Engaging the Online Customer:
Service and Support 2.0

Key Benefits Deliver high-quality service at a fraction of the cost Hear the voice of the customer to target product and service improvements Increase customer engagement and loyalty

The World Has Changed
Top-down command and control business models are obsolete. Today, the road to success means empowering customers with Web 2.0 technology and enabling users to manage their own experiences while simultaneously contributing knowledge that brings benefit to all.

At the same time, service and support keeps getting harder. Products are more complex; customer expectations continue to rise; financial pressure increases. How can service and support managers deal with these problems, while also using each customer interaction to build loyalty and drive service-leveraged revenue?

The right model is to empower customers to become partners in the customer service process, using Web 2.0 approaches to customer engagement.

Self-Service Puts Customers In Control
Service and support organizations have typically held tight control over each customer interaction. But as Patricia Seybold notes, “Customers are challenging and disrupting the standard practices in virtually every industry. They won’t be denied. They have power and they know it.”

When customers are in control of how service and support happens, companies need to think of self-service not as a call deflection strategy, but as a customer engagement strategy. By providing attractive, scalable, and cost-effective service offerings, companies can satisfy more customer demand, build loyalty, and increase revenue.

Support Communities Tear Down Barriers Between Company and Customer
Companies used to draw a very bright line between themselves and their customers—“us” and “them.” (Often, us vs. them.) Service and support 2.0 achieves success by taking a more open view of their stakeholder community, whether those stakeholders get a paycheck or not.

Thought leaders have long talked about customer-driven innovation; now, customer support organizations can be the primary conduit of the Voice of the Customer. Development organizations know they should listen to their customers, and the reputation model that is part of any healthy community can tell them which customers they ought to listen do.

Why do expert users take the time to answer other customers’ questions…for free? Humans have a fundamental need to affiliate with a ground and align with a purpose. A sense of achievement, recognition, interesting work, and alignment can all motivate as powerfully as a paycheck.

Customer Feedback Drives Continuous Improvement
Enterprises have always relied on employees to deliver value. But, enterprises can only pay so many people. Service and support teams know how difficult it is to recruit and retain the expertise necessary to support a growing business.

Nowhere is this more true than in making sure that tens or hundreds of thousands of pieces of support content are effective and up to date. And, in many cases customers have more expertise in a particular area than any employee working on the knowledge. So a core principle of Service and Support 2.0 is to engage customers in the process of continuously improving knowledge.

A simple way customers can improve knowledge is to submit feedback. Ranked documents earn a reputation, like eBay users, that can inspire confidence. Document rankings guide users towards documents that have a demonstrated track record of success, and urge caution when using documents with a lower rating.

Specific customer feedback should be acted on, and when possible, a “thank you” and updated document should be sent back to the customer providing the feedback. This encourages the flow of feedback, which (viewed cynically) is just free QA.

For a more visionary approach, talk-back forums can be attached to self-service knowledgebase articles to give users the ability to add their perspectives and experiences separate from, but attached to, the “official” document. This suggestion sometimes causes consternation in the customer service community, but it’s worth remembering that even the United States newspaper of record, the New York Times, allows viewable public comments on all their articles.

Getting Started
All the Service and Support 2.0 capabilities described on this page are available from the Consona Knowledge Driven Support solution. Remember, the smartest person in the room is all of us—and use that insight to chart a new course for customer engagement.