THINK CUSTOMER EMPOWERMENT; NOT CUSTOMER SERVICE

Has your company moved from enabling customer self service to empowering customers? Notice these customer empowerment trends. How many of them are in play in your organization?

1. We are investing in providing better self-service tools:
across the customer's lifecycle (plan, explore, learn, evaluate, decide, buy, learn, use, improve, enhance, replenish/renew/update, or replace)
across interaction channels/touchpoints (Web, email, phone, PDA, point of sale)
across direct and indirect sales, distribution, fulfillment and service personnel, and ecosystem partners

2. We are investing resources and time in improving search, navigation, findability, and content quality for our customer-touching Web sites and portals, as well as our knowledgebases, online product catalogs, and e-tools and resources in all the languages with which our customers and partners interact with us.

3. We are developing "smarter" products--products and services that can gather data, provide feedback, monitor their own performance and report their status and usage; products and services that "know" who owns them, and what support, update or subscription services they're entitled to receive; products and services with which customers interact directly; products and services that "phone home," to provide and receive updates.

4. We're converging our previously silo'd and specialized customer support organizations into "single point of contact" cross-functional customer support organizations. We are combining support for business issues (quotes, orders, contracts, credit approval, financing, licenses, maintenance agreements) with our support for usability or technical issues (is this the right solution for my needs, will this solve my problem, will this work with/go with what I already own, what are the possible downsides, e.g., tax consequences, hidden costs? How do I use this to do X? Why isn't this working? Did I do something wrong? Can you help? How can I improve my performance/utilization? How can I reap greater benefits?).

5. We're building out and nurturing customer communities--communities of customers who share a common context and common outcomes, customers who are willing to engage with us and to help each other.

I see these five trends as the building blocks for an integrated customer empowerment strategy.

If you're engaging in one or more of these activities, you're moving away from customer support and customer self-service to EMPOWERING customers and empowering your employees to empower customers. You're investing in giving customers the tools they need to help themselves and one another, to find what they need, to get things done, and to improve their performance. You're (re)aligning your organizations to empower customers to help them achieve their desired outcomes.

November 22, 2006