Customer Service User Experience
October 12th, 2008 . by MegI’ve been thinking a lot over the past year about what makes designing for customer service different than designing for conversion or other business needs. Clearly, most of the goals around customer service efforts relate to cost savings in terms of reducing contacts, handle time or user churn (repeat user contacts). In this area, businesses are more transparent about making changes that impact the bottom line, like putting up ‘challenge’ pages or road blocks for the user to discourage them from making a contact. This is a simple way to do it, but not a really good user experience. What’s best for both the business and the user is to strike a balance or find an innovative way to accomplish both goals.
The cornerstone of reducing contacts, in my opinion, is to know which contacts are avoidable and which are not. With the list of avoidable contacts, one can measure the number of those contacts to the Call Center against time. Key Performance Indicators can take the daily or weekly temperature of a system and allow the business to respond to changes quickly and efficiently. They can also reflect the marked progress of user experience efforts over a longer time. For customer service initiatives, those numbers should show a decrease in contacts, which inversely relates to an increase in savings and revenue.
The Call Center and its agents are a great resource for more understanding of what kinds of problems user are having that relate to those top avoidable call drivers. They can provide some insight and background. Developers can provide rules or if/then statements from the code that help further define the problems and solutions. And Product Management can work with a designer to delve more deeply into the data and user behavior to discover areas of opportunity.
A three pronged approach to providing a better experience for the user that also helps them avoid a contact in most situations would be to contextualize help within the flows where a user needs help, to personalize their information so that the right information bubbles up to the user and to provide a wealth of searchable and/or browseable self-help information in an easily navigable format.
Contextualization gives the user the information he/she needs at the right time. An example of this is when a user is entering key account information in a sign-up form. If a user enters a field incorrectly, help text that appears inline at that moment or upon ’save’ at the very least is more helpful than providing a link to an FAQ that describes the error and its causes. Page-level help is most useful when a user is completing a specific task. Another example, as the flow level this time, would be if a user is paying for a service or good and stepping through multiple pages of a form. There are a lot of things that could waylay that process or prevent a conversion. Being able to conditionally display help text depending on the particular problem the user is experiencing is very helpful in giving the user what he/she needs to proceed and convert to a final sale.
Personalization allows the company to bubble up the best information for the user to take actions on his/her account. It also functions as a way to increase brand recognition and familiarity. It could be as little as including a welcome message with the user’s name. It could be as much as providing a ‘feed’ of what all of their friends or contacts within a network are doing right now. It could also be alert statuses for payments made or received in the past 30 days.
Self-help is a last key in providing the kind of information users want and in a way that they want. A large database of centralized help information with its various elements can be used in a variety of ways by providing straight FAQs, popups on other site pages, shortened versions for help text or contextual aid. The self help FAQs should be both searchable and browseable by a secondary or tertiary navigation menu, allowing the user to engage in primal actions like hunting, searching, browsing or finding. This would also allow the business, with proper data calls in place, to get a snapshot of what users’ paths are. This data could alert designers and product managers about ’sad paths’ or problems the users are having. It could help them solve problems. The data can also reveal behaviors that lead to new products and features.
All these things combined could potentially increase engagement on the site itself and reduce contacts to the live agents. Saving money would seem to be a key to increasing profits, so why wouldn’t we look at ways to increase the efficiency of any cost center? I’m sure there are a few reasons why this area often gets overlooked or avoided, like tax breaks due to losses or lack of resources. These reasons are not always compelling, especially when compared to the potential benefits. As the saying goes, ’sometimes the best offense is a good defense’.
Meg,
Has any employer of yours implemented every piece of your strategy? Have you seen sites that have?
Not yet, but these are really large initiatives and some of them cut across normal verticals, so it helps if the business commits to a special team of the product and user experience teams aligned across business unit. So, some businesses have taken some of my advice - or, er came up with it separately on their own - good ideas have a way of happening like that. Usually there are a bunch of people pushing for the same thing separately and when they can come together and persuade peers to make some changes, then we see it manifest top to bottom…but normally it’s already bubbling up bottom to top if a company is really encouraging employees to think and participate.
And I think there are some sites out there that do this well…Intuit is phenomenal I think at its end to end self help initiatives. I think that it’s a huge problem though that is constantly shifting according to consumer behavior, so it’s great because it offers a lot of opportunities and possibilities for the business to go after. In short, no one does this perfectly but the goal is not to do it perfectly…it’s to do it. If we reached a state of perfection, we’d just stop doing it. Or it would maintain itself…which is an ideal more than a reality.