Outside Innovation

What Low-Cost Customer Experience Improvements Should You Be Making RIGHT NOW?

A slowing economy is an ideal time to be focusing on making it easy for your customers and prospects to do business with you and on making it easy for your customers to reach their goals. Yet most organizations are so busy trying to cut costs and to convince cash-strapped customers to buy that they neglect investing in the most customer-critical things. Some of the things your customers need to make their lives easier may be low-hanging fruit that has been ignored.

I remember talking to a client in the customer support group at Cisco during the last big tech downturn. She was happy to report that as times got tough, the company had stopped throwing more people into customer support, and turned its attention, instead, to empowering customers and customer-service agents with better information and better tools—the things that she had been advocating. Cisco also changed the compensation structure for customer service agents at the time, to reward them for solving tough problems and turning those solutions into self-service wizards, rather than rewarding customer service personnel on the number of cases they resolved per day. Downturns bring opportunities. Make sure you’re taking advantage of yours!

So here’s my top 5 list of customer experience tactics you should be doing right now. The first three are Web-related because, for most of us, the Web is our customers’ first port of call:

1. Improve the Findability and Quality of Information on Your Web Site(s). This is a continuous improvement project. It starts with analytics. What search terms are people using? What navigation paths are they taking? What results are they getting? How accurate and up-to-date are those results?

Are customers seeing what they need to see in order to buy something and/or to solve a problem? If you don’t have a fancy tool to analyze what people are doing on your Web site, use the free tools from Google Analytics.

“Anticipate” Customers’ Questions; Answer Them Completely

No matter how good a job you do in Web site design and navigation, and in trying to anticipate customers’ questions by proactively offering the right Q&A and links in the right places on your Web pages, customers either don’t see those links or they still have questions. Those questions may be specific to that customer’s account (What’s the balance on my credit card? What’s the schedule for my courses for next semester?). The customers’ questions may be semi-generic (How is a credit rating calculated and how can I improve mine?). Or the questions may be very generic. For example, customers ask “What kinds of credit cards do you offer?” over 13,000 different ways in different places on the TD Canada Trust site. TD Canada Trust knows this because they use a SaaS offering from IntelliResponse Systems, a Toronto-based software supplier. IntelliResponse provides tools that let you instrument your Web site to capture all the searches people are doing in context and to help you tailor answers to these questions with a single, comprehensive, and satisfying response, rather than to provide a list of search results or to dump you into an FAQ. I’ve heard FAQs referred to as “Find a Question”—pretty apt! People don’t want to go to a list of questions; they want a single, relevant answer!

Search Marketing Survey

Most of you—our clients—are “best practitioners” in the art of online merchandising and search marketing. You invest in search engine optimization. You constantly refine your Web site search and navigation. We’d like to calibrate how far along you are in integrating your search marketing efforts to provide the optimal findability, navigation, and results for prospects and customers. So please take our Search-Driven Marketing Strategy Survey. And forward this link to your colleagues to take as well. You’ll find Sue Aldrich’s questions provocative. As you respond to her queries, I’m sure you’ll begin to realize that there may be things you should be doing that you hadn’t really thought about yet. We’ll publish the survey results shortly and offer our analysis and recommendations about what you can do to make it easier for customers to find your products and services in order to meet their needs.