The Tools You Need
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
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