Richard's Blog

 Posts Tagged ‘Customer Support’

I had recently bought my kids some apple computers. After all of my adult life in the PC world I had finally decided to give a Mac a try.

Actually my early computer experiences included fortran and a Data General MV8000. But those those were even before PC’s existed.

I had heard that Apple and Macbooks were great for kids and had good graphics.  But I think what had finally caused me to change was dealing with the service reps for all of the virus protection needed for pc’s.

What has most surprised me about Apple was their customer service. We purchased their $99 one-to-one support package. This gives us one year of unlimited one on one service.  We have now taken several classes.  Today my daughter put up her first web page.  So far its one page with a couple of you tube links to Miley Cyrus – but its a good learning experience.

What a difference this type of service from Apple has made in understanding how macs are different from PC’s and how to use their various features.

Once again, a high level of personal touch really makes a difference in customer support.

With so many conferences and money (both investments and corporate marketing spending) being spent on often trendy or perceived fun products and services – we try to assess which are good use of resources for Therap to be involved with from a marketing and support perspective.

In general our approach is to encourage our team members to use many of these services so they have first hand experiences. That makes for more effective internal discussions about what is possible. We also communicate with our users in so many manners.

While Farmville doesn’t allow outside apps to create products that integrate into Farmville, we do have buttons for flair on facebook.

We also have increasingly been posting some video’s to YouTube.

Our You Tube videos tend to be informative which may be why they haven’t really taken off on page views yet (maybe eventually). Topics like electronic signatures, documentation for surveyors and MAR’s don’t seem to be as popular as Lady Gaga’s music videos.

Clearly important pieces of what we do include making sure we have proper medicaid approved electronic signatures and documentation, ensuring a user interface that allows direct support professionals to accurately and cost effectively enter data, working with providers and states on various state and federal requirements, managing our company owned equipment infrastructure and more.

But there are choices on how to communicate with users.

We tend not to use Twitter very often. Justin does a bit. I have tried it and don’t get it. I had tried Second Life a couple of years ago and thought it was fun – but it had huge bandwidth requirements. Its seemed fine for someone like Starwood Hotels trying to hype their new Aloft brand hotel – where they could supplement whatever they spent on Second Life with a huge PR budget. But where does that leave companies without those type of budgets?

John Burton recently headlined a blog post: Twitter, Second Life, Mafia Wars: Enterprise-Grade Business Tools or Silly Toys for Business Professionals?. He wrote

Twitter is on top of the world. Twitter is the soup de jour. Twitter is the new black. Twitter is the prom queen and the homecoming king. Twitter is, dare I say, its own religion. Yet in the back of my mind the question remains, is Twitter really a useful business tool, or is it just yet another toy for stressed-out business professionals?

He continues with lots of reasons why twitter and second life haven’t been effective as customer relationship tools.

In Nicolas Carr’s Blog Rough Type he stated

We are now coming to understand that the failure of the once much-hyped virtual world Second Life was inevitable. It was never that the Web would provide an alternative reality. It was that the Web, a labyrinth devised by men, would become reality

John Burton finally concludes with

Which Brings me to the Next Point: Don’t Stalk Your Customers on Twitter! Just Pick Up the $#@! Telephone When They Call

There are so many effective ways to communicate with our users and potential users. Telephone calls, live help chats, webinars, user groups, in person meetings, visits to agencies for training and other discussions, and our conferences. We will continue to monitor new technologies and services and employ them as appropriate and useful. We are very mindful that every minute someone is using Therap is time away from other activities. So our goal is to be efficient and productive in our interactions.

It seems almost everyday on the internet I am learning some new fear or concern about some concept or term I never heard of before.

For example, the other day I learned you can get “ghost banned” at Stumble Upon.  Basically if you give too many good reviews to websites created by the same people they start to assume you know each other and stop counting your reviews, but they apparently don’t tell you.

I was trying to think how this related to the rating systems we have in place for either Therap Ideas or the Global Template Library. It seems that there is a fundamental difference in how approvals and comments are approached at Therap because information and postings in Therap are date and time stamped and also have the name, agency and title of the person submitting.

If you really are concerned about getting ghost banned – I found a post on “How Not to Get Ghost Banned” on Stumble Uponl.

Today I read a blog post by Prem Kumar called Is Social CRM About Automated Relationship Building. He discussed a
fear that the term Social CRM might get disfigured to mean a set of tools that help businesses to eavesdrop & stalk on their leads, prospects & customers on the social web and thus push more targeted messages to them to lure them into buying more from the business, all the while reducing service costs by crowdsourcing it to the customer communities. The tools would still be the ones we envision, the purpose would be transmogrified. See how easy it would be fake a customer centric culture?

I read this post the day before we have 150 or so people coming together in Oregon to discuss how to improve use of an online service  (Therap) to provide better support in an environment where the ultimate service is provided face to face.  We are sending four therap team members to help present along with several of our more experienced users.

We are finding that the internet and social media must supplement personal relationships in this industry. Once people have met each other there is a higher comfort in sharing information and care plans and templates and ideas.

I had thought that perhaps its because our product is continually evolving and use agile programming and rapid prototyping that we spend so much time thinking about interactions with our users.  Perhaps its because we still know our customers by name – and in fact have visited the vast majority of our users -even in relatively remote locations like Kalispell, Montana or Scottsbluff, Nebraska.

Prem Kumar discussed how someone asked
how can social media marketing help him in sending coupons as part of his marketing campaigns. He started to explain about some successful mobile coupon technology value chain they had worked out between the business, the mobile service provider, the coupon distributor and whoever else.

While I think there is a place for all sorts of automation and in fact we use the internet to communicate with our customers and potential customers, it will be interesting to see  how social media, crowdsourcing and other really user interactive parts of the internet will evolve as large consumer product companies with advertising budgets in excess of $100 million annually start to use these tools.

One of our goals at Therap has been to have the best customer support for our users. We were once told we had the best customer service outside of Disneyland.

We have had conversations with a couple of agencies which were not using Therap about using Therap. We were told they were very impressed with Therap – but that the agency had purchased a different system a while back for amounts ranging from perhaps $100,000 to past $1 million in fees plus hardware, maintenance and other costs. Our fee in those instances would have been a fraction of that cost.

We were then told that the agency was not happy with the system or the support, but that they felt stuck with their purchase given what they had paid for it upfront.

This got me thinking about whether there is a correlation between great customer support and pricing models. When a product or service has no upfront fees and no future monetary commitment, does that mean that customers can expect better ongoing support? We have to constantly be good at our service and our reliability or there is really nothing stopping an agency from switching to another system (not that we think there are really any good alternatives in the developmental disability community – as we think we have the best system when factoring in HIPAA, ARRA, electronic signatures, state forms, DSP training, cost savings and so forth).

But the point is we have to prove this everyday.

I started thinking of places known for great support – many of the best support experiences are when customers can relatively easily change their purchase options. If a restaurant gives bad service or bad food you would not go back. Look what happened to the General Motors over time when they developed a reputation for less quality than other auto companies (and I know this is a complex issue but most examples are too complex for a blog post anyway).

Think about the services as an agency provided to individuals and the state and guardians and so forth. Most agencies have contracts which can be cancelled for non-satisfactory services.

I would be curious what the balance at companies which require long term contracts is between support and development costs compared with sales costs. And to what extent long term contracts have a negative correlation with quality service and supports.