Empowering the Customer

Loyal customers are confident partners in your company. As a partner, we feel that it is our duty to empower our customers with more than CRM solutions. We have to also empower them with problem-solving techniques that will allow them to fully understand the benefits of what we bring to the table. It's a win-win situation - our value is better communicated and customers have confidence in their ability to maximize how well our solution works for them.

A past goal at Firstwave was to reduce the number of support calls we received. Through surveys, we realized that many of our calls were the result of customers failing to use the help documentation and training manuals. So, we developed a new strategy, which has achieved two goals: reducing our support calls, and more important, empowering our customers with the ability to solve their problems.

Our first tactic was to introduce a shift delay in our response to support calls. In other words, when a customer call comes in, their question is logged in to provide tracking and then directed to the most appropriate support manager. That manager then returns the customer's call within five minutes and provides them with the answer.

This process has multiple purposes. First of all, the most appropriate person contacts the customer. It shows our desire and care, and eliminates any room for error. Second, the waiting period has statistically and dramatically reduced the number of calls. In the past, people found that calling the support line would provide an immediate response, as opposed to having to look up the answer in the manual. By introducing the five-minute delay, customers would be more inclined to first find the answer in the manual. But, if they did not find the answer, or they chose not to look in the manual, we were able to get the most knowledgeable person on the phone. This helped us reach our goal and, more importantly, we helped the customers help themselves, resulting in increased confidence in our product.

There is a definite danger in giving too much technical support and therefore not empowering the customer - this is human nature. Human nature states that a person will always want to show off how smart they are. Therefore, a support person or manager might tell a client to type in a lot of highly technical computer code (read: intimidating) to fix the problem, but that shows they didn't have any confidence in the product. It is more important to show the product structure, and work through the product's documentation, which has defined the answer. If the support person gives the client a "geek shortcut," then the client becomes dependent on the support staff. The staff member, on the other hand, thinks he's doing the customer a favor, but really, he's giving them a fish instead of teaching them how to fish. Interestingly, he's also inadvertently setting the client up to believe that the product is not easy to use.

In order to ensure that our support managers were assisting the customers in solving the problem, we added a box on the support call log that required the manager to point out the page number where this item was described or addressed in the manual. This way, if the "cool" support guys aren't properly addressing support complaints, we can confront them. We don't alienate them, but deal with it fairly, inquiring whether they knew that the issue was covered on a particular page. In reality, they didn't know the page number, because they hadn't read the documentation. They were techies, so they didn't need to read the documentation. But they were cheating the customers. So by forcing them to enter the page number on their logs, they had to know the documentation. Then they would give the customer the page number, the customer would look at it, feel good about it, and the call would end positively. Both sides win in this kind of customer relationship.