Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Guide
CustomerService
Service on
The Insiders
Guide
to to
Customer
on the
theWeb
Web
Ten Secrets for Successful Customer Service
Ten Secrets
for Successful Customer Service
by Greg Gianforte, RightNow Technologies
Contents
Executive Summary
10
Industry Response
12
13
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Executive Summary
The web is a great place to do customer service. It's where people go to find
answers fast. It provides a way for customers to navigate their way through
lots of content to find the particular piece of information they need. It's open
seven days a weeks, 24 hours a day. In fact, according to industry
observers, web-based customer service is one of the biggest business
opportunities on the web.
Unfortunately, most companies fail to effectively exploit the web's
full potential as a customer service vehicle. Some fail because they
don't recognize just how powerful of a business tool web-based customer
service can be. Some fail because they never develop a practical process for
capturing the information their customers want and quickly getting it onto
their siteor they fail to keep such information properly updated. Others fail
to adequately integrate web self-service with their email and call center
channels. Others leave out some of the key functions that make web
customer service really "click"such as store locators or remote web session
control.
There is a cost for such failure. Companies that don't develop effective
Internet customer service wind up spending far more on customer
support than their competitorsas much as 20 times more per
incident. Thats because, without effective customer service, companies
must rely on their over-burdened, high-cost call centers to answer even the
most routine and repetitive customer inquiries. Companies with poor service
also lose customers, since web users get frustrated quickly and head
elsewhere.
Web-based customer service is a great way to habituate customers to using
your web site, thereby creating other opportunities to lower transaction
costs, execute cross- and up-selling strategies, and otherwise leverage the
Internet as a business tool. And, because its so scalable, web-based
customer service offers an extremely cost-effective solution for dealing with
the inevitable peaks and valleys in your service incident volume. Thats why
web-based service has become such a hot topic for business and technology
managers alike.
This white paper distills the experience and best practices of successful webbased service implementers from a wide range of industries. It also provides
a simple test for determining your company's Service Quotient, or "SQ."
With this insider information, you'll be able to plan and implement your own
customer service strategyand join the ranks of successful Internet service
pioneers who have significantly lowered their per-incident customer support
costs while consistently delighting their customers and strengthening their
Internet presence.
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call center operators temporarily. But how many do you add? If you add too
many, youll waste money on excess capacity. If you add too few, you
wont be able to respond in a timely manner to your customers. An
effective customer service solutionespecially a hosted onecan
easily scale as needed to meet any volume of traffic, without
requiring guesswork or potential over-spending on additional
infrastructure.
Freeing up staff
One of the main constraints on most companies' online efforts is the limited
number of staff members who understand the business and the Internet. By
automating the generation and management of online support resources,
web-based customers service relieves these precious employees of having to
perform many repetitiveyet critical tasks time-sensitive tasksthereby
freeing them to support other strategic projects.
The bottom line? Responsive, automated, service delivers concrete business
advantages, day in and day out. Online customer service is also rapidly
becoming a competitive necessity, as more and more companies make their
web sites a primary channel for low-cost, customer-pleasing service and
support.
What's Your Company's SQ?
Because web-based service effectiveness has become an important factor in
every companys overall business strategy, now is a good time to assess the
quality of your own companys Service Quotient, or SQ. This simple test will
help you determine just how healthy your company's service strategy really
is, and allow you to pinpoint where it could use improvement.
SQ Evaluation Questions
Yes
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No
Don't
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Unlike competing CRM solutions, RightNow Service is designed for quick and
painless implementation. Its a hosted, fully web-based system that doesnt
require you to make extensive upfront investments in infrastructure or take
on long-term management burdens. So you can start reaping the benefits of
more responsive and cost-efficient customer service right now!
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Industry Response
The industry's response to RightNow's innovative approach to end-to-end
customer service has been nothing less than enthusiastic. Here is a sampling
of comments from leading analysts and top corporate customers:
"RightNow Technologies has grown to become one of the largest suppliers of
Internet customer care application software. Their current installed base of
over 1000 customers places them among the largest firms in this space."
- Yankee Group
"With RightNow's bi-lingual capability, Air Canada immediately extended its
online service offerings to an entire nation and completely flattened the
growth of its incoming email."
- Air Canada
There is little or no incremental cost to us whether we have 40 customers
looking for the answer to a particular question on our site or 400. RightNow
provides the scalability we need to support any amount of query volume.
- LeapFrog
"RightNow has proved to be a valuable asset to our IT department. We have
eight level three technicians handling incoming IT questions from about 800
level two technicians, with about 3,100 inquiries going through RightNow.
RightNow allows us to focus on critical matters and improve the service we
are providing Sprint."
- Sprint
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