NETTING IT OUT

Your customers want answers to questions about your business, your policies, and your products and services. They also want solutions to the problems that they have with your products and services. Your agents want those answers and solutions when your customers seek assisted-service.

Knowledge management-based customer service products can help you deliver answers and solutions to your customers and agents through your implementation of their content management and search facilities.

We’ve developed a framework for evaluating knowledge management-based customer service products. The framework has these top-level criteria:

• Cross-channel cross-lifecycle support
• Knowledge management
• User interface
• Search
• Escalation
• Analytic functionality
• Architecture
• Product viability
• Company viability

In this report, we describe these evaluation criteria in detail. In future reports, we will offer our framework-based evaluations of specific products and services.

CUSTOMER SERVICE TO ANSWER QUESTIONS AND RESOLVE PROBLEMS

This report presents our evaluation framework for customer service products that help customers get answers to their questions about your organization, your policies, and your products and services as well as to diagnose and resolve problems with your products and services. These customer service products are known as knowledge management products because they combine content management and search technologies to build customer service applications that create “knowledge” that answers your customers’ questions. The framework specifies and describes the criteria that we use and that we recommend you use for evaluating, comparing, and selecting these knowledge management-based customer service products and services.

CUSTOMERS WANT CROSS-CHANNEL, CROSS-LIFECYCLE HELP

Before we get into the details of the evaluation framework, let’s take a step back and put these knowledge management-based customer service products in context—the context of cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service. We’ve been writing for a while about it. Here’s what we mean:

• Customers want your help on every channel through which they interact with you—the Web and email for service, your contact center, physical locations (e.g., stores or walk-in centers), and your field service force for assisted service.

• Customers want and need your help at every phase of their lifecycles, through every interaction and iteration within the lifecycle phases of plan, explore, select, buy, use, maintain, and renew.

Illustration 1. This illustration shows the phases of the customer service lifecycle around the core of (customer) support and the focus of the customer, represented by the proxy of your customer information.

Cross-Channel Customer Service

Your customers do business with you through mechanisms that we call channels. Channels link your customers to your customer service agents and your customer service systems. Channels are the technologies and the personnel through which your customers interact with you—the Web, email, kiosks, and contact centers, store personnel, field personnel, and call center personnel.

Channels support either self-service or assisted-service interactions. Self-service interactions occur when customers interact with your customer service systems. Self-service channels are automated. They typically have high implementation costs but very low costs to serve. The Web is a key self-service channel. It can support the broadest range of types of customer interactions.

Assisted-service interactions occur when customers interact with your customer service personnel, who, in turn, interact with your customer service systems on behalf if your customers. Assisted-service channels are manual. Contact centers, stores, and field personnel are the key assisted-service channels. They have high implementation costs and high costs to serve, although you can implement some of them, such as field sales and support, quite quickly.

CONSISTENT CROSS-CHANNEL CUSTOMER SERVICE. We’ve discussed the need to deliver a consistent cross-channel customer experience many times. Fundamental requirements are a consistent view of your customers and a consistent context for the business that they want to do with you. For customer service, consistency is your ability to deliver the same answers to customers’ questions and the same resolutions to customers’ problems independently of the channel through which they choose to interact with you.

Cross-Lifecycle Customer Service

Your customers’ interactions with you traverse the phases of a lifecycle, from the first step of the first piece of business that they do with you through the time when they stop buying and using your products and services. Between those points, customers perform various activities that we can associate with phases of a lifecycle. These lifecycle phases are:

• Plan
• Explore
• Select
• Buy
• Use
• Manage/maintain
• Renew/replenish

Any customer can be simultaneously in multiple phases of the life cycle. For example, a customer can be in the process of exploring offers at the same time that the customer is fixing problems with products already purchased and waiting for a PO to be cut to renew the customer’s service agreement. You want your customers to be constantly active in the select and buy phases. In Table A, we list examples of the activities in each of these phases. In Illustration 1 we show these phases around the core customer and the cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service systems that help the customer do business with you across channels and activities.

Customers Need Your Help to…

Please download the PDF to see the table.

Table A. Customer lifecycle phases and examples of activities within each phase are presented in this table.

Also, while these phases typically occur in sequence as a natural order of doing business, it’s also common that customers’ behavior doesn’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.

While customers are ultimately in control, 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 marketing offers 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.

Practical Customer Service

Cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service is absolutely essential for strong and profitable customer relationships. However, in practice, delivering a customer service experience with the breadth and depth to support every channel and the entire lifecycle of your customer relationships is quite difficult. There are two reasons for this difficulty: