Customer-Powered Service: A New Way to Serve in a Wired World

In today's wired world, the power balance has shifted from the business to the customer. For example, online commerce has introduced customer-powered buying, and online supply chains have introduced customer-powered production.

And now online customer care is introducing customer-powered service. This development has important implications across a wide spectrum of online environments, but particularly for any business that offers financial services.

Customer-powered service is a new model that empowers customers, not just internal service personnel. It helps customers achieve their goals, and it optimises service towards making the best use of customers' time.

This model transforms the service experience. It helps customers do business almost effortlessly with your company. The model also builds on and enhances any existing service infrastructure that you may be using.

Your Offline Competitive Advantage Goes Online
Your company built its business on a foundation of superior service for your customers - retail, commercial and/or institutional. The quality of the service you deliver to each customer is a major competitive advantage. So is your reputation for quality service.

When you serve your customers online, you naturally want to deliver the same quality that built your reputation in the offline world. And that's where customer-powered service comes in. Customer-powered service enables you to smooth every customer's use of your online application. It removes the technical hitches that can cause the customer to give up in frustration.

This is an enormous problem. According to a report by Datamonitor, e-businesses lost $6.1billion in sales in 1999 because of poor service, and will lose more than $173 billion in potential sales during the next five years if service doesn't improve.

Trouble Spots for Online Financial Services
Smoothing your customers' use of your online application is especially important at major trouble spots such as registering for a new service, completing transactions, accessing value-added services and solving technical problems.

Registration: Bringing new customers online, adding a new service to their accounts, or enabling them to apply online for a financial product can be make-or-break moments. If these customers don't make it through, they will revert to offline methods or to a competitor. To prevent that, the business must ensure that customers who have questions never feel abandoned. Customer-powered service makes sure that this is prevented, by enabling step-by-step access to answers and experts throughout the registration process.

Transactions: Consumers managing their personal finances and institutional traders conducting complex trades have a simple requirement: "Help me complete the transaction." This is not as easy as it sounds, because processes such as pay, purchase, sell and transfer can include many complex steps. Embedding customer-powered service within each step allows customers to complete their transactions without hesitation, lost time, errors or frustration.

Value-added services: Differentiating a business online requires delivering services - such as financial planning, investment research and advisory services - that leverage the offline assets of a business and its partners. Typically, experts from within the business and from its partners, and ranging from customer service representatives to professional brokers and account managers, interact to deliver these services. Customer-powered service makes these offline service networks available online, creating a powerful competitive advantage.

Technical problems: Problems with .pdf files, audio files and financial-management software can stop customers in their tracks. Focusing service content on the most common technical problems can reduce the volume of telephone calls. Customer-powered service brings technical service to online customer care and gives the business a new level of control over its service costs.

How to Get Started
If you are considering the customer-powered service model, there are three initial steps you can take now to ensure a smooth transition.

The first step is a mental step: Re-think what it means to serve in a wired world. The networked business environment demands a radical change in the way service is provided to customers. Service must be shaped by the customer; it must be driven from outside the business to inside. Service must be designed to make the customer successful, not just to make the support staff more efficient.

On the surface, this step sounds simple or obvious. But if you give it some thought, you'll see that it is a profound change in approach. Support people habitually think in terms of improving staff efficiency, because that was always the way to keep up with increasing volume. Over the years, as more users called the help desk, we developed methods for handling the volume, such as online FAQs, knowledge bases, artificial intelligence systems, email and chat.

However, these methods are only options, not comprehensive solutions. Today's customers are busy and impatient - they don't want to be forced to compose emails, describe problems over the telephone, or seek answers via generic searches. They often have questions or problems that require a "high-touch" service model. Customer-powered service meets this need by embedding service in the application itself, so that customers perceive service as a built-in feature of the application. Embedded service provides a streamlined, high-touch experience that can deliver instant gratification and ensure friction-free e-business.

The second step is to take a look at your e-business and determine those high-priority places where you have the greatest opportunity to serve - to help your customers do business with you more easily.

In other words, get back to basics. Focus on what's most important in service applications, such as helping customers register, answering their questions, and helping them complete their transactions.

The third step is to determine the assets you would like to make available to the customers who use the embedded service. These assets include digital assets stored in knowledge bases as well as human assets such as employees, partners and suppliers.

Assets can span traditional call centres and service departments, functional departments such as accounting and remotely located experts in partner companies. Ideally, you can integrate all these assets into a dynamic "service network."