If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire…
Ok ok, so maybe they aren’t quite the A-Team but the opening dialogue to that classic 80s TV show sums up why most of us turn to a customer service call center when we have a problem with our product.
The reason we contact them is for one thing; we want them to give us a solution to our problem, and no, we don’t want to wait to get it.
However, in the past few years those solutions have been increasingly found online through the myriad of social media channels (blogs, forums, Twitter) which dedicated users create around a product. Oh yes, and sometimes we can still get solutions direct from the company itself. Personally, I don’t really care where I get the solution, as long as I get it and the faster that happens the better.
Of course, the type of solution is important to consider and, regardless of your product, whilst there are a lot of good resources out there, sometimes you want to make sure that you are getting a verified and reliable answer to your question.
And it’s at this point where there is starting to be a unique merging of two occupations, both of which are charged with providing solutions to problems, answers to questions. One of these is where we, Sword Ciboodle, specialise and the other is in my chosen profession, technical communications.
The team I’m part of here at Sword Ciboodle aims to make sure the right information is delivered in the right format, at the right time, to the right user. We want to be able to answer those questions as quickly as possible and we are looking at new ways to be able to provide that service, including using our own product to power a “social” web self service area specifically targeted at the technical users of our product.
The only difference between the service we bring to a product and the services a contact center solution offers is purely down to how the information, the answers to the questions, the solutions to the issues, are presented and as more businesses start to realise the importance of information, of providing a good level of knowledge to their customers, the more we realise that an awareness and understanding of the solutions offered elsewhere are just as important.
In some instances you could argue that the solutions and answers offered outside of our space are more important as they carry the weight of many customers: real recommendations from people using the product. How we merge these spaces, the formal information we provide and the informal knowledge the community of users creates, is the challenge.
Interesting times lie ahead as we continue to explore the unique space that social media has created. It’s going to be fun seeing how we can get the most from our own product in that area and you can follow our progress here on this blog.