Customer Advocacy: Maintaining a Customer Focus

By Julie L. Mohr

Your organization exists to efficiently provide and support technology to meet customers’ business objectives. Your technology enables those companies to perform their core business processes. When the technology fails, the support organization is the first point of contact for the customer into your IT organization and support should serve as the customer advocate throughout the incident management process. A well-defined, core set of communication responsibilities ensures that your organizational focus is always on the customer. The goal is to improve the customer experience, fulfill their needs, provide data, analysis and feedback to the IT department, and to develop a customer-facing tactical and strategic organization.

Before the call
Consistent communication ensures that customers are aware of all the services they’re entitled to or are offered, additions and modifications to those services, and any available training. Services should be described and communicated through a Service Catalog or a Scope of Products and Services. Create and distribute a brochure to employees to communicate information about your services, who to contact, and how to use those services. You can also use a newsletter to notify customers of any changes in services as well as provide a method for delivering just-in-time training.

Before any incident management process, your organization has an obligation to identify potential problems and notify customers of issues before they arise. For example, through proactive notification, you can communicate scheduled and unscheduled outages. A system availability Web site linked to system monitoring tools allows customers to check service availability. To ensure customer adoption of service availability Web sites, the information displayed must be dynamic and reliable.

You can also be proactive by sending broadcast messages through e-mail, voice mail, or upfront messaging on the ACD system. Once an outage has been identified, you can proactively notify customers to eliminate a large volume of calls. Without proactive notification, resources are diverted to handle customer reported incidents instead of being focused on restoring the service. The broadcast message must communicate the outage, the expected time for restoration, and next update.

Proactive communication is important to communicate what services are available to the customer to facilitate business processes. As the customer advocate, the support organization must take the lead to ensure that proactive communication is a priority and that information is well maintained and timely.

At the point of contact
The incident management process begins when a customer experiences a problem or issue and contacts support. At this point, support must provide excellent customer service and technical support, and manage customer expectations.

Wait time during the call handling process can provide valuable information to customers that may eliminate their calls. Take this opportunity to tell your customers about your self-service Web sites, how to submit non-priority tickets via the Web, or provide e-mail addresses they can use to submit questions. Once a support rep answers the phone, it’s time to capture the problem, verify customer information, and provide a resolution.

Documentation in the problem or knowledge management system should adhere to established standards. Inefficiencies are introduced when inadequate problem descriptions require additional contact with the customer. It also results in escalations to higher-paid, more technical resources than are actually necessary to resolve the problem. Documentation standards also ensure that adequate information is available to customers to check on the status of their issues via the Web. Updates must include actions taken and underway, an expected time to resolution, and the time for the next update.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) define how your organization will respond to customer demands. Goals for metrics such as average time to resolution, rate of abandonment, and first contact resolution ensure that the support organization responds in a timely, efficient manner. Support managers must ensure that staff has excellent customer service and technical skills. A high first contact resolution rate gets customers back to their business processes as quickly as possible.

If a problem can’t be resolved by level 1 support reps, it must be quickly dispatched to the appropriate technical support level. Prior to handing off the customer, the rep must assign the appropriate priority to the incident and establish an expectation with the customer for the service level objective.

During an incident
Once the customer hangs up the phone (if the incident is not immediately resolved), the customer’s ability to conduct business is impacted, therefore, support must establish the expected time to resolution before hanging up the phone to enable the customer to make decisions and conduct business using alternative methods. Because these other methods are generally inefficient, the customer will be anxious for the resolution. If the IT organization is unable to meet the expected time frame, proactive status updates through e-mail, voice, and the incident ticket should communicate the necessary information to the customer to make business decisions. Without status updates, the customer’s frustration will escalate often resulting in additional calls or escalation to business unit management.

Notification methods vary by priority. A high priority incident represents a significant impact to the business. Status updates should notify a significant portion of the company. Broadcasts via voice mail, email, and emergency ACD messages can more appropriately communicate to a larger audience. As the priority of an incident decreases, the communication method can be limited to a few customers with a non-critical service outage. The support desk must let customers check the status of their non-critical issues through the problem management system.

Implementing a quality assurance problem coordinator role to track and manage all open incidents is important. This role facilitates a strong focus on the customer, to drive focus on incidents based upon priority, and to keep incidents from falling into a black hole. The coordinator communicates status with the customer while working with technical support to achieve resolution.

At resolution
Once the problem is resolved or service restored, the customer must be notified and you should verify that the customer is again able to conduct business. For high priority incidents, customers should be notified by voice and email. You can probably trigger e-mails alone from within your system for lower priority issues. The problem coordinator should also follow up with the customer to verify resolution.

Organizations often have difficulty justifying the additional resources required to provide problem coordination. Communication throughout the incident management process provides valuable information back to customers that enable them to make decisions about business tasks. The problem coordinator ensures that your company continues to assign the appropriate resources to resolve customer issues and provides consistent feedback to customers.

Once the problem is resolved, or service restored, your organization can determine the root cause and eliminate the problem. For some incidents, this happens immediately, the incident ticket is closed and the process moves into the closure process. For others, the incident ticket is closed but a related problem ticket is created and the problem is then handled via the problem management process. When the incident ticket is closed, this triggers two additional processes that are also critical to customer advocacy.

At closure
When an incident is closed, it triggers the customer satisfaction process. By incident, a percentage of customers should be surveyed monthly at a minimum. However, if you’re going to survey your customers on the service they received, you must have processes to analyze the feedback and provide the results of the analysis back to the IT organization.

As the customer advocate, the support organization must promote change within the company to focus on the issues that are important to customers and drive efficient business processes. In addition to working towards internal change, support is instrumental in communicating that change back to customers. When the customers see the direct link between the feedback they provide and changes in the environment, they’re more likely to provide valuable and constructive feedback as well as champion your company to its other business units.

The last component of customer advocacy at closure is to capture the incident resolutions for future customer issues and support training. Although this step is transparent to customers, it’s critical to ensure the ongoing improvement in process efficiency. When an incident is closed, the knowledge manager and subject matter experts can facilitate the process of capturing the knowledge, ensuring its accuracy, and storing it in a common repository.

The customer satisfaction and knowledge management processes create the final step in a closed-loop incident management process. Process closure enables your organization to learn, improve, and measure the value of support and services provided to the business.

Customer advocacy
Front line support is an integral part of the incident management process. Its function is to be the principle interface between your company and your customers. To effectively provide that interface, support must focus on communication both to the customer and with any technical support partners.

Communication with the customer begins before a customer calls your support desk and continues throughout the process to closure. The customer experience is delivered through each communication point in the process.

The technologies used throughout the incident management process capture the data that defines customer demand and your organization’s ability to meet that demand. Regular and consistent reporting will help you effectively deliver services and develop a strategy to improve your organization.

Communication is the one vehicle that can create a positive customer experience, even when IT resources fall short of customer demand. Your support and service organization is the primary conduit of all information.

About the Author
Julie Mohr is a Managing Consultant for Alternative Resources Corporation. She has 14 years of experience in the IT industry with eight years of progressive management responsibility in information technology services. Ms. Mohr has a degree in Computer Science from the Ohio State University and is a Certified Helpdesk Director from Helpdesk 2000.

Mohr maintains industry expertise and presence through conference speaking engagements and publishing articles on best practices. Ms. Mohr is the published author of “The Help Desk Audit: Blueprint for Success” and maintains a service desk enhancement Web site at www.blueprintaudits.com.