Get Smart ! Deploy Customer Self-Service Portal

Take this situation; I call my broadband customer care for a simple configuration of my MAC OSX for the Internet. I have to press 1, then 3, then 1 (etc. I think I have to press numbers at least 5 times) and at last I end up with a customer care guy, who haven’t heard of MAC OSX even in his previous life… err

I had to configure the same in my hometown with another broadband company but fortunately they gave me a printed manual with the Ethernet modem and I used it to configure my MAC with the connection. (But the engineer who came in for the installation asked me for Internet explorer with about blank screen in a MAC, even though I had given her Firefox).

In both the situations, the customer care executive and the engineer didn’t know how to configure the MAC, but in the second situation I had the manual which I could use. The whole point is the customer of the current world is smarter and warrants immediate solutions to his/her problems. The customer can help himself out when there is a simple problem.

The Customer Self Service Portal will help you in these kinds of situations. If at all the first company had a self service portal, in which I could have searched for the configuration settings provided in simple steps I would have saved my time, customer care executive’s time and the cost incurred by the company for the executive.

Why waste your time, cost and productivity when you can make it simple for the customer. Customer is not a moron, he is smarter than you. He is more inclined to solve his problems than you and so he will expect a faster solution.

SupportCenter Plus provides you an excellent Customer Self-Service portal in which you can create solutions for simple problems, classify them in to topics, sub-topics and in keywords. The user can search through keywords; find solutions for simple problems and even complex problems if the administrator wishes to allow them. The admin can configure what to show and what not to show.

The latest thing is that you can configure a template of solutions to particular accounts and those accounts can view only those solutions associated with them. It will be helpful when you have multiple products with multiple accounts associated with each product. It also reduces the amount of time used by the customer to search for his solutions.

(Click the thumbnails to see in detail)

How does it help me?

Common, it will save your cost, time and will increase your support representative’s productivity time. And above all it will reduce the number of calls and emails coming in to your support team considerably. You can find the difference when you deploy your self-service portal effectively. Just using the portal will not help. Use the portal diligently and efficiently. Get Smart and make your customer even smarter….

PS: So at last how did I configure my MAC? The next time I called I got hold of a smarter customer representative who helped me out. But it cost me one more call, one more day and some increase in my blood pressure.