Connect Online for Better Customer Care

By Bill Price, Driva Solutions

Expedia, Amazon, eBay, Hyatt and many other companies have successfully exploited the online channel for sales, but surprisingly few companies have figured out that connecting online for customer care with their customers can deliver a superior experience for them, and more deeply satisfy their customers.

One of many ways to do that is through dynamic FAQs (frequently asked questions).

A composite company I'll call SellMore has an expansive web site with special offers and highly tailored recommendations based on the customers' or prospective customers' answers to a handful of questions posed to them on the site. Sales have been brisk, with generally high marks from users for order accuracy and speed, but the company started experiencing higher return rates and negative postings on blogs about "poor service."

SellMore assigned a team of experienced sales and support reps to walk through the entire customer experience, from the fliers and email campaigns that attracted customers to the site to the web site, itself, and on to post-sales care. Afterward, the team concluded that there were several critical missteps, including "static FAQs" and "isolated FAQs."

With static FAQs, a product or marketing group works directly with web development to post frequently asked questions. But this is done in a vacuum, based on what the product and marketing managers believe are hot topics or issues that they think the customers "need to know" (and they often are thinly veiled sales arguments, not support aids).

The frequently asked questions become isolated when companies place the FAQs on the often hard-to-find "Help" page and only once in the entire web site.

The SellMore team asked web development when the "Top 10 FAQs" were last updated. It took a while to get the answer (in, itself, revealing). It turned out that seven of the "Top 10" questions hadn't been refreshed in 12 months; two were each a month old; and one wasn't even accurate anymore, referring to a product the company no longer offered or supported. Clearly, something had to change!

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Bill Price, president and CEO and founder of Driva Solutions, LLC, has more than 25 years of experience as a consultant, a CRM instructor at the college and post-graduate level, a writer and a CRM practitioner, most recently serving as Amazon.com's first global vice president of customer service.