Top-Notch Customer Service Requires Change In Focus
By Rebecca Wetzel
Special To Inter@ctive Week
"What's a modem?" is the punch line of a joke e-mail widely circulated among Internet service provider technical staff members. The joke sums up beleaguered ISP customer service staffers doing their best to help Net newbies negotiate the bewildering reality of connecting to the network of networks.
The popularity of the Internet has expanded to include vast numbers of progressively less sophisticated users who often bring both higher needs and higher expectations to their providers. At the same time, already connected customers are becoming increasingly Internet-savvy, and their service expectations are rising as well.
For today's ISP, that means that life is hard, and it will get harder. But in this cloud there is a silver lining for those who make the need for customer support a priority.
Customer Service As A Competitive Advantage
In the beginning, raw technical prowess was enough to attract Internet customers. The early adopters didn't want their hands held. Techies within service providers served like-minded techies within the customer's organization. And if it all didn't "just work," that was all right because the techies welcomed a technical challenge, and no one really cared because, after all, Internet connectivity was not a business necessity.
But not anymore. Today, forces are driving the best players to focus on customer service as a competitive advantage, for two reasons. First, an Internet connection is no longer a techie's sandbox; it's a business-critical tool. Ever higher technical complexity of Internet products and applications, combined with a shortage of savvy staff at customers' sites, makes it hard for customers to help themselves. As a result, customers are demanding top-notch service.
Second, as the market for Internet connectivity matures, all service providers look increasingly similar. Internet access is becoming a relatively undifferentiated commodity, and outstanding customer service is a way to stand out from the pack and woo customers.
We've seen a similar trend play itself out in maturing voice and data services, and now we're seeing it among leading ISPs. It's to be expected.
Customers Value Good Service
Some ISPs are making customer service quality a top priority, believing excellent service is decisive in winning and keeping customers. For the rest, its importance is growing because customers are raising the bar.
According to TeleChoice Inc.'s recent survey of ISP customers and their preferences, five service attributes scored highest:
Service reliability
Service performance
Speed and proficiency of technical support diagnosis and repair
Price
Competence and knowledge of customer service and technical support
Two of the top five attributes - the speed and proficiency of technical support problem diagnosis and repair, and the competence and knowledge of customer service and technical support staff - point to the quality of customer service in determining overall customer satisfaction. Price is sandwiched between these two elements, indicating that it is not as powerful a differentiator.
In the survey, service providers received vastly different scores for service quality.
Given all of the variables inherent in a system as open as the Internet, service performance and reliability are inevitably uneven. A customer's assessment of service quality hinges, therefore, on properly set expectations and the quality of navigation an ISP customer service staff provides around the inevitable shoals customers will encounter. Not even the best customer service staff can paper over poor technical infrastructure and management, but good customer service can enhance perceived quality and notably increase customer satisfaction.
What Is Good Customer Service?
Not surprisingly, ISP scores for overall customer satisfaction correlated almost exactly with those for customer service speed and competence. Those ISPs that were rated highly for their customer service, were rated highly overall. So, what characteristics distinguish providers of superior customer service?
First, the ISP must focus on customer service. For most service providers, customer service begins life as ancillary to the core technical function of connecting customers to the Internet. Infrastructure is deployed, products are developed, billing systems are created and then a customer service group is appended to the organization.
Customer service-focused ISPs reverse this process. They place customer service at the center of the business and make product and process modifications with the needs of the customer service staff, and by extension, those of the customer, in mind.
Staff training is the second key element. Good customer service requires massive corporate resources to train the customer service staff. Customer service managers at Digex Inc., a Beltsville, Md.-based business ISP, for example, estimate that their staff members will devote between 10 percent and 20 percent of their time to training in 1997, and they expect the figure to rise in 1998. When training staffs and fees for external training are factored in, Digex spends the equivalent of 20 percent of each customer support person's salary to ensure their effectiveness.
Third, there are key technical depth requirements. Functional specialization within the customer service staff is another necessary but costly way to achieve higher levels of effectiveness. Customers' demand for greater technical depth and customer-specific knowledge among customer service representatives push the edge of individuals' capabilities and require rigorous training, specialization and stringent performance evaluations.
As you can see, the costs involved in developing top-notch customer service are substantial, but ISPs that are customer-service-centered are inclined to view extensive training, call center infrastructure and a growing list of other line items as investments in strategic advantage. These providers realize the potential for excellent customer service both to lower customer churn and, through referrals, to contribute very cost effectively to new customer acquisition.
Greater Involvement
Fourth, the customer support organization needs to be involved in service design. Customer service managers play a critical role in developing new features and services within world-class ISPs by developing and testing a prospective service's support requirements early in the design cycle and investing great care in developing service descriptions, user manuals and promotional materials.
As the capabilities and technology of the Internet develop quickly, customer service staffs form a flexible cordon between a service's specified features and the increased capabilities sought by users. Customer service staffs are often compelled to improvise ways to meet user requirements, which evolve more quickly than the Internet's frenetic product development cycles.
Savvy providers indulge this practice, work out bugs and legitimize useful innovations as features of subsequent product releases. As customer service becomes a larger portion of the product itself, this process of increasing customer service responsibility and flexibility becomes more prevalent in product development.
Fifth, the top ISPs also anticipate external and internal needs. Leading ISPs combine responses to internal demands for efficient scaling of their functions with external demands for more responsive service, by applying hard-won lessons to continuously expand and improve their customer service capacities.
A guiding principle for many ISPs is anticipation - striving to improve their capabilities and processes to give customers the information, reassurance and corrective action required immediately when troubles arise. Hardware and software vendors have obliged here, introducing a wide array of products that better enable collecting, analyzing and in some cases, automating response to real-time data regarding networks and servers.
Anticipating Problems
Whereas it once was difficult to verify that a given network component was actually functioning, such products now permit customer service staffs to assess current performance details and, in some cases, to forestall outages. Problems that are solved before customers know about them not only boost satisfaction, but also reduce the need for customer service staff to handle calls, freeing them for more lucrative pursuits.
These sophisticated tools permit well-organized, alert staffs to take on problems and their probable causes at least as quickly as customers themselves do, allowing them to tell customers who call that a fix is already in the works.
Sixth, ISPs need to keep their customers in the loop and well-informed of changes.
A few providers have learned that continuous interaction with customers, providing useful and timely information is remarkably valuable in satisfying customers. Most ISPs were well ahead of their customers in deploying Web sites and Extranets that incorporate software tools that provide high-level network status and other such information. These ISPs are extending what they've learned to the detailed customer-specific performance data that the new tools provide.
For example, these forward-thinking ISPs enable and encourage customers to access Secure Sockets Layer-encrypted sites to view the same performance statistics that their customer service representatives use to prevent and troubleshoot problems. Customers become familiar with the data and learn to interpret it so they can discern tremors from earthquakes, separate local problems from those affecting a wide area, etc. The greater sense of control afforded by this knowledge confines customer calls to important issues and expedites problem identification and resolution.
A customer service strategy predicated on sharing this type of data can be a double-edged sword, however. Offering customers detailed performance data creates risks and challenges, even for providers with the best performing networks. Some customers will persist in viewing tremors as earthquakes. But for providers that follow this path, the benefits far outweigh the risks. Not only is customer service interaction improved with better-informed customers, but their confidence in and satisfaction with their service provider grow dramatically.
Other examples of the trend toward proactive customer communication include notifying customers of outages immediately and sharing estimated repair intervals, rather than waiting for customers to call. Some customers find this unnerving, but ISPs that use this approach discover most customers like it. Similarly, ISPs that permit users to request service changes, modify their own contact data and specify other special conditions or instructions through Extranets find that customers are eager to help improve their own experience.
Seventh, the savvy ISP constantly solicits customer feedback. Finally, customer-service-driven providers understand that there's no substitute for asking the customer what he or she needs. Most ISPs originally divined customer service requirements from intuition and guesswork. But as the market for Internet services has become larger and more segmented, intuition has given way to measurement.
Many ISPs now survey their customers regularly in order to assess satisfaction, and most include specific questions on customer service performance. ISPs that regularly survey customers find that customers send them in directions they would not have gone otherwise, with the result that customers get what they need and are more likely to stay on board.
Best-Of-Breed
To develop best-of-breed customer service, an ISP must treat excellent customer service as a competitive advantage - and commit to it.
The TeleChoice Internet Study shows that a knowledgeable and capable customer service staff strongly influences overall customer satisfaction. As customers become increasingly savvy, their expectations of what constitutes excellent service will rise.
To be best-of-breed, you must not only meet, but plan to exceed, these expectations where possible. Exceeding customer's expectations means investing in staff and infrastructure. This level of investment mandates that management unequivocally commit to make top-notch customer service central to its strategy and open the purse strings. Short of this commitment, a well-intentioned customer service staff can only go so far.
At the rate ISPs are ramping up their businesses, relying on intuition and anecdotal information about customer preferences quickly becomes inadequate. Survey customers regularly obtain third-party data on the preferences of the market as a whole (check out the TeleChoice Internet Study, for example). Zero in on the information customers want and how they want it. Above all, act on their responses.
To follow through on that intelligence, ISP management must also invest in tools and infrastructure that prevent service problems and enable quick resolution of problems that do occur.
When service is interrupted, customers crave the assurance that their customer service rep understands the cause of the outage.
The ISP that wants to be customer service-centric must use the tools of the Internet trade to improve customer service quality and efficiency.
It's telling that the customers we surveyed stress the importance not only of their provider's ability to resolve service problems, but also of their knowledge. Proactively offering sophisticated and information-hungry customers direct access to key operational data may initially raise as many questions as it answers, but it tells the customer you're on top of your game, instilling confidence and loyalty.
from zdnet |
