Driving Business Through Smart Customer Service

During the last 10 years, there was huge growth in consumer market. It also gave birth to too many competitors within and across the categories. Companies must be smart enough to support their customers. There are many platforms available such as twitter, facebook and wordpress to express both the positive and negative experiences. Before I placed the order for my car, I did go through tweets and blogs and asked the people I know about the product & service issues.

Let me share some of my uncomfortable experiences as consumer. Once I took my device to the service centre. For a simple problem, the support person asked me to remove all the data from my device so that they can completely reinstall everything from scratch. I asked them why you need to make it too complicated for such a simple issue. That person kept saying the same thing repeatedly like a broken audio record. This dumb interaction depicted a bad image in my mind about the company. I got frustrated and came back home without leaving my device there.

After coming back home, I started browsing the web and found the solution for it. Within 10 minutes, I installed that patch and made the problem disappear. This is the power of the support knowledge base that looks much smarter than the support person. I only wondered how come they did not get access to such knowledge base. For such a simple problem, why should I leave my device there and end up spending a day or two to install the additional software that I have installed in that device.

Recently I took my digital camera to the service centre for replacing the broken lens. They told me that it will cost about 200 dollars to fix it without even knowing that the brand new camera with better feature is less than 200 dollars. Are they really dumb or don’t know how to just replace the lens? Where is the repairing model heading to? What kind of customer service model we are heading to? If this component replacement model that are as expensive as the brand new device is going to be the way of customer support, then why would customers visit the service centres?

Many a times, I have seen that the support persons are not smart enough to understand the issues and suggest solution quickly. You call it attrition or lack of experience. As a customer, we don’t want to see and understand those reasons. We just need solution to our issues at the fastest time and optimum price possible.

Once I reported about a problem with my network. You will not believe I explained same problem to 10 different people 10 times and finally our problem is not solved. Then we switched to a different service provider. Since then we are with them. Any organization that is not capable of collectively responding to customers to maintain highest level of quality and speed will be no more in this competitive landscape.

All our inefficiency in solving problems and responding to customers are added to the service cost (or AMC). Any organization that is capable of eliminating all the inefficiencies will be able to serve the customers at the lowest support cost. Then, you know where the customers will go to for giving more business.

Summary of Challenges

• Reinvention and repetition of costly mistakes drains organizational energy
• Slow response to customer issues due to lack of reusability
• Poor memory related to past interactions with customers
• Difficulties in finding the right solution at the right time
• Inefficient access to the collective knowledge base due to disorganized knowledge
• Lack of coordination among the team members due to the absence of systematic collaboration

Solution

An integrated and comprehensive model for linking support process, collaboration, learning and quality management helps optimize the support process and leverage quality talents for faster and effective response to customers. Entire support team needs to be trained through scalable learning model to dramatically bring down the cost of learning while enhancing the competency level.

Ensuring that the support model is highly scalable, optimum and consistent across the organization is critical for success in today’s business environment. Support team must be able to leverage their true potential and collective experience to respond to the customer needs on time. Ultimately, it helps minimize the cost and maximize both productivity and quality of support.

Key Functions

• Support Knowledge Bank to manage the complete learning (self, collaborative, organizational)
• Ask the Expert to spot the right talent, interact with experts, gain knowledge and find the solutions
• Option to align right experts to the issues and tools for monitoring the responsiveness
• Self-service support system for the customers to report and find solution without interacting with the support team
• Virtual support team across the globe empowered by the common system and knowledge base
• Support Team & Scheduling to align right talent to the issues for timely completion
• Smart Communication system that replaces email and provide right mechanism to interact with customers, partners and team members
• Smart Solution Delivery through collective working and common knowledge base
• Support Dashboard & Scorecard to monitor the personal & team progress and gaps if any
• Quick report for the top management to see the health of the support function and to quick insight into customer satisfaction
• Quality management systems to define, communicate, monitor and refine the processes & solutions
• Partner connect to bring partners into the support network and help them deliver quality support to the customers
• Align individual performance gap to one-to-one learning to ensure that the mistakes will not be repeated
• Monitor personal productivity and team deliverables in line with the demand to systematically plan for team expansion and reallocation through multi-skilling
• Reporting on the SLA to help the team monitor their performance in line with the SLA commitments
• Collective ownership through knowledge sharing and access to all the insights on and interactions with a particular customer to avoid finger pointing

The Next Phase of Outsourcing

Many companies outsourced their support function to dramatically bring down cost through salary arbitrage. As the salary gap has come down and competition for outsourcing has increased, there is a huge pressure to deliver great support with further reduction in the support cost and time.

Considering the fact that the salaries are increasing, it is impossible to bring down the cost without focusing on the platform for empowering the support team to deliver the smartest way possible.

Driving Business Growth

Customer satisfaction is the biggest driver of growth in business. If your customers are happy, they will be your sales people. If your customers share their positive experience with people around them, they can win you more deals than your dedicated sales team. Ensure that your support model is smart and efficient to make your customers extremely happy. Embrace system thinking to become smart.

To know more about the key functionalities, check out http://www.lpcube.com/wise/support. To learn more about implementing and embracing the support knowledge management system contact us at greatwork@lpcube.com.

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