Service Untitled

I’ve been reading Managing Online Forums by Patrick O’Keefe over the last few days. The book was an interesting read because Patrick has an interesting, very hands on background. He has a lot of experience running some very large and very successful forum communities and as a result of that, the advice in his book is extremely practical and hands on.

O’Keefe focuses on the “how” and provides a plethora of information about “how” to do things. The book isn’t academic and it isn’t really that marketing focused (i. e. run a community to help brand awareness, etc.) — it’s focused almost entirely on actually running an online forum or community. The book is for those who are looking to learn how to do it, not why to do it.

Managing Online Forums is essentially divided into ten parts:

1) Laying the Groundwork (planning and overall goals)
2) Developing Your Community (setting up and configuring the forum)
3) Developing Guidelines (community rules)
4) Promoting Your Community (self explanatory)
5) Managing Your Staff (working with the people who will help you run your community)
6) Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos (self explanatory)
7) Creating a Good Environment (working well with your members)
8 Keeping It Interesting (games, features, resources, etc.)
9) Making Money (self explanatory)
10) Appendix (resources, templates, etc.)

If you are a customer service manager looking to start a community for your company, you can probably skip parts 5 and 9. While these apply (and are very important) to traditional online communities, communities run by companies usually don’t deal with volunteer staff members or making money (the company handles both aspects). The other chapters, though, serve as a great introduction and overview of what it’s like to run a community. Experienced community managers probably won’t pick up too much from this book (there are still some really helpful tidbits), but for those new to community management, this book is a great book to start with. It is a perfect book to give to the customer service supervisor you want to be your community manager. That manager can have it right on their desk as they go through the process of setting up, starting, and eventually, running, the community.

Managing Online Forums is a dead simple read. It’s easy to skim and you won’t have to think too hard about what’s on the page – it is all pretty logical. Communities, like customer service, require thinking things through and making the logical choice. The topic isn’t that complex and it certainly isn’t abstract, so the simple tone and style of book is appropriate. The content is organized and written in a way that makes it easy to understand and easy to put into action, making it perfect for a newbie.

Bottomline: If anything, Managing Online Forums can serve as a useful and practical guide and overview for starting and managing an online community. O’Keefe provides the reader with an easy to follow how to guide that can be applied to almost any community without difficulty.

Pros: Easy to follow, useful templates and examples, lots of information covering a broad range of topics.

Cons: Because the book covers so many aspects of managing a community, it doesn’t go too far in depth on any particular aspect (with community rules / guidelines being the notable exception).

More on Service Untitled: For some more information about communities, check out this post about looking at communities like parties.

Note: According to the author’s web site, the book’s publication date is April 28. It is currently available in most Barnes & Noble stores.

Remember the extremely positive review I wrote of my experience with TurboTax the other day? I still think very highly of the company, but I do have a suggestion for them. Stop sending me emails once I’m done. I have gotten several (unnecessary) emails from TurboTax over the last week and it is starting to get annoying. They are reminding me of the April 15th tax deadline, warning me that prices go up, etc. Quite frankly, I get it and I don’t need them to contact me further.

When a customer is finished using your product or service (especially when it is something with a clear purpose, like filing taxes), stop emailing them for a while. You should send them a nice survey a day or two after to see what they thought of their experience, but anything beyond that is probably unnecessary. A customer who has already filed their taxes doesn’t need to be reminded of a tax deadline or of a future price increase; the information is irrelevant. When customers receive irrelevant information via email, they start to get annoyed. When customers get annoyed, an attempt at helping (or selling) actually starts to help the brand.

Your marketing and product systems should be coordinated. When a customer files at TurboTax, their email should be removed from the marketing list for the rest of the year. You can start emailing them for tax time in 2009, but for 2008, they’re done. Further communication isn’t necessary (and shouldn’t happen) unless there is a problem or something that is genuinely relevant to them. The same thing applies if a customer cancels – you should stop emailing them about product updates and such. It seems simple, but a lot of companies don’t do it because their systems aren’t interested.

The goal is to have systems that are integrated and on the same page as each other. When the systems are integrated, the customer experience can go much smoother.

My apologies about not posting on Friday. I was (and still am to some extent) sick. Being sick made me pretty much useless for the day – I barely checked my email, much less made progress on anything. I expect to be completely back to normal by Monday and posting will return as usual then. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Something I try to encourage companies (and their customer service representatives) to do is to offer a small service credit to customers who have had issues and have had to call or email the company several times. Even if the problem wasn’t necessarily the company’s fault, the service experience wasn’t unpleasant, etc., it is an act of good will (and good business) to proactively offer the customer a small discount on their next bill. When I suggest this, I’m usually asked why in the world a company would offer a credit to any customer who was not:

• Demanding a credit
• Threatening to cancel
• Threatening to sue, call the BBB, etc.
• Violent

The act of proactively offering a service credit is almost unheard of. The idea, however, is a good one(I think). It shows that your company is dedicated to great service and to a great customer experience. Volunteering (as opposed to the customer asking or demanding) makes a big difference. Even if it is just a tiny service credit, the act of offering it proactively is always helpful. Customers will likely be impressed and appreciate the gesture. They’ll be impressed and appreciate the gesture because companies offering a service credit proactively is so out of the norm that it is a big deal.

One of the best parts about this is the service credit doesn’t have to be a large amount. What determines a “large amount” obviously depends on your business and the particular customer, but I’ve seen companies that bill $15 a month offer a $5 service credit to a somewhat flustered customer. The customers usually appreciate the gesture, especially every dollar given as a service credit is a dollar the customer doesn’t have to pay. Companies that charge $50 a month sometimes give a $10 service credit, which is perfectly reasonable. I would say you should make it roughly between 5% and 35% of the monthly bill, with the percentage getting smaller as the monthly bill increases.

What customers like most is that you are considering the inconveniences and problems they’ve had. And then you’re doing something about it. It just makes the customer feel good.

Technorati Tags: Credits, Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Customer Service Representative, Pro-active, Little Things

I talk about tools occasionally, but not enough. Just like self-service, tools are becoming more and more important to great customer service. As the products and the solutions to inevitable problems with those products become more and more complicated, customer service will get more and more complicated.

As a result of that, customer service representatives will start to need more and more powerful (not necessarily complicated) tools. Companies will obviously have to invest time and money into purchasing or developing these tools. And when companies have to invest time and money into getting something, they start to what is actually necessary versus what is completely superfluous.

It’s important to look at the value of tools beyond their actual development or acquisition costs, though. If your company is a large company with 500 people providing service on a daily basis, spending $100,000 on developing an internal tool probably isn’t a huge deal. However, if that tools disrupts the flow of the service process, requires a lot of new training, etc., the costs will start to pileup elsewhere and in other forms. Tools are rarely a one time expense – they are almost always a recurring expense.

Once companies come to terms with the cost associated with adding a new tool, they should also consider how that particular tool fits within the larger toolset. If customer service representatives already have to use 10 tools to get through a call or resolve an issue via email, you should look at the addition of a new tool very closely. Is there an overlap between this new tool and existing tools? Does it make the process slower? Will this tool negatively impact the customer service provided while representatives learn to use it? These are more qualitative measures, but they are just as important as the purely quantitative measures.

The question I encourage my clients to ask themselves before investing in a new tool is, “can we live without it?” Most of the time, the answer is yes (they already have for however long). The next question to ask is, “will the introduction of this tool make us look back and realize how dumb we were for not having it earlier?” If the tool is that good, then it’s definitely worth investing time and money in. Tools shouldn’t be added for the sake of improving the toolset, they should be added for the sake of improving the customer service experience.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Customer Service Representative, Purchase, Tools

(The end of) customer service made it onto Time’s “Top 10 Ideas That Are Changing The World,” along with mandatory health, reverse radicalism, and a whole bunch of other seemingly more important issues. Regardless of the editors’ views about the importance of customer service as a global change factor, the one page article was interesting.

It focused on how self-service (think self check out, airline kiosks, grocery stores where people buy their own things instead of the clerk going to get it, etc.) is changing business. And Time rightly assumes, what changes business significantly (especially consumer business), does tend to affect consumers significantly. Self-service is here to stay (and become more prevalent) because it saves money for business and gives customers more control.

Time gives an interesting history of self-service. It started in 1902 when the first vending machine-esque cafeteria came about in Philadelphia. People were able to pick their own food and buy it without much help from humans. Piggly Wiggly became the first self-service grocery store 14 years later and completely changed that model around (for good). Self-pump gas stations followed in 1947 and are found in a vast majority of states today. ATMs came about in 1967. In 1995, Alaska Airlines (why them, I don’t know) sold the first airline ticket over the Internet. The timeline shows that self-service has been steadily getting more and more popular, spreading both horizontally and vertically across industries, for the last 100 or so years.

Physical self-service and the concept of self-service is interesting. It’s definitely here to stay, which makes it a natural topic of interest. The thing that is perhaps most interesting about self-service is that thinking of unique ways to bring self-service to your company is often pretty difficult. It takes some unique thinkers to essentially turn the way something is done around completely. In 1916, the idea of a self-serve grocery store was unheard of. No one thought it would work. Being able to see the potential in that and then being able to make it happen is no easy task. You definitely need unique thinkers.

What are some other examples of self-service that you’ve seen? What industries have room to provide more self-service? I would say essentially any industry where the average transaction price is low and/or simple has room for more self-service.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Customer Service Representative, Time Magazine, Self-Service