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Making and Avoiding Five Big Customer Service Mistakes

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TMCnews Featured Article


June 18, 2010

Making and Avoiding Five Big Customer Service Mistakes

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor


Customer support software provider Parature has written an interesting white paper on five big mistakes customer service teams make - and how to avoid them. Here's a quick re-cap of the main points:

The Mistake: Not Using Self-Service for Deflection. Customers have taken to Web-based self-service, handling everything from simple product registration to IT break/fix issues, in vast and growing numbers. More and more support organizations are opening up their knowledge bases to partners, customers and employees.
The Answer: Businesses should carefully consider which issues and tasks they entrust to self-service because some transactions are too complex to be handled by anyone but an expert, but simpler, repetitive issues such as password resets, warranty registration and a plethora of administrative tasks are low-hanging fruit for self-service channels.
The Mistake: Not Offering Integrated, Multi-channel Support. Self-service, though an increasingly visible and viable channel choice doesn't suffice as the only offering in a support organization's arsenal. Some customers simply don't take to self-service, preferring the more intimate experience they get from talking to someone on the phone.
The Answer: If the business decides they're going to offer multiple channels for gaining service, integration is a key consideration. Too many service organizations make the mistake of creating siloed service channels, each with its own data and processes. With this lack of integration come inconsistent delivery standards, knowledgebase content, sloppy escalation, cost inefficiencies, and plummeting customer satisfaction.
The Mistake: Not Using Social Media. Thanks to social media, in all its incarnations, customers have the ability to rapidly and loudly advertise their happiness with a service experience, or wreak havoc on a company until their anger dissipates.
The Answer: Best-in-class customer service platforms today include forum functionality so businesses can create a hospitable place at their own site for their users to congregate, socialize, and solve problems. These suites also integrate their ticketing capabilities with platforms like Twitter and Facebook (News - Alert), allowing organizations to automatically create tickets based on chatter on popular social networks.
The Mistake: Not Capturing Customer Feedback from Support Transactions. Support organizations should not only make use of the feedback they can find all over the Web on social networks and at home on their own forums, but through each and every service interaction they have with their customers. Too many rely solely on support center metrics such as hold times to measure performance, and ignore valuable information that can come straight from the source.
The Answer: Beyond immediate feedback, support organizations should also regularly take advantage of surveys to continually monitor their customer relationships. They'll want to be able to customize their surveys, keep them "lively" and timely, and adapt the ways they deliver them.
The Mistake: Not Using Tracking and Reporting Tools. Measurement is the foundation of service and support, but too many service organizations measure everything possible and then do nothing with the data.
The Answer: As part of any customer service system they implement, support organizations should look for sophisticated reporting tools as part of an integrated package. With every front-office application producing metrics-related data, support center executives can and should run reports on all relevant performance indicators.
To download a free copy of this informative white paper, click here.
 

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Patrick Barnard







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