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  Kate Leggett 7:00 am on June 26, 2008 | 4 | # |
  Tags: KCS, Knowledge Management, Web 2.0

  Many customer service organizations make irrelevant knowledge-base entries available to their customers because authoring is done by someone who is not on the front lines, interacting with customers. The content is written without an understanding of the language that the customer uses in explaining their problems.

  Adopting a “just-in-time knowledge management” strategy or a KCS (knowledge centered support) approach can help bridge this relevancy gap. If a customer service agent is unable to find the right solution to a customer’s question within a knowledge-base, he or she is able to author a new solution on the fly, right after having helped a customer; the solution is captured with the customer’s point of view in mind, and in his exact words. In this same model, agents can modify existing solutions to make them more in-line with their customer’s words and phrases. The end result is that the knowledge-base entries are easier to find by customers in future searches.

  Solutions are not subjected to an arduous review process, but are reviewed as they are reused by other agents. This ultimately focuses the agent’s energy in perfecting only the solutions that are the most frequently used and ensuring that they use the language and expressions that are best aligned with customer’s needs, while maintaining the knowledge-base constantly updated.

  Another benefit to using your customer’s voice and words is to augment the company-generated taxonomy with an organically developed folksonomy – or collection of tags (think of the flickr tag clouds, for example). Users can tag useful content and the user community can browse these tag clouds. These folksonomies do not preserve the intrinsic relationship between objects, but they echo more closely how users interact with knowledge that they come into contact with. And, these tags help in making relevant content easier to find.

  Are you using just-in-time knowledge? Folksonomies? Is it working for you?

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  Andrew Cohen 7:00 am on June 23, 2008 | 2 | # |
  Tags: Collaboration, Communities, forums, support, Web 2.0

  With lots of interest I’ve been watching the web 2.0 worlds evolve and gradually replace our notion of collaboration. It’s been even more curious to watch this evolution in support. We are infatuated with forums and communities – how to establish them, what to do with them, how to leverage their content, and that this is where and how collaboration happens. For sure, forums and discussion groups are places where great things happen:

  • Where questions are asked and (maybe) answered
  • Where extended discussions happen
  • Where members use the collective knowledge to make purchasing decisions
  • Where participants can become part of the social fabric and extensions of the company
  • Where the community collectively grow the extended a body of knowledge

  But this is a specific kind of collaboration. If you have to produce work … If you have a software system down, a prospectus to deliver, if you have a significant insurance payment to approve or challenge, you need tools that help you get the work done — and collaboration is a supporting activity in that endeavor. If you go into support centers that are anything but ultra high frequency centers, most of the time is spent producing resolutions to questions or problems. Communities, IM, email are not the best tools for this. We need collaboration environments that allow us to work on our problems, but support awareness and presence information, and interaction tied to the work product so we can more easily collaborate ON the work and perhaps maintain a history. The point is that while communities are empowering in many situations, the biggest chunk of time in support is spent on creating new answers and solutions. Here, collaboration is intended to support the work, not the thing we are doing.

  In the right configuration, wiki’s might be a solution. Most are text based, but a few, Socialtext and Jive are beginning to support more forms of work — spreadsheets, presentations, and code and with presence information, groups, reputation and discussions tied to the work build into the wiki. We have a long way to go, but by looking at the main activities inside support organizations, we can see what activities need to be supported and that we need to broaden our notion of collaboration.

  What is your experience? Are you using these new tools in an innovative way? Let me know…
   
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  Kate Leggett 9:50 am on June 19, 2008 | 6 | # |
  Tags: Communities, content management, CRM, customer service, users, Voice of the Customer, Web 2.0

  Customers today pull information they need to make purchase decisions and for customer support from web sites, expecting higher quality of information. Unfortunately, support organizations have been caught unprepared. Researching how to better adapt to this new world led me to try to understand what has worked for other companies:

  • Wikipedia’s success rests with its user community taking collective responsibility for the accuracy of the content
  • eBay realized that users trust the collective voice when rating suppliers
  • Amazon understood that purchase decisions where based on customer reviews and their reputations
  • Facebook, saw their success tied to an ease for forming communities

  
  We can use these principles to help shape successful customer service interactions.

  • Think about loosening the strings around your content. Let your agent community take collective responsibility for the accuracy of knowledgebase information. Let agents flag inaccurate content or author new content
  • Reach out to your user community and integrate your knowledgebase with discussion boards. Let users recommend information to be added to the knowledgebase, ensuring that it organically grows with customers changing demands
  • Expert users who know the product as well as their customer service agents exist. Let these experts post content directly to your knowledgebase, and use ratings and reputation for author ranking
  • Let users rate solutions, vote on important content, append comments and use their feedback to optimize the information delivered during the service experience
  • Let users subscribe to content and receive it in the format they prefer
  • Be proactive with communication to your users. Push knowledge and alerts out, even before customers experience a problem

  
  All these strategies help you engage in a two-way conversation with your customer base and your agents. Which ones do you think work best for you? Can you tell us why? Do you use other strategies?

   
• 

  Esteban Kolsky 9:41 am on June 16, 2008 | 1 | # |
  Tags: CRM, customer service, strategy, Web 2.0

  Back in the old days of the Internet, when money was free and ideas plentiful, a few friends asked me if there was something new and different that I thought was ready to be discovered, transformed into a product, created into an IPO, and worth millions of dollars. I said I was not sure about the millions, but there had been something bouncing around in my head for a while. I called it, at that time, “point-of-need customer service” (Yes, seven years at Gartner improved – but not perfected – my naming skills). We created a pilot product, deployed it – and amazingly enough people wanted it and it worked. Of course, this was about the time the air was let out of the bubble, so the lack of funding made it impossible to continue the endeavor, which coupled with my wife’s insistence that I get a “real job” took me to Gartner.

  The concept behind “point-of-need customer service” was that the browser is a clunky, stateless, session-driven interface that, to keep constantly providing service and support to customers required lengthy and complex programming, integration, and adaptation to many, many operating systems and computers. The concept I had was a unique, non-browser type application that was constantly in contact with service providers, proactively providing customer service and support to clients. The money-making portion was to sell to providers the infrastructure to service those devices, and “viral distribution” for free of the devices or applets would take care of the rest. As I said, it did not go far due to lack of funding.

  Fast forward some time, and while at Gartner I proposed the idea of the Customer Interaction Hub (yes, this was the best name we could agree on – I told you it was better but not perfect). This basically became the infrastructure component that each organization could deploy to use browsers as “point-of-need” service applets. I sorta gave up on the idea of replacing the browser, as it had become as ubiquitous as operating systems in computers. I still, for the record, believe that the browser is a lousy interface… but my Don Quixote days are over, so let’s embrace it!

  So, on to the concept of where we started: Service 2.0. If you are wondering where the next “thing” (or the new, new thing as Michael Lewis put it) is start to look into how to expand your Web 2.0 investments into Service 2.0. Think about the characteristics of Web 2.0: proactive, effective, low cost, high-volume, point-of-need… doesn’t it sound like that Customer Service strategy you have been working on? Some of these things already exist and are implemented (one of our clients, Symantec, does first-level troubleshooting of problems in the computer itself – without using the browser), others are infrastructure components (like device relationship management components embedded in medical and industrial machines that alert to service needs, troubleshoot, and even scheduled service calls automatically) already in place… but the whole idea revolves around three core concepts of both Web 2.0 – and your service strategy: automation, decentralization, and proactivity.

  All the elements of a winning Service 2.0 strategy.

  What do you think? Ready to embrace the future? Are you planning your Service 2.0 infrastructure?
  

   
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  Kate Leggett 7:55 pm on June 12, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Communities, Web 2.0

  I think of relationship content as the content generated in discussion boards or blogs which bring like minded users together to exchange ideas. Typically, these users can be categorized as 70% lurkers (those that read posts but never contribute) and 20% joiners; 9% are regular contributors and only 1% can be classified in the elite category. These are your MVPs – your user group leaders, your super-contributors.

  Knowing what your distribution looks like is key to knowing how to use them. You want to see whether your elite users represent the voice of your entire community, or whether their contributions apply only to their line of business or specific situation.

  If your elite are a good overall representative sample, working with this elite set is easy – you can listen to them for feature requests, you can bounce ideas off them and you can monitor their posts to ensure that their goals are aligned with your business.

  However, if your elite contributors do not represent the opinions of the community you need to identify which ones are your advocates and which ones are severely dissatisfied. In all cases, you need to reach out to them, and cultivate a relationship with them of openness and transparency. Your greatest contributors can be your best advocates and your dissatisfied elite can give you insight on what processes may be broken in your organization and give you an opportunity to turn around these individuals.

  With over 60% of our customers having plans to offer discussion boards, the question is figuring out how you want to work with your elite contributors. Perhaps you want to create a sub-discussion group of only your elites to explore topics that are not suitable for general consumption – like finding out the specifics of how they want to see a capability implemented, or delving into the real problems that they experience when they interact with your company.

  How do you, or what are your plans on leveraging your elite community? Do you have tips that you can share? Do you need help in figuring this all out? Let me know…

   
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  Esteban Kolsky 3:08 pm on June 10, 2008 | 2 | # |
  Tags: contact center, CRM, customer satisfaction, customer service, email, erms, satisfaction

  I would like to add some wood to the “email use in customer service” fire. If you have been following the blogs last week, we have a little of a controversy going on about whether email should be used for support – or sent to sleep with the fishes. Personally, I believe that email is an essential support tool in certain situations, and when done properly. For medium-complexity scenarios, with lots of data necessary to exchange hands, and where accuracy is paramount (like something you can cut and paste from a screen or log), email cannot be beat. The process of reading an error message via telephone is usually cumbersome at best. I know that organizations that implement email for support situations such as the above, when they answer promptly (read before 2 hours for 80% of emails, 4 hours for 100%) and they get good results.

  Of course, these “good results” don’t usually translate into easily quantifiable cost savings, or return-on-investment models. That would be too easy, now wouldn’t it? I have been working lately with some clients that are trying to come up with Justification models for their ERMS (email response management system) deployments, and we are struggling. I will be very honest, each case is different and we can only use tested-and-proven ROI models as a basis to start the discussion, then we deviate into the different variables that affect each business. At the end, we can always justify implementing an ERMS on financial terms — as long as we are willing to make certain assumptions about growth and support, very often the largest unknown components. Worse, when we create TCO models, over three years, it is hard to find cost savings over using the telephone, and little over a chat implementation. Most of the benefits come from two areas:

  Experience Management and Customer Loyalty

  Reduction in manual process when automation is implemented

  So – what should you use to justify your ERMS implementation? Glad you asked…

  This is where your Customer Experience Management, or a similar initiative, comes into place. Use your customer’s demands to justify your ERMS initiative. Yep, use them to service them… corny, huh? Let me explain.

  1) Prepare a survey for the purpose of understanding your customer’s needs and demands, if you have not already done it (even if you did it already, read on… chances are it was not the best survey you ever done). The survey should have just 3-4 questions related to your planning of customer service for the next 2-3 years, and what customers would like to see in it. Don’t sneak questions on satisfaction, loyalty, or anything like that in there. Simply planning questions.

  2) Ask the following : “We are considering implementing one more technology for service and support. Please rank from 1 through 5 your choice of the following technologies to submit service and support requests”. Then, it would feature three, four, or five technologies like chat, SMS, email, etc. Pick the ones you would seriously consider implementing.

  3) Your customers will then tell you, if they want email, that you should implement email for support. Depending on the ranking and your plans, you can justify your ERMS on Customer Experience Management reasons: customers want it, we will give it to them. You will find that the costs of implementing ERMS, or virtually any other technology you can imagine, will not drastically reduce the existing costs… but, customers want to have it.

  Would you willing to take the chance to have your customers say “no, please don’t implement that”? What would you do then? Let me know…

   
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  Kate Leggett 7:20 am on June 4, 2008 | 0 | # |
  Tags: Communities, feedback, Feedback Management, user generated content, Web 2.0

  Emotional content on websites is all the rage these days as customers want to have a voice – they want a venue to easily express an opinion, critique an answer, rate a vendor or a product, or append a comment to an article. They also want to be able to story-tell, like for example, to share their insider information on how to best utilize a capability of your product.

  This emotional content is very valuable as customers of today trust information from peers more than information from companies. By allowing this content on your site, customers can pull information that they need, on their own terms, in order to make purchase decisions and for customer support. By being vocal, customers can also impact the type and quality of information being delivered. This, in essence, puts them in the driver’s seat, allowing them to influence the relationships that they have with the companies with which they do business.

  You need to let go of control and allow emotional content and you should unobtrusively monitor these posts. This will help you engage in a two-way healthy conversation with them, and will also allow you to pinpoint the ardent supporters of your brand. It will also help you validate product roadmaps and strategies making sure that your offering stays in line with customer demand.

  Emotional content allows customers to influence the relationship that they have with companies. Yet companies will have a greater success in creating a loyal customer base if they listen, respect and use the voice of their customers.

  What type of emotional content are you allowing on your site? How do you monitor it? How do you use it- do you use it for improving service or for product development or for something else? Share your best practices with us! Or ask me for advice.

   
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  Esteban Kolsky 5:58 pm on June 3, 2008 | 6 | # |
  Tags: best practices, CRM, customer satisfaction, customer service, email

  Little did I know when I started writing my last post and some other people also had strong opinions about email. Since I published that blog, I found entries related to using Email in support organizations in two other places.

  As you probably figured out, mine is a positive blog entry. I do believe that Email has its place in the customer service organization, that is quite powerful when done properly, and that it does not take much more than a commitment to do it right. However, others are not so convinced.

  Glenn Ross writes in his latest blog about diversifying your communication with your customers, including really taking a survey on what email does and whether and how to continue. While he does emphasize he is a believer in email, he also says he believes more in new communication tools and technologies, social networks, and Web 2.0 methods. While I don’t disagree, I don’t see the value that it brings to customer service – yet.

  On the other end of the spectrum, my good friend John Ragsdale over at SSPA wrote an entry about the death of support email. Well written article, and he does make some valid points. I responded to him that the problem is not in the tool, but rather the implementation of the tool. That most companies don’t take the time to do it right.

  Alas, I truly believe this. I find that any technology or tool could be useful, in certain circumstances, when properly implemented. I truly, honestly believe that if more people were to advance their email implementations (auto-responses, structured web-forms, specific transactions, knowledge repositories integration among other things) we would not be having this discussion.

  Now, consider this before you respond to my question… in a recent survey we discovered that email’s growth rate is 28% year-over-year, just a smidget below web self-service (29%) and Chat at 35% (these are CAGR 2007-2009). Now, with that in mind…

  What do you think? Is Email dead? In life support? Thriving? please, let me know what you think… either comment below, or email me (ekolsky at evergance . com).

   

• Esteban Kolsky 9:07 pm on June 2, 2008 | 4 | # |
  Tags: best practices, CRM, customer service, email, erms, eService, Knowledge Management

  Back in the old days of the internet revolution (circa 1990s) email was the solution for communicating with customers. It was to replace the phone, and virtually any other channel, for support. It was going to be automated and processed within minutes. It was going to allow anyone close to a messaging device to get world-class customer service.
  

  The magic of SPAM, viruses, and malware, hindered that vision, and the coming of other text-based communication channels with more prompt responses put the, supposedly, final nail in ERMS (email response management systems). Email support became a four-letter word – but several companies saw email as an opportunity and succeeded at it. Their stories provide us with some very valuable lessons learned that we can use to optimize the second coming of email.

  When properly done email can significantly improve and optimize your support organization. Of course, “properly done” is not usually the case. There are three things you can do make sure your ERMS implementation is actually well done:

  Extend customer experience – for the most part, email support has been neglected, not loved, sent to the corner. Usually when a customer sends an email for support the answers are incomplete, incoherent with other answers and policies, or (in close to 50% of emails) non-existent. Make sure you can complete the transactions your customers want in a timely manner, and that you have access to necessary resources, data, and applications to complete the transactions.

  Identify the proper transactions – organizations tried to use email for every single transaction, regardless of the viability of doing a good job with that channel. Not all transactions were meant for email, some of them will be almost impossible to do cheaper or better than through other channels. Make sure your ERMS tackles the transactions that make more sense – not just any transaction.

  Speed up resolution – This is the killer application for ERMS, if there ever was one. If you use automation (included free with the best ERMS packages), and tie it to the proper knowledge repositories, you can increase response times to almost negligible. Better yet, route users to either use a web-form for sending emails, or automate the initial interactions to get the information you need (think conversational agents) then you are sure to answer those emails so quickly… it may just work.

  Email can be your most powerful weapon for decreasing the costs of customer support and for improving your customers’ perception of your willingness to help them. Don’t cast it aside for a bad experience, turn it into a positive one.

  What do you think? Are you ready to turn your customer service email into your friend?

   

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