INPUT FROM THE FIELD

Over the past several months we've been involved in many customer-centered projects—consulting engagements, workshops, case studies, and research on products. We've spoken with dozens of your customers, many consumers, and many B2B accounts. They've told us that customer service remains a critical factor for their satisfaction and loyalty, and they've been quick to tell us how they want it delivered. Here's what we've heard.

Customers want:

• Cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customers service
  
• Support for their common Customer Scenarios
  
• To find answers quickly and easily—anywhere
  - Search and navigation
  - Premium search
  - Flat navigation
  - Effective landing pages—hence I get there, I want to see what I want
  - Adapt to Customer Behavior
  
• Fresh answers, fresh knowledge
  
• Forums for "how to" information. "Your involvement is requested..."
  
• Timely and Responsive Escalation
  
• Notifications. "Let me know when..."
  
• Portals—customers want a place to go to manage their account, product, and entitlement information

What we've learned is that current customer practices validate and refine the criteria in our evaluation framework for cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service. You should continue to have confidence that you can use the framework to shorten the time and to reduce the risk in your customer service product selection process.

Now, let's take a closer look at how customers want you to deliver customer service.

CROSS-CHANNEL, CROSS-LIFECYCLE CUSTOMERS SERVICE

Customers want cross-channel, cross-lifecycle customer service. The Web is their preferred self-service channel. The contact center is their preferred assisted-service channel. On-site service is essential for business-critical problems. And peer-service via online forums plays an important role in learning about your products and services and in understanding how to use them. Customers expect you to deliver customer service to help them perform activities across all phases of the lifecycle of their relationships with you—from their first contact with you to learn about your products and services until their last contact to retire those products and services or, heaven forbid, begin to use products or services from your competitors.

Customers Want Excellent Self-Service

Customers most commonly begin using self-service to perform their tasks. They expect that they can complete their work quickly, efficiently, and effectively through your Web site. When they can't, they pick up the telephone. If they can't get the help they need via telephone, then they want to see you, either at their site or at yours.

Escalation from the Web to the contact center to on-site is expensive for your customers and expensive for you. So excellent self-service is the key to high customer satisfaction and low cost-to-serve.

SUPPORT FOR COMMON CUSTOMER SCENARIOS

Customers Scenarios are the sequences of activities that customers perform in order to accomplish the work that they want to or need to perform in doing business with you. Each customer service interaction is a piece of a larger Customer Scenario. Your customer service systems should support the types of interactions that make up your customers most common Customer Scenarios. Here are a few examples of customer service Customer Scenarios:

• I want to figure out how to import my Microsoft Outlook folders, calendars, and emails to Apple Mail and iCal and get them working on my new Macbook.
  
• I want to activate my new cell phone/camera/music player and use its latest features successfully.
  
• I want to upgrade our maintenance contract for our HVAC system to get 24/7 telephone support and on-demand on-site support.

FIND ANSWERS QUICKLY AND EASILY—ANYWHERE

Fast and Easy

Customers think of customer service as your delivering answers to their questions. For self-service, first and foremost, customers want to find the answers to their questions quickly and easily. By quickly, they say, "I want to find the answer in five minutes or less." By easily, they say, "I want to find the answer in two or three clicks."

Search and Navigation

Customers want to search and navigate to the information that they need. It's a personal style thing. Some of them will look for your search box and start typing search queries before they even look at the rest of the content on your Web pages. Others, structured and analytic types like me, go right to the left side of your Web pages and start browsing through (what we hope is) your list of topics or categories.

Premium Search

Ideally, your customers want to be able to enter their questions as phrases or sentences in their own language and to let your search engine do the work to find the best answer. That work includes some or all of these tasks:

• Parsing the search phrase for topics, action words, qualifiers, and stop words
  
• Performing stemming analysis, looking for forms of topics
  
• Performing synonym and antonym analysis
  
• Matching the analyzed query against content in your search collections to produce a list of results
  
• Filtering results by customer-specified qualifiers
  
• Presenting results

Sue Aldrich, our expert on search and findability, calls search engines that have these capabilities "premium search" engines. She differentiates premium search engines from basic search engines that match keywords in customers'queries with keywords in the indexes of local repositories that contain the content of answers. You need a premium search engine to make it fast and easy for customers to find answers to their questions by search.

Flat Navigation

Customers want to be reading the answers to their questions in two or three clicks. Don't make them navigate deep hierarchies of topics or categories. On the other hand, don't flatten your hierarchies to the point where customers have to read through a page-long list to find a topic or category that matches your answers with their questions. It's a tradeoff between breadth and depth that balances the number of topics/categories that customers have to read at any level of your hierarchy with the number of topic/category levels that they have to navigate. Those of you with multiple product lines and complex product hierarchies have to be sensitive to this balance.

Synonyms

It truly is the World-Wide Web. Even the smallest companies can go global by deploying a Web site. Customers are international in language, culture, and corporate style. Your most local customers differ by region. And they all differ by industry, role, and, of course, personal style.

From a findability perspective, customers have different vocabularies. They use different terms for the same entity or item and for the same activity or task. For example, Brits say lift; Americans say elevator. Programmers debug problems, while most of the rest of us troubleshoot them. In the US, carbonated beverages are generically called soda, pop, and tonic (probably other things as well).

You've got to learn all the vocabularies of all of your customers and use that knowledge to tag the content that contains the answers to their customers. It's a continuous process.

Effective Landing Pages

Whether customers arrive on landing pages via search or via navigation, when they do arrive, they want to see the content that they're looking for immediately. Don't make them read your landing pages top to bottom, left to right looking for the answer. And make sure the landing page really does contain the answer. Deliver the answer in the most obvious place on the page—in the center just under your logo and navigation bar.

Adapt to Customer Behavior

Even if you don't make it easy for customers to find the answers to their questions by providing search and navigation facilities, premium search, flat navigation, synonyms, and effective landing pages, your customers will adapt to the findability facilities that you do provide within your self-service customer experience. And they will use external facilities to help them get the results they need. They'll figure out the fastest path to the answers to their questions using any facilities they can find. For example, customers have told us that they use Google to find answers instead of the search box on some sites because Google can get to the answers more quickly and more easily. That's embarrassing. You have to monitor your self-service sites, especially the search facilities on them, to understand customer behavior and to understand the effectiveness of your customer service facilities. As importantly, you should speak with and listen to your customers directly and via feedback and survey to understand their findability requirements and how well you are addressing those requirements. You have to adapt to your customers'behavior.

FRESH ANSWERS, FRESH KNOWLEDGE

A real life example: A customer or prospect is considering the purchase of one of your products or services. After some preliminary research to narrow the list of choices, the customer is ready to evaluate and compare the details of the candidates on the short list. The customer downloads the "detailed specs"document from your Web site, figuring its content will provide the information necessary to make the decision. On opening, the customer discovers that the document is three years old and provides information on a now unsupported product version. The customer drops your product from further consideration. (This part is true, too.) You, of course, never learn about this situation until, perhaps, some analyst like me tells you about it.

Patty calls it "evergreening." It's the process of keeping your research up to date, to reflect current product versions and current usage so that customers can use it to help make selection decisions. (Note that we also work hard at staying current. For example, our product reviews on customer-self-service products from ATG, eGain, InQuira, InStranet, KANA, KNOVA, and RightNow all evaluate the most current version, and our evaluation framework represents customers' latest requirements, such as those discussed in this report. And, by doing so, we know it's hard work to keep this "knowledge"fresh and current.)

Remember that customers depend on you for fresh knowledge. Your knowledge contains the answers to their customer service questions, the instructions for installing and maintaining your products, and the basis for their product selection decisions. Fresh knowledge results directly in more satisfied customers.

This report continues...

To read the full report: http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=845.