Connect Online for Better Customer Care

Expedia, Amazon, eBay, Hyatt and many other companies have successfully exploited the online channel for sales, but surprisingly few companies have figured out that connecting online for customer care with their customers can deliver a superior experience for them, and more deeply satisfy their customers.

One of many ways to do that is through dynamic FAQs (frequently asked questions). A composite company I'll call SellMore has an expansive web site with special offers and highly tailored recommendations based on the customers' or prospective customers' answers to a handful of questions posed to them on the site. Sales have been brisk, with generally high marks from users for order accuracy and speed, but the company started experiencing higher return rates and negative postings on blogs about "poor service."

SellMore assigned a team of experienced sales and support reps to walk through the entire customer experience, from the fliers and email campaigns that attracted customers to the site to the web site, itself, and on to post-sales care. Afterward, the team concluded that there were several critical missteps, including "static FAQs" and "isolated FAQs."

With static FAQs, a product or marketing group works directly with web development to post frequently asked questions. But this is done in a vacuum, based on what the product and marketing managers believe are hot topics or issues that they think the customers "need to know" (and they often are thinly veiled sales arguments, not support aids). The frequently asked questions become isolated when companies place the FAQs on the often hard-to-find "Help" page and only once in the entire web site.

Stale FAQs
The SellMore team asked web development when the "Top 10 FAQs" were last updated. It took a while to get the answer (in, itself, revealing). It turned out that seven of the "Top 10" questions hadn't been refreshed in 12 months; two were each a month old; and one wasn't even accurate anymore, referring to a product the company no longer offered or supported. Clearly, something had to change!

SellMore decided that, to be true to its name and sell more, it had to change the FAQs and base them on real recently asked questions of customer care agents, enabling customers to view current issues instead of stale ones. The company examined its numerous reason codes and scored them for urgency and importance from the customer's perspective. Then people thinned the list down to a new set of Top 10 FAQs, with color coding for urgency and importance. Initially, the company reviewed the Top 10 before posting the list in the FAQ field, but executives (correctly) feared reverting to the screened/static FAQ era. Instead, SellMore let the FAQs go straight onto the web site.

The same team at SellMore recommended taking the FAQs out of isolation. Instead, they suggesting placing the dynamic FAQs on the home page, the check-out pages, the product pages and on the Help page—creating roughly six times as many opportunities for prospects or customers to see them. Plus, because they were color-coded, the dynamic FAQs stood out on the pages, attracting visitors to click through to learn for themselves what to do.

As a result of the efforts, SellMore scored a triple win that continues to improve over time:

SellMore's experience shows that online customer service doesn't have to mean giving your customers short shrift. It means giving them timely, up to date information and freeing your agents for those customers who really need them.

Bill Price, president and CEO and founder of Driva Solutions, LLC, is a CRM consultant, practitioner and instructor. He was Amazon.com's first global vice president of customer service. His new book, with co-author David Jaffe, is The Best Service Is No Service (Wiley & Sons, March 2008).