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Maximizing the financial benefits of web self-service happens only when an organization decides to make it the primary support channel. To be successful in this endeavor, three key factors are necessary: 1) get and maintain senior management support for self-service initiatives, 2) include specific goals for increases in web site usage in employee performance objectives, and 3) involve customers in the support web site design process. Driving organizational change: A successful self-service initiative calls for high-level sponsorship to support the necessary culture changes. The sponsor plays a key role in defining the vision and objective. In 2006, the VeriSign Senior VP of Customer support declared self-service as the #1 support initiative. A global support strategy placemat was distributed to all support employees, and the message of "self-service is our #1 support initiative" was repeated at all group meetings until all employees could easily respond "self-service" when asked for the top initiative for their organization. Goals of all support staff, at all levels, were redefined to align with this self-service vision. Metrics were redesigned to reflect the new focus on value creation vs. cost reduction, and to balance the quantity of activities compared to the quality of outcomes. These metrics were reviewed biweekly by support supervisors, and highlighted at quarterly all-hands meetings. To maintain senior management awareness, and drive ongoing management commitment to the new initiative, new executive level measures were developed:
New initiatives cannot be successful until they become a top priority and a company's work processes, systems, and structure change to reflect that. When employees observe senior managers persistently demanding self-service and customer experience information and using it to make tough decisions, their own decisions are conditioned by that awareness. Customer involvement in designing exceptional experiences: Usability Testing Typically when looking to fix pain points on web sites, internal stakeholders are tempted to have opinions on what’s best for the customers. But who better to be involved in the design process than the customers themselves? Fortunately at VeriSign, we have the luxury of having a usability testing lab on campus. Usability testing doesn’t have to be performed in a lab environment. Various ‘low fidelity’ methods of testing can be used (e.g. using remote meeting software, or even just recording a conference call with a customer who is looking at a site or design that is being presented to them to get feedback). Customer feedback is valuable in any form! Usability testing is a qualitative (rather than statistical or quantitative) methodology used to understand the user experience and identify "pain points" in the customers' online interaction. So you can get a lot of feedback from 7-10 participants. Each session is around 45-60 minutes and is objectively moderated by a person sitting next to the customer. Usability can be defined by five quality components (See Jakob Nielsen’s Usability 101: Introduction to Usability (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html ):
To test our support site a mix of VeriSign customers from across product lines, business size and role types were recruited. A cash incentive of $100 was given to each participant for their time. Scenarios were created that were typical support tasks related to the type of product the customer owned (e.g. “You have a VeriSign SSL certificate but you realize the common name is not correct. Go to the VeriSign web site to find out how to change the common name”). Findings were collated into an executive summary which was used as a basis for a web site redesign. High-level examples of the findings:
Based on the customer feedback, we were able to validate our design enhancements. At a high-level these included providing a support page for each product that provided the following support features in a “how to solve your issue”:
We also redesigned the support main page, simplifying the number of links, removing drop-down list boxes, resulting in a much cleaner gateway page to the product support pages where we wanted people to go to find the most relevant information about their issues. We were then able to track the new designs by monitoring web traffic click-throughs to and through the support pages (using Visual Sciences www.visualsciences.com ). The results were a significant improvement, not only the web traffic going to the correct pages, and more content being found in the knowledge base, but an overall increase in the number of customers coming to and returning to the support site. We now have 80-120K visitors per month. Survey Techniques We ran an online survey as a link from the support pages, with an incentive for a drawing for a $100 Gift Certificate which asked a series of questions about customer experiences with VeriSign support and our support site. Sample Results Include:
In hindsight, we believe that surveys without incentives are a better approach as they are less likely to be filled out by any contest opportunists. This year we are implementing a new online survey hosted by ForeSee Results (http://www.foreseeresults.com ). This survey can be configured to popup for a certain percentage of users. If a user declines participation, the survey will not appear again for 90 days (or as configured). The survey questions will be tied to our customer loyalty and retention program using The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). This resulting survey data can also be correlated to our web traffic metrics to better understand where on the web site people are having problems. Improve customer adoption by promoting self-service channels Background on current support channels Many of our support issues at VeriSign are related to the purchasing, installation and renewal of digital certificates that require specific instructions processed in a specific order. The customers range from novice to server administrator. There is also a significant turnover in the customer contact responsible for the yearly renewal of these certificates, so each time the process is new for a majority of customers. The lifespan of our SSL certificate products is between one and three years. There are four different support channels for our customers all at no additional cost. Self-help, email, phone and chat are offered with the same type of issue resolution. Goals for 2006
First Step: Customer Communications Project We launched a major Customer Communications Project to make sure that all emails and communications would drive customers to their relative product support pages. These emails originated from multiple systems throughout the organization, were dependent on unrelated release schedules, and required signoff from different stakeholders. As part of the design process we took the opportunity to evangelize our self help strategy throughout the company. Phone numbers were removed from the email templates and links promoting the support pages were added. We also updated the hold messages on the phone queues in order to promote the support pages and the available support tools on these pages such as product advisories, the knowledge base, top ten issues, tutorials and chat. As part of our cross functional education we asked product marketing and sales to change their email signatures and documentation sent to customers. Now customers would be driven to their product support pages instead of the main support page for better relevancy. Second Step, training the agents to direct customers to the support website Our agents were trained on directing our customers to the support website as part of the troubleshooting process and the knowledge base. As the agents become more and more used to helping customers by directing them to the support website, external (customer) traffic increased to the knowledgebase and specific customer issues were highlighted by website statistics that were gathered. By finding the major customer facing problems we identified opportunities to add flash demos to better help our customers. Support supervisors included self-service and knowledge base practices as part of their ongoing coaching and quality monitoring activities. Lessons learned, revisiting KCS and raising the bar For over 5 years VeriSign has used the KCS (Knowledge-Centered support) model as part of our self-service strategy. The goal of KCS is to improve and share best practices for capturing, reusing and structuring knowledge. Each year we have introduced a new initiative related to self-service as part or our drive to increase usage. In 2007, we are calling it “raising the bar.” About Lori Harmon…………………………………………………………… Lori Harmon is the vice president of global customer support at VeriSign, Inc. She has over 20 years of high tech experience focusing on support, sales, and marketing, and she specializes in building and simplifying organizations, developing high performance management teams and streamlining operations. Prior to joining VeriSign, Lori held senior management positions at Interwoven, Brio and Network General, leading inside sales, product marketing and professional services organizations. Lori holds a BS degree in Information Systems from Appalachian State University. |
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