I want to grant you an insight into the possibilities which eBusiness holds in store and how you can utilize them.

Last week we looked at my favorite chapter “learning marketing from the porn industry” which really generated a lot of buzz to my inbox.

This week we’re going to have a look at how you can reduce your customer service costs significantly by implementing instruments for customer self help.

As the internet evolves so do the habits associated to it. One of these habits is that people will search on the web before they will call customer support most of the times because the questions they will have occur outside of regular business hours.

The obvious effect this will have on your business strategy is that it reduces your costs for both pre-sales and post-sales customer support if you manage to direct them to your online solution.

The fact no business development consultant or CEO will ever realize is that it will seriously enhance your websites visibility on the internet also because of the amount of input that is being generated around your products and services on your own website.

The quantity of this user-generated content will supersede anything you and your organization can produce in that amount of time.

Further it will be helpful to your customers because they will find workarounds, which you can integrate or include in your future releases of manuals, guides, etc.

Your customers may also find glitches and other minor faults in your products, which you can then avoid in further production.

Your next question will probably be how to create a FAQ, wiki, blog, etc.?

A section for frequently asked questions (FAQ) is the easiest thing and can consist of a simple page on your corporate web presentation.

When setting it up go ahead and scroll through your past emails, tickets submitted by phone, and ask your team to give you a list of questions which have been presented to them most frequently.

Sort them by the times they have been asked and then write a comprehensive and idiot-proof answer for this specific FAQ page.

Now that that is done, let’s go and save money with email queries you get.

As an email comes in, there are some words included in the mail, which can be highlighted to indicate what problem your customer has.

There are several software solutions out there which take care of this for you – some of them are even free.

So if a person submits a question as a support case, you have certain words highlighted and these will indicate that they have a problem with an issue which you have on the FAQ section of your website.

Now all you have to do is direct them there with an auto-responder email.

And this is where it saves you money because you reduce the duration for answering this email from a few minutes down to a few seconds, which will enable your staff to take care of a higher amount of trouble tickets in the same amount of time.

You can thus reduce personnel and save money.

Next let’s deal the pesky callers who have problems.

A short while back it would have been considered rude to ask a person to search the web for a problem.

But the times have changed and you can even “sell” searching your website as something better then calling you up.

If you have a product which people may have problems with, have a thorough documentation that goes along with it available on the web.

You will also have want to have similar publications at hand for reoccurring problems your customer care staff is confronted with regularly.

Your call center staff can then direct the incoming caller to this specific page on your website.

The call time will have reduced because they don’t have to explain the process or procedure a thousandth time, and the customer is happy because they have the solution ready on their screen.

As you can see, you only have to be a bit creative in projecting portals like this one onto the web platform.

But it is definitely possible to significantly reduce the costs for customer care without risking reputation or losing only one customer.

If you are interested in the details on how to evaluate and execute these plans my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) is available for purchase.

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That being said…

1. Determine and document the processes going on CURRENTLY inside your organisation (you have taken years to make them work – don’t ruin them upon a CRM implementation)

2. the go ahead and have the CRM mapped ON TOP of the existing processes and not vice versa

Bottom line of this argument is, that an organisation dynamically grows. And your CRM will grow along with that. If you happen to install a CRM which makes it necessary to implement totally new processes your organsation will – at least for a moment – less productive (because of training, etc.) and there will be a lot of adapting going on. This is – especially for older people – a big task to request.

The closer you document the requirements for the CRM, the better it will integrate and be accepted by the staff.

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For the information ascertained there, I would like to suggest to set up a wiki because it will allow you to manange and document the incoming data better. Further more, you can point to associated entries/items/posts a lot easier than a bb will allow you to do.

After having completed that, you’ll be in a pretty good fix. Associated to that I would most definitly set up a good working customer service page on your website which will handle incoming tickets. The money saved there (due to the increase in efficiency) can then be spent in integrating better environments.

Regading the blog part: blogs are not really suitable for the environment you are looking for. Primarily because of the fact that comments are most of the time hidden. And you don’t really have an easy way of getting fruitful discussions out of blogs. The commenting sections are hardly made to handle large amounts of replies but more to be there for what they were inveted in the first place – comments Discussions are best lead in discussion forums/bbs. Documentation and management of knowledge etc., in Wikis.

Related posts:

1. BOOK MONDAY: Make your customers do the customer service themselvesAs the internet evolves so do the habits associated to...
2. BOOK MONDAY: Customer Information ManagementDown the line, and if your business is ever up...
3. BOOK MONDAY: Learning marketing from the porn industryIt's sad but it's true: if there is one industry...