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Proactive Customer Support: What and Why?

November 25th, 2009 noelmcavoy

Proactive Customer Support is actively taking steps in preparation for difficult issues in supporting customers as well as preparing your customers for potential challenges and providing cutting edge solutions for their needs.

Many companies think of their customer support obligations as a necessary expense. Support staff is expected to solve customers’ problems and answer their questions as quickly and efficiently as possible, nothing more and nothing less. This approach is hardly sufficient for a successful business model.

Today customer service is what separates you from your competition. Anyone can sell widgets but if you provide exceptional customer service, your customers will return again and again.

Thoughts: What do your customers think about the service you provide? How did you come to that conclusion?

Finding Answers: Today's Consumers

October 22nd, 2009 noelmcavoy

In today’s connected world, consumers find answers to their questions and problems in a very different way than they did even 10 years ago. Card catologues and extensive directories or menus are overlooked in favor of the search engine. Tools like Google and Wikipedia can take your input of a few words and deliver resources (or links to them) that have already been processed and analyzed for quality and trustworthiness.

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.com explains the power of these web giants well in a recent blog post entitled ‘The collaboration economy’;

That’s how Google sees us, capturing our links and clicks to discover the value of those million – no, trillion – flying pages. That’s how Wikipedia and Craigslist created their value, dealing in trust and membership as a new currency.

That’s right,  we still use other people to determine the value of content and information but to determine that value, we search using tools like these. If we are looking for the number of quarts in a gallon we type that in, if we want to know about the specs on that new athletic shoe a customer just called about we type that in, and if we need to know who to call if our water pipe breaks, we search that too.

What does that mean for you and your business? How are you making information available to your customers and employees? How can it be made more available? How can it be made…. searchable?

Using the information you have

October 3rd, 2009 noelmcavoy

If your small business maintains an electronic record of your customers, your sales, or your expenses you may have a powerful resource available that you haven’t tapped into yet. Large companies use this sort of data in the form of spreadsheets, databases, and the like to create reports that track trends and spot inefficiencies in their organization.

These reporting applications include the more basic Microsoft Access and the open source Open Office Base as well as higher end products like Crystal Reports from Business Objects. Simple reports created with any of the above can be very effective and will help you take advantage of the information you have on hand.

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