Selling to the Empowered Customer

To retain its customers, a company must be able and willing to answer questions and resolve issues with the same prompt attention it gives to closing sales.

"Savvy companies let customers reserve hotels, book airline tickets, order products, track shipments and find for themselves answers provided in a well-managed and targeted knowledge base. Really savvy companies reward these self-sufficient customers with lower costs and improved service," says Patrick O'Neal, the CEO of US customer service consultancy Sento.

Providing high-availability, high-quality customer service is neither easy nor inexpensive, however. Many companies find customer satisfaction decreasing, even as they pour ever-increasing resources into their customer service operations. Actually, according to Aberdeen, many IT suppliers offer solutions that can create self-service environments, yet only a few understand self-service is just a means to an end.

The real end goal, as described by marketing guru Seth Godin to Massachusetts-based Art Technology Group's ATG Insight 2004 user conference in February, is to develop proactive service strategies that can profitably serve the empowered customer. Godin's keynote emphasized that the empowered customer is the key agent of change transforming go-to-market strategies. Customers know that they are in charge. Any company that ignores this reality is living on borrowed time.

Today's wired consumers care little about a seller's product and excel at ignoring pitches. Because they believe the world revolves around their unique wants and needs, they expect "me-mail" - not e-mail for the masses. "They expect personalized experiences whenever or wherever they interact or transact with a seller," Aberdeen says. "Marketers must accept that these dynamic environments are now must-haves, not nice-to-haves."

Since today's customers demand remarkable products even though not every company has a remarkable product to sell, the idea, at least in ATG's eyes, is to do the next best thing and create a remarkable customer experience online. Dynamic online self-service environments promise to lower costs and deliver more loyal customers. However, to appeal to customers, Fariborz Ghadar, director of the Centre for Global Business Studies at Penn State University in the US, says such self-service environments must feature facile user interfaces that quickly deliver relevant answers.

As organizations move to get customers to do more things independently, they must recognize that customers generally do not want to spend a lot of time hunting down information or being shunted from one Web site to another, Ghadar says, echoing Thornton's thoughts. Unless they can get what they want within four or five clicks - or you can find a way to make the hunt compelling for them - many will lose interest and leave your site. "If we have to ask a customer more than four or five questions, he or she basically goes away," Ghadar says.

The convenience of online self-service is already actively determining which sites customers elect to do business with. Jupiter Research recently found 17 percent of online buyers surveyed said the existence of online self-service search would determine which sites they would make future purchases from. "The attitude that drives do-it-yourself behaviour is born from a desire for convenience," reports Jupiter in its Search Technology Buyer's Guide. "Ultimately, self-service frees consumers from having to wait for an answer to a query. Yet, such convenience has hardly been realized; searchable service options continue to frustrate online consumers."

While Jupiter has found that for now, customers are likely to blame themselves for not knowing what keywords to type or how to use advanced queries, such self-deprecation will not keep them on your site.

Customers will not linger if they cannot get what they want, Ghadar points out. If they cannot find what they are looking for after four or five clicks, chances are you have lost them. It is no longer good enough to just post the information and expect them to find it. Information must not only be timely, accurate and easy to locate, it must be delivered the way the customer wants.

Research firm Gartner estimates that more than one-third of all customers or users who initiate queries over the Web eventually end up phoning in for answers to their questions. Yet ServiceWare's Tobin finds most customer queries are similar in nature and often inefficiently satisfied.

"Does someone really need a live agent - the most expensive method of support - to know your hours of operation, whether you sell widgets, or if there is a new driver for the peripheral they just bought?" Tobin asks in a white paper called The Value of Online Self-Service. "Of course not, and nor does a customer want to wait in a queue for five minutes to get an answer. So, the inflection point is providing this type of support online or via the channel that is most convenient for the customer."

Tobin says delivering the information in a timely way that is easy for customers to find and in the format they want requires that you "knowledge-enable" your online support. "You may or may not have already provided knowledge to your agents in the centre. In either case, your customers want access to that knowledge," he says. "The win-win here is that the customer is happier with your company, you've reduced your support expenses and the knowledge-enabled self-service solution conveys economies of scale that even your best agents could never match. The more a self-service tool is used the lower the transaction cost to you."

Tobin points out the ROI from knowledge-enabled self-service can be significant, as borne out by a recent Hewson Group [which, by the way, should be the poster child for flash but frustrating and impossible-to-navigate Web sites - ED] report that noted "by improving online experience to match the best competitor, the average grocer, for example, can increase online sales by a minimum of 54 percent".