BY PAUL DESMOND Network World, 4/24/00
In early 1998, Delta Air Lines embarked on an ambitious project to upgrade its WAN capacity to airports across the country. It hired Qwest Communications to lead the effort. Find out how vendor executives assess the importance of the Web for customer service
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Before too long, problems cropped up, says Paul Millard, Delta's vice president of engineering. Qwest had trouble getting lines provisioned from regional Bell operating companies and securing permits from airport authorities. As a result, schedules slipped. To make matters worse, Qwest fell down when it came to informing Delta about the delays. "Quite often, we didn't know until the eleventh hour that things were not going to happen when they were supposed to happen," Millard says. "A little advance warning would've helped." At the same time, Delta had problems with Qwest's customer service call center. "It seemed like it was under construction during the early stages of the project," Millard says. Flash forward to early this year and things are much smoother. "I've had no real complaints recently about the quality of support or customer care," Millard says. "I think it was a case of Qwest hiring the right talent and getting internal processes in place." Good service can - and does - make customers believers in a vendor or service provider. Often customer service is a key selling point a start-up vendor will use to attract its first customers. "We'll give you the attention a bigger company can't," the pitch goes. Ron Schorsch, senior director of customer service at Cisco, points to an old Harvard Business Review study that demonstrated the importance of customer service. If a customer registers 4.5 or above on a 5-point scale measuring satisfaction with customer service, "that customer will be incredibly loyal," Schorsch says. "They become apostles for your company." Cheryl Currid, president of consultancy Currid & Co. in Houston, puts it another way: "Bad customer service has a way of getting rid of customers." Where's the service?But vendors face plenty of obstacles in their effort to provide quality customer service, especially as they grow from start-ups to substantial entities worthy of the Network World 200. The biggest obstacle, Schorsch says, has to do with people - finding, training and keeping them. For Cisco, the key is to keep employees stimulated and engaged. That often comes down to training them continually to do their jobs better. "We do quite a bit of e-learning. We've got about 60 modules available to help train employees on processes, systems and capabilities in providing excellent customer service," he says. All Web-based, the modules let employees train at their own pace, even at home. But the training shouldn't stop with employees, says Currid, who advocates for vendors to come up with interesting, blanket multimedia training programs for customers. "Why they don't . . . is beyond me. You won't keep customers if you don't take care of them with training," she says. Mergers and acquisitions can compound the customer service problem. Maybe you were happy with the customer service you got from a particular vendor, but that knowledgeable technician you always called is nowhere to be found since the company's acquisition. Carriers, including MCI WorldCom and various ISPs, face such issues as they grow through acquisitions, says Rosemary Cochran, a principal with Vertical Systems Group, a consultancy in Dedham, Mass. "Overnight, customers find they're part of a different group and end up with different procedures and service," she says. In the wake of its frame relay outage last summer, MCI WorldCom was roundly criticized for not keeping customers informed of their networks' status. "Some customers were left in the dark for several weeks about when their service was going to be restored," says Lisa Pierce, telecom analyst with Giga Information Group, a market research firm in Cambridge, Mass. New products present another challenge because customer service representatives have to climb a learning curve. Consider the problems RBOCs had for years supporting ISDN, Cochran notes. Users calling with configuration questions and the like consistently confronted customer service reps who had little ISDN knowledge. When companies experience rapid growth, it's especially challenging to hire and train customer service personnel fast enough and put the proper procedures in place, particularly for dealing with major problems. Pierce thinks Qwest fell victim to these issues. "Qwest had another challenge in that it was going from serving more wholesale customers, where there's not a lot of customer service, to retail, where there's lots," she says.Customer service the Web wayAfshin Mohebbi, president and chief operating officer for Qwest, takes issues with Pierce's contentions, saying customer service problems such as those Delta faced are the exception, not the rule. To ensure it keeps customer service up to snuff, Qwest examines its business plans to estimate the number of customers each of its business units will acquire in a given year. The company then calculates the funding those units will require for supporting the expected number of customers. On top of that, Qwest worked with outside process experts last fall to formalize a four-phase product development process with detailed checklists to complete before moving from one phase to the next. "A lot of us have experience like the ISDN example," where groups such as customer service were left out of the product introduction process, Mohebbi says. Qwest's process fosters cooperation among groups with a supervisory team making sure they all mesh. Such processes are no doubt important, but the real action in improving customer service is centered squarely on the Web. Forrester Research, another market research firm in Cambridge, predicts 87% of the volume in customer support will be coming through Internet self-service by 2002, whereas the majority is by telephone today. You'd be hard pressed to find a vendor that won't say the Web is "critical," "crucial" or at least "very significant" to its customer service efforts (see sidebar, this page). "Today, about 86% of our business comes in via the Web," says Cisco's Schorsch. Cisco has reams of product data on its site, from bug fixes to sample configurations to technical tips. Given all that data, finding exactly what you want can be a bit daunting. Dell Computer's answer is "Ask Dudley," a plain English search tool based on the Ask Jeeves search engine. Ask Dudley is the entryway to a knowledge base Dell started building four or five years ago for its customer service technicians, says Manish Mehta, director of online support for the computer maker. To help solve the problems of customers calling in, Dell technicians accessed a database of troubleshooting information via the corporate intranet. This knowledge base increased in value as technicians entered more solutions to known problems. In December 1998, the company essentially gave its customers direct access to that database, Mehta says. Dell conducted focus groups and surveys and determined that customers were willing to spend a few minutes searching for technical help online if they could ask questions. Ask Dudley lets them do just that, and in response presents a short list of relevant topics from the knowledge base. "We're averaging well over 125,000 queries per week and growing," Mehta says. However, he can't say whether Ask Dudley has reduced headcount in the company's phone support center. That's because there are too many other factors, such as ease-of-use features being built into PCs, to pin any such savings on one initiative. But Dudley has definitely helped Dell become more proactive in identifying problem areas.
Using a feature called Jeeves Insight, Dell can highlight the top customer questions that contain no content in the database. The tech support team then quickly creates that missing content.
MCI WorldCom is also interested in becoming more proactive, just one of the lessons learned from last summer's frame relay outage, says David Nathos, director of frame relay product marketing. In the wake of that incident, the carrier determined that customer communication has to be No. 1, Nathos says.
In the future, MCI WorldCom will quickly post information regarding outages on its Web site. The carrier is also promising to notify customers within one hour if one of their frame relay links goes down for more than 10 minutes. That, at least, is a step in the right direction.
The promises come through the carrier's new Network Assurance program, which includes disaster recovery options and spells out actions MCI WorldCom will take in the event of an outage.
Additionally, the carrier has a Web-based application dubbed Interact that lets customers open trouble tickets and pay bills. Soon it will begin posting a sort of network quality report on its Web site that details information concerning software upgrades in the works, maintenance windows and other issues. That will be rolled out at the beginning of the second quarter.
Challenges aheadWhile progress has been made, there's still a way to go when it comes to providing quality customer service via the Web. Cisco will look to increase the level of personalization for its customers, with content specific to the customer's market segment and specific job, Schorsch says. "We'll probably see more wireless and multimedia solutions as well." Like many - if not most - vendors, Cisco and Dell are working to better integrate various customer service channels. Ideally, if you send e-mail about a problem one day and place a phone call the next, the phone rep will know about the e-mail and all other related history. Qwest has support staffers answering customer queries via e-mail during certain hours, and lets larger customers send trouble reports via the Web. Consumer customers can deal with Qwest exclusively via the Web, from paying bills to reporting problems. "The goal is to let anyone who wants to have a relationship with Qwest on the Web to do so," Mohebbi says. That includes being able to check the status of your network online, something for which Qwest is finalizing plans, he says. Anything that furthers the customer service cause is important, says Giga's Pierce. "I don't think anybody is really capitalizing on this huge opportunity," she says. "When someone does, I'll go work for them." Desmond is vice president of King Content, a strategic publishing company in Southborough, Mass. He can be reached at paul_desmond@king-content.com
Going the Web wayWhen asked: "How do you assess the importance of the Web in providing customer service?" vendor executives said:
Related links Desmond is vice president of King Content, a strategic publishing company in Southborough, Mass. He can be reached at paul_desmond@king-content.com Ask DudleyFrom the customer services site of Dell.
Web Customer Services
Call Center Magazine
Customer Care Institute
A list of Customer Service & Telemarketing Associations online.
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