Save Money with Customer Support on the Web
by Dr. Ralph F. WilsonWeb Marketing Today, Issue 29, February 17, 1997
They say it's five times more expensive to get a new customer than it is to keep an existing one. Growing your business on the Web isn't just attracting visitors to your Web site. It requires a holistic approach: doing business on the Web in a way that customer needs are being met. Customers -- and potential customers -- need to know you care enough about their business to provide support when they have problems. Customer support spells the difference between a loyal customer base and losing them to your support-savvy competitor.
How much should you spend on your customer support function on the Web? First, determine your company's budget for all customer support. Then decide what proportion of your customers are likely to have Web access in the next year or two. Or ask how much you will save in printing, mail room, and postage costs, and telephone support time by making your customer support available via the Web. Businesses with a national or global customer base will find Web customer support extremely cost effective compared to traditional media.
Technical Documents
It's a high-tech age, and access to technical information is vital. Frequently Asked Questions, or FAQs, are probably the simplest kind of technical document. When your customers call, what questions do they ask most often? Frame a simple answer to each and you have a FAQ document. Post these questions and answers on the Web and you will save hours of phone support each week. You might also want to compose a series of brief e-mail replies to each of these common questions so you can respond quickly to e-mail inquiries.
For many years Microsoft has excelled in providing a "Knowledge Base" comprised of thousands of papers describing how to diagnose and solve various software and hardware problems. While Microsoft uses a database to store such information, today a company on the Web can provide a wealth of technical papers indexed merely by a Web site search engine. I have found Matt Wright's Simple Search Engine adequate to search up to 300 Web pages or so. Faster and better search engines employ indexes and allow more sophisticated searches. While search engines may sound complicated, a CGI-wise Web site designer can install one fairly easily and inexpensively on all but the largest or highest traffic sites.
Troubleshooting decision trees
The next level of support might be a troubleshooting "decision tree". You've seen these. "Is the product plugged in? Yes? Go to next Web page. No? Plug it in." Web pages with hypertext links are a natural for this type of step-by-step problem solving, but don't underestimate the time it takes to develop such a comprehensive "expert" or "wizard." It's plain hard work! To see an example of how this might be used, take a look at Microsoft's "Troubleshooting Wizards".
Extra Information
Why not make your customers appreciate you by going the extra mile to help them get the most out of the product or service you are offering. Consider:
- Cheat-codes for challenging computer games
- Checklists for their next camping trip with your Acme tent
- Links to helpful articles and resources in your field
- Software downloads which add to their existing product and extend it.
You can afford to pamper your customers given the low costs of doing this on your company's Web site.
Community Interchange of Knowledge
Do you want to build a loyal customer base? Then offer ways they can discuss your product or service with other users. You'll find this very cost effective, and not nearly as much work as you might imagine.
Chat rooms are not difficult to implement, but businesses beware. In my surfing trips in search of good chat models, I've been to lots of empty rooms punctuated by an occasional plaintive "Is anybody there?" message from sometime last week. A much better strategy is to offer scheduled chats every month or two on a particular topic of interest, or to feature a well-known industry guru. Then publish a transcript of the chat for those who couldn't make it. Most of the successful chat centers have lots to do with making contacts with the opposite sex and not much to do with real business. For some time, Richard Seltzer had a "Business on the World Wide Web" chat sponsored by The Boston Globe each Thursday at noon. You can also find resources on business uses of chat at our Web site.
On the other hand, electronic bulletin boards can be a wonderful customer support tool. For many years I maintained a CompuServe account solely to have access to software support forums which helped me fine-tune upgrades and new purchases. Today, Web sites can host a bulletin board which offers these functions and more.
Last week updates to McAfee Virus Scan 95 caused my computer to crash. What was wrong? I checked the McAfee Internet Support Forum found a user who described a problem identical to my own, read the answer posted there by a support engineer, and solved my problem within minutes without having to contact McAfee at all. Over a period of months, a bulletin board system can grow into a powerful and dynamic FAQ on its own, and provide a valuable information support source for your company. ZD Net University uses a custom-designed bulletin board as the centerpiece of its online software training classes.
Our own Web Marketing Forum used HyperNews, an excellent freeware program. It also offers an e-mail feature which alerts those who have "subscribed" to the forum of a new message. Such bulletin board systems always come with an administrative function to allow removal of trivial or undesirable messages, but I haven't found that much of a problem. Bulletin boards are a great untapped support resource which work extremely well in a Web environment.
Another way to allow customers to talk to one another is through an e-mail discussion list powered by majordomo or a similar mailing list program. When a member sends a message to the mailing list program it "echoes" the comment to every subscriber in the group inviting response and ongoing discussion. Some companies allow customers to discuss between themselves how to set up this application or that, perhaps monitored by a company employee, perhaps not. If you want to foster company loyalty, just making this forum available may be enough. Don't feel you have to censor it (unless your service is consistently bad and you don't want anyone to know it). Other companies use one-way mailing lists to alert customers of impending changes, new products, or service problems. Of course, newsletters focused on customer needs are a natural and valuable extension. Carefully-written newsletters are a powerful tool to build company or brand loyalty. Distribution cost of an e-mail newsletter is far below its printed and mailed cousin.
Tracking Orders
However, enabling customers to track orders via the Web is not inexpensive at all. FedEx offers dynamic tracking of package locations which UPS was forced to duplicate. But maintaining a live database integrated with the Web, and providing the kind of security needed to keep hackers out, is extremely expensive; you'd better look long and hard before you implement something like this. It's one thing to upload an on-line database daily or weekly to provide up-to-date information, but a live database is something else altogether. Perhaps, however, you'll find the cost is worth it. Order tracking does indeed provide welcome customer support.
Product selection guides
Let's say you have a very complex line of parts, automobile brakes and oil filters, for example. Customer support to your distributors now merges into an on-line ordering system as well as detailed product information regarding replacements, model numbers, etc. Customer support may require a detailed on-line catalog attached to a shopping cart system which enables purchase orders from your distributors. Inexpensive? No. But you may well find this worth your while to provide a competitive advantage in a global marketplace.
However, if your products are not nearly so complex, you may provide simple product selection guides with charts and tables on a series of Web pages. If you make it easy for your existing customers to become repeat customers, your business will flourish. Perhaps you need to supply your existing customers with a way to purchase supplies or add-ons for the products you've already sold them. Customer support and product sales merge once more.
Questions via E-Mail
Of course, you'll want to provide a list of contact options on one of your Web pages: phone, fax, snail mail, fax back directories, publication lists, and publication order forms. (Better yet, make your publications and fax-back content available on the Web and save money month after month!).
You may want to provide a way for customers to ask specific questions via e-mail. You can set up Web page response forms so that specific classes of questions are directed to specific e-mail addresses. You can also ask questions about the customer's context, model numbers, etc., with a space for the customer's description of the problem. I've found that many questions can be answered by merely sending the inquirer the Web address of a company document which addresses this very question. When you consider how long it would take to answer a common question over the phone compared to sending a prepared e-mail reply or URL reference to a document on your Web site, you can see how much money customer support on the Web could save you.
Merging of Intranet with Internet
But what if you don't everyone in the world to see what can go wrong with your product or service. You don't have to. Some or all customer service information can be hidden in a password-protected area. You e-mail current passwords to your customers each month so they and they alone have access to sensitive data and proprietary information. Password protection may seem exotic, but it is really very simple and inexpensive. While Wilson Internet Services' philosophy is to provide lots of free information to the Internet community, we use password protection to limit certain trade secrets for the exclusive use of our clients and Development Partners. When you think about it, a password-protected Web site is nearly the same as a corporate Intranet, though it uses the Internet rather than a expensive private network for connectivity.
Will customer support via the Web cost you money or save you money? Both. You'll need to set up new systems, and such as assigning specific employees to check for e-mail inquiries each day, and make sure they reply promptly. New systems are always expensive to implement in terms of planning, creativity, time, training and sometimes cash outlay. (Perhaps you'll charge for immediate response to questions like Microsoft does, turning customer support into something of a revenue center.) But in the long run, I believe Web-based customer support will save companies significant money while providing a higher level of customer support than can be offered by other means.
We also believe that if your company implements significant and obvious customer support systems on your Web site, you will attract new customers impressed by this support mechanism, as well as retain loyal customers who know you care about helping them out in a jam. While customer support via the Web is a competitive "leg up" in 1997, a year or two from now it will become de rigueur for companies that wish to be taken seriously in the national and global marketplace.
