Letting Your Customers Support Each Other

Many customer support and e-business executives are scratching their heads over this question: what’s the best way to integrate online customer forums into our formal customer support activities?
We love the fact that customers are ready and willing to share their knowledge and their experiences, to lend helping hands to one another. But we worry about the fact that their advice may be misleading, causing more harm than good.

In our formal customer support processes, we’ve designed well-thought-out escalation paths. Customers should be able to navigate or search quickly to the problem or issue they’re having, find the answer and resolve the problem themselves, and diagnose or troubleshoot, if necessary. They should only need to consult our support professionals if the customers can’t resolve their issues on their own. This self-help approach is not only the most cost-effective one; it has also proven to be the most satisfying to the majority of customers.

But customers tell us that they often prefer the insights they get from learning from other customers’ experiences. They find relevant short cuts and tips. They often find another customer who has faced the same issue in the same context. It’s much easier to follow that person’s advice than it is to try to explain your context to someone who may not have experienced the same issue.

The current best practice is to combine the best of both of these worlds. Let customers decide whether to follow your formal self-help escalation path, to see what other customers have done first, or to ask for help from other customers before, or in addition to, asking for assistance from your company’s subject-matter experts.

What we’ve discovered in our customer co-design sessions around customers’ ideal customer support processes—how they’d ideally like to get answers and resolve problems or issues—is that the decision about whether to rely on other customers or on the company’s own experts has nothing to do with whether or not they’ve paid for support. The decision about where to go for help is based on who they trust to give them the right answer in the most convenient way.

Comments

[Patty Seybold]

Got it, Graham!

Thanks for the clarification and the link!

Patty

[PaulSweeney]

Its a very good point. Now will CRM suppliers enable people to find other people within that base of users for a particular company? Imagine that Verizon or Vodafone presented you with the option of contacting another customer who had the problem, who seems to be online right now? This is a big market for 2007.

[GrahamHill]

Patty

I think you missed the obvious answer. Help customers make sense of the variable advice available from the company (advice based upon what we think you should be doing with our products) and customers (advice based upon what customers really do with your products, often in conjunction with other products) by mining both and bring them together into a common knowledge source.

And by mining I don't just mean parsing written knowledge in databases, I also mean how-to diagrams, short video clips, joint company-customer problem-solving sessions, etc.

This brings in both sides of the double-two-way mirror perspective needed to tackle these types of problems.

As Kathy Sierra in a great post on "Why marketing should make the user manuals" on her Creating Passionate Users blog - http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/08/why_marketing_s.html - it is high time as much effort was spent by companies supporting the product ownership experience as on marketing the products.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant