I have this little project I am working on. I am calling it statzen; maybe you have heard of it. As I am getting close to launching I am starting to think about customer service strategies. The recurring theme that I keep coming back to is that I want to make it easy for our customers to interact with us to provide feedback and ask for help. Each customer service interaction is an opportunity for us to really win over our customers. So I want to make it easy for those opportunities to take place.
Granted, I may be a little idealistic in these thoughts, but these are some of the ideas I hope we can implement.
noreply
Typically when you receive an email from a web service the reply to address is something like noreply@example.com. This breaks email. The point of using email is that you are communicating with your customers through a channel they are already using. By using a noreply email address you are doing a real half-assed job of communicating on that channel. I want our customers to be able to reply to our emails.
Today I have been working on the email that will be sent to our new customers when they create a new account. This will be our first opportunity to wow our customers with our attention to service. They will just have created a new account and may be having difficulties implementing statzen on their blog. It could also be that they have immediate feedback about the signup process or our explanation of the service. Not only should we allow them to reply to the email by not using a “noreply” email address, but we should also encourage them to reply. We are going to be hungry for feedback and so we want to make it as easy as possible. What is easier than replying to an email?
Instant Messaging
Another form of communication that many of our customers will already be using is IM. I posted an idea for an IM Support System at the Nashville Startup Weekend site. The idea came from how I would like to be able to handle customer support / interaction over the existing instant messaging services. The basic gist is that I would like to have a single Statzen screen name on each of the major IM services (AIM, GoogleTalk, Yahoo, MSN).
Obviously it would be hard to scale that as the service (hopefully) grows. This is why I would like a system that routes the incoming IM chats to a pool of support individuals. When someone initiates a chat it would pick someone from the pool. The Statzen side could be staffed by each member of the team until we actually have a support staff. I would also like the system to provide some assurance that requests are being answered. If a request went unanswered for a few minutes I would like it to escalate to another member of the team.
This will be harder for us to implement in the short term. However, it follows a consistent theme of “communicating with our customers via their preferred method of communication”.
The Social / Conversational Web
With a customer base centered around bloggers I am sure that the social / conversational web will be key to our customer communications. Once we launch I will be spending time making sure the Statzen blog stays up to date. I have a Statzen Twitter account that I hope will also gain traction after our launch.
Possibly the most important way for a company to participate in conversation on the web is to listen. Sadly it seems harder and harder to keep track of what people are saying in the blogosphere. Technorati is not what it used to be. Google Blog Search is good, but I really wish Google Alerts were faster. Luckily “Statzen” is a pretty unique word having no other English usage that I have seen.
At least for now, Statzen’s presence on the conversational web will be either me or Statzen’s CEO (my business partner and father), the guys who thought it up, wrote the code, and made it happen. It doesn’t get more authentic than that. Our years of experience as owners of a couple of retail stores have given us a deep appreciation for the value of a customer.
General Accessibility
For years I have published my phone number on my blog. I remember thinking “If Robert Scoble can put his cell phone number on his blog, I should be able to handle it too”. Over on the right side of my blog I have listed my email, phone number, and AIM screen name. They are in hCard format (a micro-format that would make it easy to add my contact info to your address books if more browsers would support it).
I plan to try to remain accessible. If you have thoughts about Statzen you can just pick up the phone and call me. The argument against this level of access is that it could create more customer support demands than we can handle. My counter-argument is that if there are that many support requests then we are not making things clear enough. By handling the support requests ourselves (at least initially), we will have a much clearer picture on what we need to work on.
Too often I see online services that have no way to actually contact the company. “Search the wiki” is not a good enough answer.
Do you see something that I left out? What are your ideas on how customer service should work online? Leave a comment (or just call or IM me).
