Listening to the Voice of Your Customers

Web 2.0 enables all these behaviors. Customers can pull information that they need, on their own terms, in order to make purchase decisions and for customer support. By being vocal, customers can also impact the type and quality of information being delivered. This, in essence, puts them in the driver’s seat, allowing them to influence the relationships that they have with the companies with which they do business.

Support management has been caught unprepared with this shift, and feel a loss of control as customers use peer groups to validate purchase decisions and for first line customer service. Support managers are looking outside traditional customer service solutions for an understanding of what makes Web 2.0 companies successful, and what elements they can incorporate in their daily practice to take back some sense of control.

So what are the key elements that breed success for marquee web 2.0 companies? Wikipedia’s success was assured when its user community took collective responsibility for the accuracy of the content. Experts would review content that was of interest to them, and correct any statement that was inaccurate. For eBay it was the realization that users trusted to a greater extent the collective voice of other users in rating suppliers compared to the top-down, company imposed ratings. For Amazon, it was the ability for customers to be heard by submitting reviews, which ultimately drove purchase decisions. And for Facebook, it was the ease of forming and growing communities of like-minded individuals.

We can use these guiding principles to help shape successful customer service interactions.

Start by enticing users to your site. Use rich internet application interfaces based on technologies like AJAX to enhance the interactivity of your site. Greet your users by name. Personalize their content. Let them drag and drop content to where they want to see it. Make your site engaging and entertainingby using, for example rollovers, mouseovers, or slidersto change data, or give users widgets to perform rapid calculations

Think about loosening the strings around your content. Let your agent community take collective responsibility for the accuracy of knowledgebase information. If content is inaccurate or incomplete, let agents flag it to be corrected. Or, if agents have authoring rights, let them to modify information on the fly, and instantly publish it so that it is available to everyone. And, if an agent finds a gap in content, let them suggest or author new content.

Don’t stop there. Reach out to your user community and think about integrating your knowledgebase with discussion boards. Let users recommend information to be added to the knowledgebase, ensuring that it organically grows with customers changing demands.

Expert users who know the product as well as their customer service agents exist. Think about letting these experts post content directly to the company’s knowledgebase. Expert user contributions can be rated so that poor contributors are restricted, and star contributors are recognized.

Append feedback forms to all user-viewable knowledgebase content and answers sent by email to customers to track the relevancy of the received information. Let users rate solutions and use their feedback to optimize the information delivered during the service experience.

Allow customers to interact with relevant content from your site, on their terms. Let them subscribe to content of interest and receive it in the form that they are most comfortable with – email, a chat session, SMS or via a phone message. Be proactive with communication to your customers. Use a blend of analytics and knowledge of customer preferences to proactively push knowledge out, sometimes even before customers experience a problem.

All these strategies help you engage in a two-way conversation with your customer base. Customers will still influence the relationship that they have with companies. Yet companies will have a greater success in creating a loyal customer base if they listen, respect and use the voice of their customers.