That's what I read in this morning's Journal review of The Best Service Is No Service by Amazon alumnus Bill Price and Limebridge Sales and Service Consulting Director David Jaffe.
Once at work, there was no way that WSJ's search bar would find the article (boo!), but fortunately I googled upon Guy Kawasaki's blog-interview with Bill Price . That article has a lot of gems too, like how to find companies with bad service:
"All you need to do is look for companies that hide their phone number on web sites"and
"We have yet to find a company that couldn't improve service and cut costs at the same time"The latter could have been a quote from our CEO Mike Rocha whose major claim to fame is having done exactly that at Oracle Corporation, and who founded our company to do it again (but better) for the rest of the world.
So how do our Service Networks help address Bill Price's Seven Principles, and how do implicit web techniques factor into that?
1. Eliminate dumb or avoidable contacts to free up capacity and slash costs
A study at Oracle showed that 99.9% of all service requests were satisfied with known information. This is why service networks focus on making existing information easily accessible, thus eliminating a huge amount of dumb or avoidable contacts. Implicit web techniques help organize the information by extracting the domain language and creating a Service Encyclopedia. Implicit web techniques also help match service requesters to the information they need -- think Amazon's "people who looked at this book ended up buying this other book".
2. Build self-service that works to free up even more capacity and cut costs even more
One of the most powerful forms of self-service is your customers helping each other. This type of participation on our Service Networks goes far beyond classic forum discussion: you can initiate a discussion on any page ("does this procedure apply to the revision that I have?"), chat with people related to the topic or issue, and share or tag relevant information such as test plans or best practices. Implicit web techniques are used to emphasize the most relevant people and information.
3. Find ways to be proactive rather than reactive because it is often cheaper than waiting
Service networks index and analyze everything that's going on so you can see issues developing much earlier -- including mood analysis that flags developing irritation. It's also easier to target news to the people that need to know.
4. Engage the real "owners" of customer problems to work with the customer service team to fix the problems
Traditionally vendors of high-tech products have flouted this principle by limiting the number of people they would interact with at each customer, because they feared losing control over the flow of information. On a service network this is no longer necessary because all people, information and transactions are linked and transparent. At any given point in time, the most appropriate people from both vendor and customer can work on the issue at hand.
5. Make it really easy to contact your business
Service networks provide myriad ways of contact (chat, email, forum dialog, phone, desktop sharing) and what's more, they're linked so you don't have to reconstruct context at every contact (please tell me again your account number).
6. Use the contacts you get to listen closely to the customer, and act upon WOCAS (What Our Customers Are Saying)
This also gets easier because the service network extends into the entire enterprise. No transferring problem descriptions from the CRM system to the developer Bug system and Requirements Management system. We just index all three systems and derive the links. On top of the indices we create dashboards to track (categories of) issues and drilling down into the specifics of any issue is just a click away.
7. Fix reporting metrics, processes, and the staffing side to deliver great experiences for customer contacts
When we were just getting started, we made an extensive study of Amy Jo Kim's Community Building on the Web : Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities . Her #1 advice is that an on-line community should have a (published) purpose. Whenever we start a new Service Network for one of our customers, we make sure we define its purpose, which should be more specific than "offer great customer service". Instead we set targets that include one or more of Bill's CPX metrics, e.g. "Reduce the average number of contacts to resolve an issue by 20% in 2008".
Service Networks make it easy to define, explain and publish their purpose, as well as publish metrics showing how they're doing.
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