUT YOUR PRODUCTS
Customers want to learn about the capabilities, the functionality, and the features of your products and services in order to help determine which of your offerings best fit their requirements. This learning is one of the key activities that customers perform before they select and purchase.
Do
Make it easy for
customers to find information about the features and functions of your products
and services. Let them both search for it and browse for it.
Provide multiple
levels of product information, and let customers drill down from high-level
features to low-level details. Provide consistent information across each
level for all of your products.
Use a common vocabulary
to describe the features and functions of your products and services.
Make use of multimedia
to help your customers learn about your products and services. Remember that
some of us learn by seeing, some by hearing, some by reading, and that the
Web can support all types of learners.
Don't
Don't hold back product information. Many companies offer only the highest-level information about their products and services, thinking that they're preventing the loss of IP and trade secrets. What they're
really preventing is customers making buying decisions. Give customers access
to enough information to help them make product selection decisions via self-service,
enabling them to get to a short list.
This report continues...
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