Thread Intelligence Article

February 5, 2004
By Dirk Knemeyer

Customer service is the ongoing process of taking care of people who have specific needs and desires pertaining to your company that are not related to an expected purchase. We typically think of customer service in the context of dealing with unhappy customers: replacing a broken product, negotiating returns of an unwanted product, addressing complaints in an effort to satisfy the unsatisfied. And those reactive components are a big part of it. But successful customer service is about being proactive: anticipating what people's problems and issues might be and either eliminating the potential for problems and issues, or facilitating the most efficient and effective resolution possible. It should also include customer communication. Often times, customer communication is done for a different purpose: to gather data for marketing, or head off problems that legal anticipates, or to try and up- or cross-sell additional products and services. But customer communication, which represents true customer service and has the best interests of the customer at heart, intends to make the customer happier by speaking directly to their personal needs and desires. That is what makes a customer become passionate about your company.

Digital discipline
The lack of physical, human interaction puts eCommerce at an inherent disadvantage from traditional commerce in so many ways, one of the subtler being our neglecting to focus on properly taking care of ongoing service. There is still a notion with the web that, if a company puts up the right sort of website and gets some promotion, they will become a thriving and successful business. The perception is that the inherent lack of transactional human contact in an eCommerce purchase somehow implies a completely different business mindset. If only. To the contrary, customer service becomes even more relatively important and valuable. To compete with brick-and-mortar stores, you need a very professional level of customer service, to create trust and comfort with people. Then, since many eCommerce models have inadequate customer service, your provision of legendary service will starkly differentiate you from the competition. Differentiation is one of the key components to brand building and profitability.

In traditional businesses, there is a definite sense of reward and fulfillment that comes with being a customer service professional. Consider: Even though your day is typically spent fielding problems from confused, exasperated or even angry customers, it is offset by the fact that your good service often receives significant positive returns. People are accustomed to poor service, to be forced to fight for what they think is right and still not be taken care of in the end. They approach the interaction from a defensive posture, even a deceptive or dishonest posture. That is the perception of how one gets customer service: It is often a combative process. What that also means is that when people receive excellent customer service - quick, friendly, responsive - they often feel a great deal of relief and pleasure. These are reflected in very warm human ways: a bright smile, a real sincerity in their vocalized appreciation, a touch on the arm, a connection that speaks to a relationship. This sort of positive reinforcement feeds customer service professionals and keeps them focused on delivering successful service and attuned to the fact that each person they are dealing with, regardless of their problem or attitude, is an individual person with whom they need to establish a relationship.

Organizations with strong customer service understand the need and importance of training, communicating and encouraging their customer service professionals. It is such a difficult job that the positive reinforcement is really not enough. This is only exacerbated for virtual customer service professionals. It is easy to lose focus on customer service when you do not see your customers. We have become de-sensitized to email and other forms of digital correspondence, their very flat and lifeless nature further compromised by the glut of e-junk that we all receive and distance ourselves from. The process of delivering virtual customer service tangles us into that sterile environment of information overload. Part of providing superior customer service as an eCommerce business is creating easy opportunities for people to pursue service over the telephone. And providing telephone service certainly provides a depth of interaction not possible through email or instant message. Yet it still falls short.

The flip side is true for eCustomers. There is some degree of fear and uncertainty for customers when dealing with an eCommerce provider, especially when it is not a superpower like Amazon.com or you have not done business with them before: the lack of brick-and-mortar infrastructure, the degree of newness and even fear of making purchases from a remote, intangible company. This is important.

The discipline of successful digital customer service, then, is twofold: first, understanding the significant importance of customer service as part of a sustainable business model and investing adequate time and resources to provide it consistently. Second, recognizing that virtual customer service is more difficult and less certain for your employees and customers both, and that you need to gear your strategies and tactics to close this gap.

Communication: the secret to a successful relationship
Various companies and even entire industries are geared toward providing tools that improve customer service. Database technology and knowledge management enable organizations to provide more customized, one-to-one attention. This technology is applied for brick-and-mortar stores, catalog retailers and eCommerce providers alike. Leveraging those technologies and approaches are a component to strong customer service. However, given that the applied technology is not unique to the digital realm, we need to find other solutions if we hope to make customer service a positive differentiator.

One of the first and easiest things that we can do is proactive customer communication. Companies are aggressive in using email as a communication tactic, but the application has a marketing focus. The strategies of virtually all those communications have to do with generating additional sales. As a goal that is great, but by gearing the strategy that way, the company is not providing customer service. It is marketing the customer. There is a big difference.

For example, my cellular phone service is provided by Sprint PCS. Periodically, they send me an email chock full of different types of information: announcements of expanded service areas, promotions for phones or service contracts, changes in legislation pertaining to cellular phones, specifics related to my account. In all fairness, a lot of the information is really good, helpful and wanted. But it still falls into the category of 99 percent of my opt-in "customer service" emails as a sales tool. They are trying to take me to their website, to get me to upgrade my contract. And there is definitely a place for that. But what if they innovated a little?

I would love getting an email from them that went something like this:

Dear Dirk,

Thank you for being a valuable Sprint PCS customer.

We understand that, at times, cellular customers experience a dropped call or inadvertent break in service. It is important to us that you do not experience these sorts of interruptions.

Please save my email address or this email and contact me directly if you have a drop in service, specifying the approximate time and geographic location that it occurs. I will be sure to get that data to our engineers, so they can account for those service breaks in our ongoing upgrades to our cellular network.

Once again, thank you for your business. We are always at your disposal.

Yours,
Trent Walker
Customer Service Representative

Now, the granular specifics of that email may not be exactly relevant to Sprint and their business model. But what is notable about that approach is the total focus on my satisfaction. No driving me to a website. No pushing of future purchases. Just sending me warm fuzzies and providing proactive remedy to the single most frustrating problem with cellular phone service. Today, even though I've been a Sprint PCS customer for years, I view Sprint PCS, Verizon and a few other providers as undifferentiated commodities. If I got an email like this, boom! I would immediately become a brand passionate for Sprint PCS. Not only would they seem to focus on taking care of me (which is strong in its own right), but no one else is doing it, which means pointed differentiation. There is a cacophony of marketing messages dressed up as customer service out there. Even if I want and appreciate those messages, they do not affect my emotional approach to the company. But this approach, a genuine customer service approach, completely changes the relationship. And it does not hurt that Sprint PCS would, in fact, be culling data that improves their ability to provide service. It is a classic example of co-creation, imperative to successful business in the information age.

That is only one example. Each company and business model would have a different approach - and ideally would provide this type of communication in an ongoing and consistent way. And email makes it painfully easy to do. But the secret is being proactive. Identify problems before they are raised. Listen to the pain points of customers even before an individual has expressed or even identified them. Marketing communications to customers is also fine, but keep it completely separate from service communication. Take the time and invest the attention to think only about the needs and desires of customers. The benefits will speak for themselves.

Open the channels
Limiting eCommerce customer service to the digital domain is a seductive possibility. Being that costumers are typically making their purchases online, and there is likely not a point where a potential physical interaction could even take place, it is easy to treat customer service as a digital concern and move on to other things. There are a few ways that companies do this: Some literally do not put any other form of contact information on their website other than a contact form or email address. Others "bury" their telephone information deep in the bowels of their site, where only the most persistent and committed customers will prove rigorous enough to ferret them out. These overt attempts to limit communication channels reflect poor customer service. For the sake of convenience, or to bring down the cost of infrastructure, companies fall back to the very easy and affordable "digital-driven" solution. But penny wise is indeed pound foolish, particularly when it comes to dealing with customers.

There are a variety of ways to open up the communication channels. The first and most obvious is by offering telephone communication and making it clear and easy for people to find those phone numbers. Another method is through more immediate and interactive digital channels, such as instant messenger availability and blogs. The former encourages instantaneous resolution while the latter provides some level of immediate gratification while enabling people to carry on a multivariate dialogue with other customers and company employees. A very effective tactic employed by Amazon.com during their mainstream establishment and growth was partnering with physical brick-and-mortar stores and organizations to provide some level of real, physical interface for people to choose. Going back to our experience design conversation in the third part of this series, providing proactive customer service communication in the physical realm - through direct, ordinary mail - gives the perception of there being an open physical channel even if there is not. Even if only for the sake of perception that your company is more "real," breaking this physical plane can have a significant impact on customer retention and additional purchasing - strictly through customer service.

On an episode of "Seinfeld," Kramer bought a meat slicer and was intensely focused on slicing the meat as thinly as possible because, he noted, the surface area is where the taste is. Think of your customers in the same way. The more of them that you can touch, the greater the surface area, the better. That means providing as many communication channels as possible, both for your proactive communication and their reactive questions and requests. Break down the barriers between their internal perceptions and definitions and your organization. Even if you are an eCommerce company, there is no reason that customers should only see you in that way.

Strong execution at the page level
An important link in the customer service chain of an eCommerce company is that of the site design. Being that your website is your actual storefront, it thus not only defines the brand experience but becomes part of the product itself. This is a point that is far more broad and important than customer service, but it is in the customer service context that details are too often missed and subtle aspects of the interaction are not accounted for. While it is typically evident how the basic interface needs to function in order for people to learn about and purchase products, there is far less attention paid to - and understanding of - executing customer service messaging and channeling on-site.

This comes back to very basic principles of information design, and sister disciplines like interaction design and interface design. From a proactive standpoint, we need to include content that reflects the thoughtful reverse engineering of common problems or questions that customers have. This content must be woven into the appropriate places, where the connections it makes are logical and intuitive. From a reactive standpoint, we need to provide as many channels in as accessible a way as possible, so that the process of a person going from question/problem to resolution is simple and hassle free. This attention to detail will minimize their frustration. In fact, people are so appreciative (and often surprised by) good customer service that your brand could actually benefit from their having a question or problem in the first place. I would never recommend that Machiavellian level of engineering to a client - to start a fire so you can put it out - but it is undeniable that many companies experience larger brand benefits from solving problems they create than anything else.

For the resolution to truly be simple and hassle free, the design at the page level must make the process seamless. Too often, even mainstream consumer websites do not do this successfully. Customer service messaging or channels have a tendency to be afterthoughts, are realized after initial implementation, then sloppily applied via a "special button" or as "add-on content" that ends up as clutter more than anything else, not properly serving its own purpose while simultaneously detracting from the other site and page-level objectives. Integration and smooth operation is vital.

Focus. Communication. Execution.
To some real degree, the secret to good customer service is paying attention: not allowing it to quietly slide out of focus and thus increasing the likelihood of damaging your profits and brand. This is particularly difficult - and important - to maintain in eCommerce. The lack of physical opportunity, reinforcement and connection both threatens the focus and makes the eventual execution more difficult. Getting your people right minded and keeping them motivated is an important organizational component. Then, coordinating appropriate communication with the most possible communication channels, while particularly focusing on effective and integrated site design, enables successful execution. Strong customer service will not only help you to compete with brick-and-mortar stores, it can also prove a vital differentiator as you battle rival eCommerce providers for market share. The value will shine through on your bottom line.

Next week, part five of the series will explore how eCommerce providers can provide immediate gratification in order to counter impulse buying and other consumer trends that traditionally lead people to bypass an ePurchase.

Author - Dirk Knemeyer

Editor -

Part 1 of 7: Understanding eCommerce
Part 2 of 7: Effective Virtual Salespeople
Part 3 of 7: eCommerce and Experience Design
Part 4 of 7: Mastering Virtual Customer Service
Part 5 of 7: Providing Immediate Gratification
Part 6 of 7: Overcoming Technology Barriers
Part 7 of 7: Next Generation eCommerce

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