The landscape of customer support, customer care and customer service has changed nearly overnight. Customers now expect a nearly real-time response to any concern they express via social media or on a user forums. And customer support now often depends on crowdsourced answers as much as it does on professional full-time company support.
One of the experts I’ve enjoyed discussing this with recently is Rani Mani, who is the director for customer success, social media strategy and engagement at Adobe, the graphics software company. As you can imagine, presiding over Adobe’s efforts to support their passionate user base brings issues to the fore quickly and with a lot of force. Here are four guiding principles I’ve gleaned from discussions with Mani. (Before you ask—and believe me, I did— Mani’s department was not involved in handling and fixing the Flash security flap earlier this summer, which, Mani explains to me, were addressed by the Adobe corporate social media team rather than customer support.)
1) Curate before you create. "At Adobe," says Mani, "our best practice is to assume that when a 'new' customer question is voiced, it has likely been asked before." Which is why Adobe invests a lot of “curation time” making sure that, rather than endlessly re-creating the wheel or some semblance thereof, they succeed in finding the roundest wheel that has been previously created, the answer that is not just correct but most complete and correct, and flag that answer for use when similar queries come up.
2) Reward your “power answerers.” A large part of Adobe’s support strategy is based on crowdsourcing, and the most important part of that crowdsourcing is the assistance Adobe gets from the most expert slice of the crowd: their “power answerers” (my term) who answer forum questions frequently, speedily, and in the most useful detail. Adobe embraces these user experts, giving them free cloud subscriptions to its products and official badge” that are of actual professional value. These badges identify the user expert as an Adobe Community Professional, a title they can use on their marketing materials and business cards.
3) Hyper-responsiveness is what turns customers around When a complaint is voiced on social media, answer it STAT. “Hyper-responsiveness is incredibly important for turning a customer around," says Mani
4) When a pain point happens frequently, fix it at the source. This may mean making a change in the software’s functionality, or it may mean adding some “intro panels” to the software, along the lines of “hey, first-time InDesign users—do these 4 things before you do anything else; otherwise you’ll be tearing your hair out later.” (In either case, since Adobe, like so many others, has moved its products to the cloud [correction: as Karl Heinz Kremer points out below in the comments, this is an incorrect description; Adobe products being large and processing-intensive are actually run off your desktop, but are frequently updated via cloud now that they're offered on a subscription basis], they’re able to get on this a lot faster than they were in years past; there’s no need for your customers to wait a couple years for the improvements to be featured in the next boxed version.)
Micah Solomon offers customer service and customer support consulting through his firm Four Aces Inc., and is a customer service speaker and bestselling business author, most recently of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service
