13 - Measuring the Value of Online Customer Service
Providing "good" customer service seems to be common sense, but the link is indirect. "Quality" research centers have shown the correlation between the perceived level of service and the income of an organization, but few businesses make an effort to describe it in greater detail, fewer still to quantify it in some way, and fewer still to make "good customer service" a priority.
It's especially important as channels are shifted: as more customer contact shifts from traditional channels (phone and in-person) to the online medium, do we know what it means to provide "good service" via the Internet?
Benefit to Business: Cost Reduction
The Web is often seen as a money-saver for businesses: if you can get your customers to do something for themselves, it saves you the cost of doing it for them. A number of examples are provided: booking a hotel room, filling out a credit application, getting an answer to a question. In every case, there are significant cost savings (67% to 95%) to moving these transactions online.
However, just providing an online capability does not provide customers much incentive to use it: if the quality of service is not equivalent, or better, then customers will simply stick to the existing channels and refuse to use the online versions.
Online Customer Service
One quantifiable measure of customer service is the number of customers that use the Web site. Consumers vote with their feet, and if the site doesn't provide good service, they will use other channels (or other providers).The attitude in the business world seems to be that the consumer's choice of channels is a matter of personal preference, and the business has no control or influence. While preference is a factor, the business does have some control: if customers flock from one channel to another, it may be that the business has done a good job of providing quality service in one channel, but a bad one through others.
Online customer service can also be assessed by listing the things that a site provides, from a customer perspective. Simply stated: what can your customers do on your site? One of the largest areas of complaints come from customers who discover they can't get the service they need from a certain channel, so they abandon it (and tell others not to bother trying).
Surveys are another method of assessing success: customers can rate your online service, in and of itself or in comparison with your service through other channels, to indicate where there are areas that need improvement (in both channels).
FAQ
The author suggests that one of your most valuable forms of customer feedback is monitoring the use of FAQs. When an answer is being sought by many people, you can investigate why it's a question in the first place.
EN: I'm not sure what this has to do with the quality of service via a Web site, but it does help identify areas where people find service lacking in general.
Call Center Metrics
There are numerous metrics applied to call centers than can help assess their quality: contacts per day, call duration, abandonment rate, contacts per resolution, contacts per problem type, average required escalation, savings of contact method, agent idle time, etc. Where possible, the Web site metrics can be aligned with these for comparison.
Measuring Customer Satisfaction
The author describes a few methods for measuring customer satisfaction - it's generally a skim over the topic of survey design. Nothing particularly new (if you've taken market research), or that revolutionary.
He really seems to miss some of the key differences between traditional surveying and Web-based surveying: the way in which results are skewed by the medium, some of the unique features and capabilities, etc. My sense is he's out of his element here.