I received a newsletter from SupportIndustry.com (www.supportindustry.com) today advertising a webinar being put on by the folks over at GoToAssist (www.gotoassist.com) that centers on the importance of the first 30 seconds in any customer support interaction.

I have no idea whether or not it will be of value to anyone, and I’m not endorsing either organization, but thought I’d pass along the webinar registration link and brief summary at the bottom of this blog post if anyone has interest.

Seeing the newsletter reminded me of the long debate I had with my team leads at our support center about what we should say to a customer, or what we should try to collect from a customer, inside the first 30-60 seconds of answering the phone. It’s amazing how complex a simple sentence or two can get when you are trying to both concisely convey and extract information at the same time – all as the first step in, ahem, “delighting” the customer.

It can get interesting and challenging as you progress out in to the first 2-3 minutes of a call depending on your industry or product. Call control is a huge consideration and one major advantage to scripted or structured calls is control. Nothing is worse than answering the phone “Thanks for calling Acme, Inc. My name is Jay, how can I help you?” because you’ll have some poor support person on the phone for 20 minutes before he/she gets a customer name or a phone number. Though they may extract the dog’s name, the cause of an ex-husband’s demise, or a lesson in how not to speak to co-workers. “How may I help you?” irks me greatly.

• I’ve found that what order to ask customer questions during a call will be heavily influenced by the case management and/or CRM systems that are employed. The length of time it takes to enter or retrieve information may not jive with the flow of the conversation. Ideally you want to be fluid and sound knowledgeable vs. stuttered, or as if you are only just discovering what info you have on the customer, if any at all. The flip side is that customers just can’t stand being forced to answer 37 questions, particularly if they call you fairly often.
  
  (Come to think of it, SaaS apps like Netsuite and Salesforce.com still haven’t offered up any truly inventive solutions to this problem. Any case form data entry is only partially organized, and more than that there isn’t a really kick-butt facility to build out your call flow in harmony with the case data entry/retrieval workflow. Their tab paradigm requires too much pointing and clicking and any screen pops you want to build all have to be done with JavaScript or something. None of it is a natural act. But I digress…)
  
• Keep both new and existing customers in mind when designing these things and use your AVR prudently. Try to avoid too many phone tree menus, e.g. “If you need help programming the VCR, Tibetan Buddhists that have already received enlightenment should press 8 then the # sign. Press 9 if enlightenment continues to elude you.”
• Another good option for previous customers is to provide them with the auto-assigned ID generated by the CRM system to their name. Typically you can look up a customer by that vs. just “John Smith” and all of the duplicate entries. Doesn’t work as well in the consumer space but holds up in business-to-business market if they call you back and provide the “Customer ID Number” for faster data retrieval. Of course, more sophisticated organizations may bind their phone system’s AVR to the case management systems, but for the smaller companies I tend to work with that’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Here’s that webinar info: