Welcome back to the CRM Products and Technology blog from Consona CRM. My name is Tim Hines and I am the author, moderator, and caretaker of this blog. In my last post I talked about the importance of customer master to an organization's ability to manage customer information effectively. The next natural step is to turn to topic of self-service, which is not only a hot topic for companies, but also an increasingly hot topic for their customers.

Generally speaking, I like the Consortium for Service Innovation's approach to defining and classifying customer service and support. The practices (which are well documented in the Knowledge Centered Support (KCStm) methodology) speak to two models: assisted and unassisted. The assisted model is when a customer specifically reaches out to work with a company to get some help. The unassisted model is when the customer helps himself or does not ask the company directly for help. What I like about this classification is that it clearly delineates the experience a customer has with a company, and it also emphasizes how important it is for a company to distinguish and manage both models.

Self-service began gaining popularity when companies finally figured out their customers wanted to leverage the internet to conduct business. But what is self-service? Well, if we were to align with the Consortium's model, it would be a part of unassisted support. Activities from a customer prospective include searching a knowledgebase for answers to questions, downloading fixes to problems. In other words, self-service is when a customer interacts directly with the internal processes of a company. So, we need to frame self-service as just that. It is technology that enables customers to serve themselves, such as maintain their own contact information; conduct certain processes to handle an inquiry (such as returning a purchased item or tracking an order for shipment); or search for an answer to a problem (such as how to fix a product issue).  

Ah, but many vendors will cloud the definition of self-service, and they commonly do make sure that you need their products and services. Many will call submitting a case online self-service. I would argue that this is actually assisted service, but rather via a different channel (i.e., not the 1-800 number). Some vendors call chatting online self-service. Again, I would argue that chatting falls into the assisted model and, therefore, by definition is not self-service.

These concepts tend to be confusing when they simply don’t need to be. I consistently hear companies talking about wanting to invest in self-service to increase their customer service margins. A good measurement and a good goal for any organization. But, I usually ask about what they have done in self-service and, commonly, they answer, “We put in an e-mail response management system” or “We made it easier for customers to submit tickets to our support organization on our web site.” Unfortunately, these companies haven't actually done anything but switch the channel. Don't get me wrong, implementing chat or web-ticket submission are good things, and yes, they are typically very good for a company’s margins based on the cost of interaction, but let's not confuse this with self-service. With true self-service, so much more could be done that would exponentially impact not only those incredibly important cost margins, but also improve the customer experience at the same time. 

At a recent Consortium meeting, I was able to review self-service case studies for three very large companies (I need to exclude their names for permission reasons). All three companies indicated that after they really embraced the unassisted model, the volume in the assisted model accounted for only 3 percent of total interactions with customers. Yes, their assisted model volumes went down, but only slightly. And, we’re talking about cost reductions on only 3 percent of their total service and support volumes! I was floored. So, what I concluded was that by doing self-service well, not only will you improve your margins, but you will also be servicing exponentially more customers—which can only lead to better levels of customer loyalty and, dare I say, growth. If you would like to read some more case studies, go to the Consortium's web site and check them out under the KCS information. They are incredible. We will get back to how to do self-service right in a later post but, in this one, hopefully I have conveyed my thoughts on what self-service actually is and gave a little peek into why it is so important.

In my next blog post, I am going to talk a little bit more about the unassisted model and, specifically what I referred to above as part of the unassisted model: customers helping themselves. I will leave you this time with one parting thought: the invention of social mediums like Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, and many, many more have changed the fundamental underlying dynamic between customer and company.  Social technologies are here to stay. If you don't think it will affect your company, you are avoiding reality, and if you don't do something about it by 2012 your competition will begin leaving you in the dust.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to the e-mails and comments that I receive. Keep them coming.

Thanks and welcome back to the CRM Products and Technology blog from Consona CRM. My name is Tim Hines and I am the author, moderator, and caretaker of this blog. In my last post, I wrote about what different CRM technologies are available in the marketplace and expressed my frustration that the CRM suite vendors haven't been interesting in providing a whole solution, thereby causing companies and users of CRM technologies a lot of pain. In this post, I am going to take it a little bit further and discuss a commonly debated topic: the customer master.

If you are not familiar with the term, the customer master is a big deal in deploying CRM. Basically, the customer master is which system in an organization holds the master record for a customer. For some companies this is the billing system, with others it's the CRM system and, unfortunately for many organizations, it's neither of these. Rather, it is spread out across the organization. So, in essence, there is no customer master. 

One of the goals of any CRM initiative and deployment should be to unify the customer record for both application (be it suite or specialty solution) and operational reuse. In today's very disparate SOA-oriented, cloud computing world, with legacy dinosaur systems, PCs, SharePoints, share drives (file systems), document management systems, and external systems environments, this is very difficult to accomplish. 

I would argue that there should be one master record that is tightly integrated in most cases across two systems, and that those systems are CRM and Financials. One of these systems is the core to the front office operations and one is the core for the back office. By providing a tight integration and interjecting some common-sense business processes for updating this data, organizations will be more able to then propagate a single customer record across the organization. If you have a mixture of specialty solutions that augment the core infrastructure, they need to be able to leverage that customer master, so that there is, in essence, one record.

Why does this matter? Because your customers think it matters. Last night I had the need to contact the manufacturer of a consumer device that I purchased because they sent me the wrong one. This is an RMA (return materials authorization) process that should be completely automated through self-service … but I digress. When I finally found the 1-800 number (buried deep in the web site) and contacted the company, I reached the typical first-level agent who couldn't help me do anything. He then transferred me to fulfillment where I connected with whom I gather was a warehouse supervisor who had none of my customer data. I had to repeat my issue to him, so that he could fill out the appropriate forms and get my RMA and replacement order processed. Now, both of the people I talked to were pleasant enough and, ultimately, they helped me solve my problem (my opinion of the purpose of customer service - this is another posting that I will address soon enough). But shouldn't both arms of the organization know about me and have this information so that I didn't have to waste an erroneous amount of time repeating myself? Now, it's not that big of a deal, but I do buy a lot of consumer devices (yes, I am a gadget guy), and this will probably play a part in my opinion to purchase from that company again.

Had their internal systems been deployed properly, they could extend a fully automated set of services and processes through the web. This is ultimately what I would have liked to have done, given that I am a Generation X-er. But, I bet if I were to talk to this company’s head of IT, he would say this is impossible based on the lack of solid internal foundation. 

Mistakes are going to happen in every organization. No person or system is perfect. I guess the bottom line is: Solve the customer master problem first, and then automate as much customer self-service as possible, so that the customer will better tolerate fewer mistakes.

Next time, I am going to dive into self-service, explore why this is completely undervalued, classify the different types of customer service, and demystify many promises made by what typical CRM vendors call self-service.

That's my take. What's yours? Email me at tim.hines@consona.com.