November 1, 2002 - - Volume 1, Number 5

Five Ways To Use The Internet To Improve Customer Care

Customer care is an overriding concern for most commercial organizations. Obtaining new customers is an expensive and time-consuming process, so once you have a customer, you’d like to keep them as an inexpensive source of follow-on business. Watching over those customers and taking care that your relationship with them remains intact is one of the most important things you can do for the success of your business.

Developing and maintaining close communication with your customers is the heart of good customer care. It helps build your customers’ confidence in your company, enhances your image of professionalism, and sets your customers’ expectations at an appropriate level. And really first rate customer care involves round-trip communication, carrying on an active dialog with your customers so that  you are able to hear what they have to say about you and your company.

The Internet offers a powerful, efficient, and cost-effective means of establishing and maintaining the communication that is central to good customer care. It is a vector for your broadcasting your marketing message to them, of course. But it also offers you the opportunity to gather a high volume of response from them, which offers the twin advantages of your hearing what they have to say and their feeling that someone really is listening to them.

Let’s look at 5 ways you can use the Internet to improve the good communication that enhances your customer care.

1. FAQs, a term of convention on the Internet meaning Frequently Asked Questions, offers you an efficient way to respond to the questions and minor problems that represent probably something in excess of 80% of all your customer support activity. The same old questions get asked over and over: “If I have to cancel my reservations, can I get my money back?” “What’s the difference between the Basic Plan and the Advanced Plan?” “Can I use my Bonus Points for more than one gift in the same calendar quarter?” The questions on your site will be specific to your business, of course, but all businesses experience this problem: spending lots of customer support resources just handling routine questions that come up all the time. And frequently your customers and prospects are intimidated about actually talking to a customer service rep; they may preface their questions with some self-effacing phrase such as “I know this is a stupid question, but . . .”  Well, the question isn’t stupid, and neither is the customer who asked it. Nevertheless he may feel a bit sheepish about it and even resist asking it in order to avoid feeling embarrassed. The result is that he may become or remain unsatisfied with you, which is bad for your business.  The existence of an FAQ page, however, can actually make your customer feel clever for finding the answer for himself, without needing to bother someone on the telephone. And he is likely to go on to read the answer to other FAQs, thereby becoming more knowledgeable about and more comfortable with your company, which is good for your business. The FAQ pages are always available and, once you have created them, they take almost no time or cost at all to maintain.
   
   
2. Downloads and updates – A great deal of the product or service of any business is intangible in nature, comprising information, knowledge, understanding. Even companies that provide a basic physical commodity as their chief product – think of olive oil, underwear, and PVC plumbing components – benefit from having their customers be informed about the product. And those who sell a less tangible service – attorneys, accountants, ad agencies, Web site designers – are even more dependent on conveying information back and forth with their clients. The Internet offers you a means, again cheap and efficient, to provide your clients (and prospects and even members of the general public) the ability to get hold of the latest, most up-to-date examples of whatever it is you provide, as long as it can be represented in electronic form: a digest of recent Supreme Court decisions, the latest regulatory interpretations from the IRS, a video driver that works around a bug in the Windows XP operating system, a revised list of contraindications for the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, the sonnets of William Shakespeare, photographs from Game 7 of the World Series, whatever. Your download page lists the content you want to make available; your visitors arrive at the site and click on a link; and Zip! Whatever your content happens to be is downloaded to their computers. As an example of a working download page, visit the Free Information and Articles page at Altenbernd Consulting’s site: http://www.altenbernd.com/FreeInformationandArticles.asp
   
   
3. Outgoing e-mail – One useful technique that you can use with your database is to store information about your clients’ and prospects’ particular interests and needs so that you can focus particular information on them. There are several ways to capture the information, mostly just by asking them “What are your interests?” when they register with you. And you can record which products or services they have purchased from you. Oh course it’s important that the information you collect be given voluntarily and that you use it with a great deal of discretion. The point of using the Internet to support your customer care efforts is to find more powerful ways to make your guests like you, not dislike you. If your e-mail communications are perceived to be spam, then you will have harnessed the power of the Internet to damage your relations with key market segments, and you will have undermined your marketing efforts.
   
   
4. Being able to send appropriately focused communications to your target market is a fine thing, but you will really begin to realize the benefits of the Internet as a communications medium when you enable them to talk back to you. And you should give them the opportunity not just to respond to a message that you have sent but also to initiate contacts on their own. When you have enabled both sides of the electronic conversation, you can have a truly interactive and constructive exchange, and at a much more rapid rate than by more conventional means. As it turns out, it’s fairly simple to set up a Contact Us button that leads to an e-mail form. That form will have provisions for the user to enter a message to you, but it will also allow for the provisional collection of additional information. You ask them for their e-mail address, which you them look for in your database. If you do not find it, you can offer them the opportunity to register as one of your users. And you can ask them for some additional information that might be helpful in serving them: How did you hear of us? Is this your first visit to us? Have you ever used our herbal car wax before? Would you like to be added to our mailing list? Which of our products are of greatest interest to you? What are your annual sales? How many employees do you have? How many vehicles in your corporate motor pool fleet? And so on, whatever questions are of help in qualifying the prospect and helping you get them the information and, ultimately the products, that are of interest to them. And of course it’s always a balancing act. You want to get as much helpful information as you can but without offending and alienating them either by getting too personal or having the interview process go on for too long.
   
   
5. The four techniques that I have discussed so far – FAQs, downloads, and outgoing and incoming e-mail – are very helpful in caring for your customers and improving your standing with them. And these techniques can be helpful with people other than your clients whom you want to serve, your prospects, the press, and perhaps Web surfers who just happen to drop in for a visit. But frequently it is useful to provide your clients with some additional capability, perhaps the ability to visit your site at their convenience and, without disturbing you, examine confidential data that you would want only them to see. To achieve this restricted access feature, you can build an “extranet”, an extension to your internal network that makes it available, on a secure basis, to selected people outside of your organization: clients, prospects, colleagues, and employees. You can assign unique identifications – username and password – to these special users, storing their credentials in your database. When one of them wishes to visit restricted portions of your Web site, he must enter a correct username/password combination. Once his identity has been verified from the database entry, he is allowed to see, and possibly manipulate, his own data, but only his own. For example, if you were an accountant, you might make his partial tax returns, in process of preparation, available for review and comment. Or you might provide a complete on-line data capture application to record travel expenses. An employee could record his air travel, hotel, meal, and other expenses, which would be provisionally posted to a database; an e-mail message would notify the employee’s manager that an expense report was awaiting review; the manager would sign on to the site and approve or amend the expenses; and finally the expenses would be posted permanently to the database. These examples of extranet applications illustrate the Internet at its most powerful, when it facilitates interactive and co-operative exchanges between you and your clients.

We have examined five techniques for using the Internet to improve the critical communication with your clients that lies at the heart of good customer care. Each of these techniques is comparatively simple and inexpensive to implement, and each will leverage your investment in Internet Technology.

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We can help

At Altenbernd Consulting we have been designing and building database-driven Web sites for more than 6 years. Our own Web site serves as an example of how most of the techniques we discussed can be implemented and integrated into an overall site plan. If you are a small to medium-sized business looking to increase the productivity of your Web site and get more back from the investment you’ve made, perhaps we can help you. Visit our Web site to learn more about how we can help you: http://www.Altenbernd.Com.

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© 2002 Altenbernd Consulting, LLC. All Rights Reserved.