CRM - October 2007 - (Page 30)

SELF-SERVICE SUCCESS or send surveys, but they just won’t do anything with it,” says RightNow’s Vap. “Measure for areas that are working, and measure for areas that aren’t working.” Consider the experience of Big Fish Games, a developer, publisher, and distributor of games via the Internet. The company uses the RightNow Service application to analyze customer activity on its site’s help section. When Big Fish relaunched its Web site in May 2007, the company was able to monitor in real time the types of queries that were trickling in. “[A] number of issues emerged that we were able to identify in RightNow and respond and create new knowledge-base articles, literally going from issue identification to publishing useful self-service information within a matter of minutes,” says Cory Finnell, vice president of consumer products at Big Fish. The company constantly analyzes how customers are using the site’s service section, but also shares that information with its engineering, game operations, and product manthat they have to the context of the relationship they have with you, you eliminate all the other noise that exists and you also have the ability to tailor the experience to that customer type,” Sweeny says. Similarly, understanding intent and context can further help companies provide the proper information. When customers appear to have hit a self-service impasse, the key is to provide them a way to regain their footing on the path to resolution. Ensure that they can easily escalate to additional channels: Enable them to fire off an email, phone a live rep, or join a chat session—a method that is progressively gaining traction. “Escalation adds cost to the transaction, but it provides the user with a higher probability of a successful and satisfactory transaction,” Sweeny says. “Plus, if, on the back end, you’re doing your homework, you have the ability to track and determine why the self-service transaction failed and what can be done about it.” Ashu Roy, chairman and CEO of eGain easy, and simple to understand what’s required,” says Mark Angel, senior vice president of corporate development and strategy at Kana Software. Fusing structured navigation with search can help guide customers whose inquiries are too broad or too specific, and direct them to the right information, says Zachary McGeary, a research associate at JupiterResearch. “Intelligent search is moving beyond just basic word associations to actually really try to understand and discover what the consumer is asking,” McGeary says. “It has to do with identifying their particular intent,” he adds, noting that the process requires looking at the relationship between words in the query and what he calls “the attitudinal part.” Also, more companies are warming up to the notion of injecting collaboration techniques, such as discussion forums, into their online self-help initiatives. (See “Wise Guide,” June 2007, for more on online communities.) Kana’s Angel notes that companies often get stuck on the overall appearance of the self-service environment, the search engine itself, and the content therein. These are important, he acknowledges, but they’re not the only factors. “There’s something in between those two things, and it’s this idea of information architecture,”Angel says.“It’s really about how to organize the pages in your Web site and the links and navigation between those pages, and how you present the overall self-service process to customers.” One of the keys there is to craft an interaction that mirrors customers’ needs. “Self-service ultimately is successful when it becomes the choice customers make versus the only alternative they’re given,” Sweeny says. “In the last five years we’ve created an environment where people are very comfortable to go and look for their own information. But now it becomes incumbent upon us to provide the customer with an experience that will bring them back. That’s the bar that’s been set: to create an experience that draws people to come back in the future.” Contact Associate Editor Coreen Bailor at cbailor@destinationCRM.com. www.destinationCRM.com “Self-service is owned and designed piecemeal. The result is that the integration of these piecemeal pieces is owned by the customer.” agement teams.“To do this well you have to take a holistic approach and engage the entire organization.” Communications, stresses the importance of eliminating silos across selfservice and agent service. Even if a company only invests a tiny bit to make sure self- and agent service are connected, Roy says, “the fact that they are joined up [at all] makes the customer experience a lot more pleasant in the long haul.” ESCALATING WITH EASE The self-service interface must enable customers to quickly access the information they’re hunting for; not surprisingly, the harder it is to find the right resolution, the higher the dropout rate becomes. As InQuira’s Shelter says, if organizations viewed “service as another business interaction, just like selling something—and treated it the same way in terms of ‘findability,’ analytics, and the effort and the money they invest in making sure that it has the right structures—that would go a long way in terms of encouraging customers to use that channel and to trust it as the first point of contact.” Full personalization and audienceappropriate content are also particularly important. “If you focus the experience 30 HELP ME HELP YOU There is no single way that all customers will ask questions. But it’s a company’s job to deduce the customer’s quest and produce the right information. Aldrich, of the Patricia Seybold Group, remembers well what one Web self-service user told her: “No matter what I type in I should be guided to what I need.” Guided help is one way to make a Web self-service interaction more dynamic and effective. Wizards can “step the customer through each particular point in the process and make it absolutely clear, CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | OCTOBER 2007 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - October 2007

Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity Coupons Without the Clipping Something Special in the Air Oracle’s Name Game Market Focus: Sports & Entertainment: CRM Scores for Sports Franchises Statistically Speaking The Pulse Required Reading Are We There Yet? Help Them Help Themselves The Chain Gang Pay Day OutClick Media Gets a Second Opinion Best Kiteboarding Makes a Splash with NetSuite True-Blue Service Documentation Secret of My Success The Tipping Point Re:Tooling Pint of View

CRM - October 2007

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