Service Untitled

The other day I read about a company that was changing the way they did business.

Previously, they had owned all of their servers in a datacenter that they leased. After a lot of thought and planning, they decided they would move to a company that already had a datacenter, change their hardware, and so on. It was a rather big decision and will likely affect the company for many years to come. As I read about this major change, I thought about what a customer service challenge it would be. A gigantic one, no doubt.

So how should a company handle a big change like this? Very carefully to say the least.

Explain the benefits.
A big part of dealing with a such big change is explaining the benefits to your current customers. Tell them how the moves will help them – how will it enable them to make more money, get faster service, etc. For the particular situation I mentioned, customers would notice better performance and reliability. Pretty good benefits.

Pace yourself.
Big moves take time, so don’t rush. It is okay to spend several months getting the details sorted out and doing the moves. Customers would rather have you spend the extra time planning so things work when the time comes. If you don’t have a specific reason for moving (as in the current building isn’t burning down – you just want to upgrade), you can and should definitely take your time.

Constantly update customers.
It is critical to constantly update customers about where you are with these big changes. Explain what has happened so far, what is going to happen soon, how things are going, and so on. The more they know, hopefully the better they will feel.

Provide lots of self-help.
Setup an in-depth FAQ, a knowledge base category specially about the move, a timeline calculator, a special forum, whatever. That way, customers can get lots of information and utilize tools to learn more. Plus, they don’t have to contact you and ask if they can help themselves.

Provide lots of service.
The above doesn’t mean you should eliminate the human element of your service. Firstly, you should setup separate contacts for the big move. You need a bigmove@company.com email address, a special live chat department, another phone extension, and so on. That way, day-to-day customer service inquires won’t see any delay because of the big move. Or, it’ll be separated and hopefully more organized. You will probably need to hire more people to help out during the big change – be prepared.

Have one on one help.
Before moves or other changes related to specific customers, contact them. It can be a simple email or even better, a phone call. Go over what they need to do, when they need to do it, and what they should look out for. This way, the customer has a fresh understanding of exactly what will happen and what they need to do.

Follow up.
Once you’ve done the move for the particular customer, follow up. Follow up after 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, and 3 months. After those four follow ups, the customer will be well convinced that you want to make sure everything went well and is doing okay.

Perhaps the best advice related to these big changes is don’t do them. They are quite a pain and an inconvenience for everyone. However, business is always changing and they are often inevitable.

A majority of this week has been dedicated to the interview with Dick Hunter of Dell. The interview (which I highly suggest reading) is done now, so it’s back to your normal programming.

When going through my usual search checks, one of the questions asked was “What is the most difficult part about providing great customer service?” That’s quite a question and one that cannot be answered easily.

To answer this question, I thought back to some of my interviews. Mike Faith of Headsets.com said the hardest part is providing great customer service day in and day out. Robert Stephens of the Geek Squad said the hardest part is providing the same quality level as you get bigger.

I think those are both good answers. Staying focused on customer service and then keeping quality levels up as you get bigger is very tough. I don’t think one is harder than the other – they are both extremely difficult.

Scaling customer service.
There is a whole section on rapid growth on Service Untitled. Companies that experience a lot of growth have a lot of trouble scaling appropriately. Even companies that are growing at an average pace often have trouble scaling. They don’t know what to do, have trouble hiring the right person, and so on. They just keep growing and can’t do much. Robert Stephens told me it was easy for the Geek Squad to provide great customer all the time when it was just him. However, when there are 15,000 people providing customer service as well, it gets much more difficult.

Staying focused.
Staying focused is another problem that companies of all sizes and growth levels experience. Staying focused on anything, including customer service, can be very hard. When there are bills to pay, people to train, customers to serve, etc., focusing on providing great customer service (consistently) is a very difficult thing to do. Mike Faith said that staying focused and working to always improve is a constant struggle and something they have to work on day in and day out. Not all companies are willing to make that kind of commitment.

How do you work to scale your customer service and stay focused? Needless to say, those are two topics we’ll be re-looking in the future.

I read an interesting post on the Dell blog today. It linked to a section of their IdeaStorm site that lists some service ideas they had. Their three ideas?

• “Geek to Grandma” support aka skill-level based routing (which we talked about here).
• Team based customer service.
• Premimum support (which we talked about here).

Some interesting ideas. I hope Dell continues to monitor the feedback and answer the voters’ questions. The ideas mentioned are somewhat vague, so I’m sure the voters’ would appreciate clarification.

Later today there will be a post about the hardest part of customer service. This is just a quick post.

Here is a round up of the three part interview with Richard “Dick” Hunter, Dell’s Vice President of Consumer Customer Experience and Support.

The interview is a three part interview that lasted was posted on Service Untitled during the week of May 14, 2007. Each part, along with a description is listed below. Be sure to check out some of the other interviews featured on Service Untitled by clicking here.

Part 1 – Link
This part of the interview talks about why Dell’s customer service worse, who made the decisions that caused Dell’s customer service to worsen, and talks about Dell’s current position with outsourcing and offshoring. It also talks about how Dell comes up with its customer satisfaction numbers.

Part 2 – Link
In this part of the interview, Dick discusses what Dell’s biggest disadvantages are, what marketting efforts they have made, what he thinks people can learn from Dell (with tips about opeartions), and where he thinks Dell’s service is now.

Part 3 – Link
In this third and final part of the interview, Dick tells us what Dell’s biggest disadvantages are, what marketing efforts they have made, what he thinks people can learn from Dell (with tips about operations), and where he thinks Dell’s service is now.

This is the third (and final) part of the interview with Dick Hunter, Vice President of Customer Experience and Support at Dell.

In this part of the interview, Dick discusses what Dell’s biggest disadvantages are, what marketing efforts they have made, what he thinks people can learn from Dell (with tips about operations), and where he thinks Dell’s service is now.

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Here is the second part of the interview with Dick Hunter, Vice President of Customer Experience and Support at Dell.

This part of the interview talks about the results of outsourcing/offshoring, Dell’s efforts to gather and respond to feedback (their blog and so on), Dell’s biggest advantage, and then a bit about Dell’s direct sales model.

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This is part 1 (of 3) of my interview with Richard “Dick” Hunter, Vice President of Consumer Customer Experience and Support at Dell. Basically, he runs the company’s customer service efforts.

This is a great interview and provides a lot of information about how Dell is working to improve their customer service and customer relations. It’s definitely a must read if you are interested in how large companies work to turn around their customer service and fix previous mistakes.

This part of the interview talks about why Dell’s customer service worse, who made the decisions that caused Dell’s customer service to worsen, and talks about Dell’s current position with outsourcing and offshoring. It also talks about how Dell comes up with its customer satisfaction numbers.

Continue Reading

I’ve been thinking about premium support and how it should tie into customer service. It isn’t uncommon to see a company that offers premium support models. If they don’t offer, premium support, they may offer different levels of support.

For example, check out the Automattic Support Network. Neither service is cheap (start at $2,500 / year), but for double the price, you get a faster response time and some extra features. It makes sense – not everyone needs a 6 hour response time or “scaling and performance tuning”, so why should companies have to pay extra for it?

Some things that customers may want to pay extra for:

• Faster responses
• Longer/more detailed responses
• More qualified people responding
• People who speak their language responding (i. e. US only support)
• Less hold time
• Person answering the phone (no IVR system)
• Personal relationship with employee (i. e. account manager)

and so on. What other things do you think people would be willing to pay for?

Another thing to consider when offering premium support is whether you want it to be a profit center, break even center, or loss center. The break even and loss aren’t fully accurate since happier customers may recommend you more, etc., but in regards to the actual support being offered, they may be break even or loss. A profit center would mean that you are actually making a profit off of your premium support offerings.

An important thing to keep in mind is that you should keep your standard level of customer service the same and still keep trying to improve it. That means, once you start offering premium support, don’t cut your staff by 30% or downgrade your computer systems. Keep trying to make the two levels of support better (the same person should not run both) and improving all the time.

Use your premium support to your advantage. If a customer is having an issue, offer to upgrade them to premium support for the future. In most cases, it’ll make them happy. Use premium support agents to get a better idea of the problems you are experiencing and the customer feedback.

The approach I like is asking the customers what they want. You may find out that a majority of your customers don’t care about the accent of your customer service representatives, but do want to get through to a human within 30 seconds. You can then tailor your premium service offerings around that knowledge.

I’ll talk more about the operational side of premium support and how to do it at a later time. I’d like to talk about how to make it happen, who you should have manning the phones, and so on.

What is your experience with premium support – either as a customer or an employee?