It is January 10, 2012, and hopefully by now you’ve been able to dig out of your inboxes.
To help you prepare for the year ahead, CCC’s research and advisory team is putting its heads together to give you some additional perspective on areas of opportunity we see across a variety of companies—fresh ideas on how to enhance the customer experience and improve operational performance.
The intent here is not to increase your workload, of course, but to give you additional perspective on continuing to improve your service and support operations in the year ahead.
So let me start here with the recommendation of a relatively simple tweak: Ensure that all staff know how to navigate your company’s website.
It is a basic idea, but conversations with numerous service and support organizations reveal that most companies—both B2C and B2B—have not properly taught staff to use their own websites.
And this is becoming an acute problem as forecasts indicate that self-service increasingly is a preferred channel of resolution (CCC research historically has found that the preference for self-service is equal to live service, if not higher). And we’re continuing to work on new research on customer expectations for self-service, in which I would be highly surprised to find the trends reversing.
This change among customers—but lack of change among service and support organizations—inevitably leads to a well-intentioned but ultimately unhelpful customer interaction along the following:
Frontline Staff: “After next week you’ll be able to check your account online to make sure that the changes have been updated.”
Customer: “OK. Thanks for the tip. And where do I go online to find that?”
Frontline Staff: “You’ll need to log in and you’ll find it on your account page.”
Customer: “I’m looking at your web page now and don’t see that option.”
Frontline Staff: “Unfortunately I’m unable to pull the web page up, so I can’t give you any more information right now.”
Customer: “OK…. I guess I’ll just call back if I can’t find the information next week….”
So what can be done to avoid this all-too-common situation? A few ideas, arranged from least investment required to most:
1. Ask supervisors to do a coaching session on website navigation—Put out a memo to supervisors and coaches and ask them to spend some time orienting frontline staff to your company’s website, particularly the service and support functionalities. A general introduction can be helpful, but also navigate the site based on a few issues customers commonly call about. At a minimum, supervisors should do this once a quarter either in team or 1:1 meetings.
2. Tweak new hire training to focus on navigation—An entirely new curriculum isn’t necessary, but even creating a short module orienting new hires (and tenured staff, too) to the website, basic navigation, and important functionality to know about is a good start. Supervisors and coaches can supplement this on an ongoing basis.
3. Integrate self-service steps into the knowledge base—It is helpful to have training and coaching on discrete website functionalities, but to truly ensure frontline staff can effectively advise customers on what to do on the web, knowledge bases should incorporate this information. CCC members, learn more about effective knowledge management design principles here.
4. If staff do not have access to the external Internet, at a minimum grant access to your organization’s website—All sorts of historical reasons exist why some frontline staff have no access to the Internet (if you missed it, CCC’s latest research explains why this isn’t such a wise idea from an employee performance and engagement perspective). Given the trend toward more customers going online and the large number of customers calling because they can’t find information on the web, this would be a good issue to put on the agenda for your next leadership meeting.
In the coming weeks, stay tuned for additional 2012 Resolutions to consider from colleague Rick DeLisi on why using the term “THE CUSTOMER” is not a good idea, and from Brad Fager and Judy Wang as well.
Happy New Year.
Related posts:
on January 12, 2012
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“most companies—both B2C and B2B—have not properly taught staff to use their own websites.”
Now that’s a scary thought! If you own employees can’t figure out how to do something on your, why are you expecting your customers to be able to? You want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to your site to navigate it. And if they have a question your customer service team better be able to walk them through it!
on January 14, 2012
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[...] Comment Email Print This Post TweetThis is the second in a four-part series that the CCC team is writing on New Year’s Resolutions for 2012…as it relates to the customer experience, of course. Read part one here. [...]
on January 26, 2012
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[...] New Year’s Resolutions for 2012…as it relates to the customer experience, of course. Read parts one, two and three [...]