Customers need all sorts of information and help from the brands they deal with, and they’re used to expressing this as a question: “How do I..?” or “What’s the best xxx?”, with the right keywords in order. The search engines have trained us well over the years, to express a written - or increasingly now spoken - request for information succinctly.
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Jeremy Payne[/caption]
But as Jeremy Payne, Group VP Marketing & Alliances at Enghouse, reflects, it wasn’t always like that. Once upon a time if people wanted to know anything about a product they had to contact the company, by phone or even by letter - the idea of a third party service curating information about their stuff and providing it to the end user for ‘free’ would have been unthinkable. “Google really is the world’s most powerful knowledge management system”, he explained. “And they’ve done a lot right. When you go on there you feel confident that within the top 10 results you’ll find the information you’re looking for.”
This success in turn drives customer expectations when they query a businesses directly. But their ability to respond effectively really depends on how well that business has structured and organised their own knowledge base, for logical interrogation and retrieval of information
Sort the FAQ out
It starts with analysing the most repeated customer journeys in your organisation, the ones which drive the most profit for you and the ones which cause the most pain. Effective responses to these can probably be automated quite straightforwardly, because the response set is limited
Payne uses a metaphor of fixed exits from a roundabout to visualise this - you don’t need sophisticated machine learning to address it. He explains,
“When we engage with organisations we can see opportunities where a range of the self and automated service tools reviewed in the ContactBabel interactive self-service industry report would be valuable”
“But when you look at where they are on their journey and what their customers need, that’s a bit like first turning up to the Olympics and expecting to compete in the 100m sprint final”.