Improving Customer Satisfaction by Making Customers Do It Themselves
Hey, before you start reading, I have to let you know that you can get a better understanding about this article if you read on Why DIY is The New Best Customer Experience first.
We used to think if we do everything for them, our customers will be happier. Yes, customers will still be very happy if we do it all for them FAST. But the limitation of human gradually giving the exact opposite for us. Luckily, today’s technology is already enable us to pass human limitation. It’s also changing customers behavior and perspective. This is why we started this ‘DIY Customer Experience’ project.
You know, a movie called ‘The Founder’ (which I wrote what I’ve learned HERE) is deeply inspired me to start the project. We started this ‘DIY Customer Experience’ project for JagoanHosting.com, at the end of 2017. JagoanHosting.com is a hosting company in Indonesia. We created this project because of one simple problem: our operational effort is in chaos, resulted in high CoGS. So the board asking us, management, to fix this. At the time I wrote this article, the project is still ongoing, but it’s already raised our profit by triple and user are growing rapidly from before we started this project. Thanks to the effort, trust, and dedication of my team on this project. God, I love them.
It all started with one simple goal we set:
To bring the best customer experience by NOT GIVING any service to the customer
Now, before you telling your customers to do everything themselves, please do remember: Not only good products makes good marketing, but good products also makes good customer experience. If your products is svcks, how can you expect people to do what you want them to do? Make sure your products do what it was promised to do. Most complain comes because the product failed to do what it expected to do.
And you know what is worse? It’s the fact that many companies think that a good customer experience is when you can handle complain with smile. For me, that’s not a good customer experience, it’s what you are supposed to do when you make people angry! We were also once proud that we can give a chat response within 2 minutes, and ticket response within 30 minutes. Well, it was indeed the best hosting industries standard in Indonesia (which we created). But no, we need to create new standard, like we always do.
So, how ‘not giving any service’ is the best customer experience? You need to understand, that we created that goal because when we read our tickets & livechat history, we found three top topics. We all agreed that they should not go to the ticket realm. So, ‘not giving any service’ means not giving any service about those three topics because it shouldn’t need to in the first place. It has to be served even before the customers asking for it. Most of them are done today, some of them need time to invest.
Where it took us today? 70% drop of our tickets, baby. What does it mean? Huge increases in number of customers served per customer service. We won’t need to add our customer service team member in the distant future. We now have 50% less customer service agents while serving almost 50% increase in customer numbers. What it will bring us? More profit.
Oh yes, our satisfaction score did increase.
Do you think you have that ‘service that shouldn’t need to be done in the first place”?
I don’t know, something like “Why do my order is not yet being delivered?”. Yo, people will not call your call center about that information, if you provide them a clear and real time delivery status.
Right now, as the project is still ongoing, I can only tell you two tricks that we -and most of other digital startup- did. I can’t be the only one who saw this, as these tricks are not a ‘secret’. It is already become common practices for business nowadays. That 3 factors I gave you before are the reason why.
Eliminate Every Stressful Repetitive Process
People hate to do or having a bad experience on the same thing over and over again. So, in order to avoid that hate and for your customers to be willing to do everything themselves, eliminate those stressful repetitive process as much as you can. Imagine if you have to put your flight details every time you book a flight via booking apps, stressful, isn’t it?
In our case, one of them is that many of our customers doesn’t know how to connect their domain to blogspot. At first, we just create a knowledge base to show how it’s done. But there is still so many tickets asking how it is done, even if we put those information on a page where they can do that setup. When we asked some of them why, we found that most of them knew where to find the guide, but still creating a ticket because it’s too complicated for them. At first, we thought of creating a less complicated guide will help, until we found out that most of them have a lot of domains and need to do a lot of setups. If I were them, I would also think that it’s just more convenient if our customer service did it for them. Then, we created a button that will automatically setup domain to blogspot. You guessed it right, no more blogspot-setup tickets.
Give Them The Power to Decide Their Future
People feel anxious (if not mad) when other people took a lot of time doing things for them. But they never complain to themselves even if they took as much time as other people. People love to have power over something, and will always be mad when other people take that power from them. When a teller filling a form for a customer (and taking their time), the customer tend to feel their power to ‘determine when that process is done’ is taken away from them. That’s what makes them not complaining when they took the same amount of time, because they are still retaining that power. They know that their future is still in their hand. Things get worse when the customers need to wait in a long queue before sitting in front of that teller.
So, if you can’t automate or cut a process, the other way is that you can ‘move’ the accountability of that process to your customers. But do remember that in order to do this, those processes must be simple & easy enough for them to do. Make it as simple as you can, follow the best practice of UX design. In our tickets, there were a lot of tickets who complained about how they can’t access their website with certain error, which happened because of their own content. It’s a common problem, and very easy to solved. Before, we helped them when they created a ticket about it. It was good, but the customer needs to wait up to 30 minutes for us to get it done. This made some of the customers are unhappy. It’s not that the process to solve that error needs that much of time, but the tickets queue that makes them have to wait that long. So, we started by creating a guide and have our chatbot learned about it. Now, whenever a customers having that certain error, our chatbot will guide them. They don’t have to wait anymore, because our chatbot can guide a lot of people at the same time. Turns out, people love to spend 10 minutes of their time in order to eliminate 30 minutes spent waiting and doing nothing.
I think I have more…
As for right now, I only have those two tricks that already proven. I still have some tricks, but it is not yet proven, thus I won’t share it, yet. But I believe many people out there also already have their own tricks, if you know some, please do share to me via afrizal@jagoanhosting.com.
