GUEST
ARTICLE - Paul Ward
Delight Members and Build a Smarter
Staff
Everyone loves lots of information. And
association members demand it as a part of membership.
But providing that information has proven to be a big
challenge for organizations of all kinds. It's hard to
keep up with demand. One association colleague of mine
reported, "One of my subordinates manages
approximately 33 committees.... Yesterday she had 600
emails in her in-box that had to be acted upon."
At a minute per email, that staff person
was looking at a 10-hour day, without lunch -- a
not-too-pleasant prospect.
Perhaps the committees were just
behaving badly. Perhaps
they had gotten into the habit of emailing the staff
person without looking for answers elsewhere.
That's a straightforward problem to
solve, I thought. Put the information where it's easy to
find (on the web, in committee folders, and so on) and
make it just as effective as getting a personal
response. This puts the responsibility for causing --
and solving -- the problem in the hands of the
communications department.
That's good news for the poor,
overworked staff person, who was at risk of being sent
to a time-management course that would not have solved
the problem in the end.
I proposed to my association colleague
that a good frequently asked question (FAQ) document
might help.
And, in fact, FAQs can help. The more I
thought about solving the problem of "getting
information out", the more I thought that the
problem ultimately wouldn't be resolved without some
hard thinking and a little technology.
Part of the problem is that FAQs miss
the point. Even when the questions are "frequently
asked" and the answers are good, FAQs sometimes
just delay the inevitable work we all must be committed
to: Knowing our customers and what they want.
In this case, the overwhelmed staff
person was sitting on a goldmine of information about
what the committees needed, and the association wasn't
pulling out their pickaxes and flashlights to dig into
it.
Without doubt, this swamped association
worker is sitting on a goldmine, because the opportunity
here is not just to answer their questions, but to
delight them.
Information Has Value
Let's examine the general situation most
of us are faced with. One group of people wants
information -- the member seeking information on a
conference, a certification customer looking for a
testing site.
Another group within your staff may have
that information -- or they may not. If there's a gap
between the desire for information and the supply of it,
you've got a great opportunity to create value. Even if
you have the information, the key is often to supply
that information at the right time, just when it's
needed. Don't bury it in a FAQ if you can instead put it
on a technology platter: In an email, on a
dynamically-generated page tuned presciently to the
user's needs, or in search results at the top of the
list. And if you can give them more than they asked for,
all the better.
That's value: The right information at
the right time, with as much of a personal touch as your
technology can muster.
That will be the sermon for today -- our
job in business and in associations is to create value.
The term I use for it is "creating customer
delight". You can do it by providing information to
your customers.
We'll address how to create this
customer delight. We'll also touch on how to make it
"scale". Creating customer delight for one
person is a snap. But for 100, it may be 500 times more
difficult. How about 1,000 people? You'll need
technology, a keen knowledge of process, a clear view of
your customers, and a commitment to create delight.
TIP: Why is
scalability so important? If Amazon gets 10,000 more
customers today than yesterday, it doesn't have to
hire 1000 more customer service representatives,
because it creates customer delight with emails and
automated processes that scale. But even if you have
just a few customers, consider scalable technology. It
keeps you focused on those parts of the customer
delight process that cannot scale: The human
intervention, the personal touch, the extraordinary
favor. Automate what you can; don't automate what you
shouldn't. You'll soon have a lot more customers. And
because you've already built services that scale well,
you'll have a lot more happy customers.
Think beyond FAQ: Think customer
experience
Notice the word "customer"
here. Don't think that your only customers are your
members. What about your prospects? Doesn't information
about what you do entice them to join your association?
Then delight them with it.
Don't forget your own staff: They are
customers, too. Work hard to delight them with the
ability to get and provide information.
So, armed with the concept of delighting
customers with information, how do you build a FAQ?
That depends. But certainly you should
get several heads together: Membership, IT,
Communications and senior staff. Plus anyone on your
staff who's up on customer relationship management (CRM).
Building information from the Real
World
Too many organizations put out a FAQ
written by a marketing department that reads like this:
Q: How do I join? What does it cost?
A: It's easy! And it's cheap!
Such lists are barely disguised sales
jobs and we're all trained by now to count that
information as tainted. Don't think your members and
prospects will be fooled. They know when the questions
on the list "feel true". Marketing and
communications department wish in the fondest dreams
that their most frequently heard question is "How
do I join?"
Nevertheless, marketing and
communication personnel -- as well as all your other
staff -- know what questions they get. Get your staff to
record these questions.
TIP: If you have an
intranet, get your IT folks to build a little form on
the home page of the intranet where all your staff can
add these questions to a database. Mine that database
for two things: What frustrations or opportunities
compelled someone to phone you or email you? How can
you create an experience that deals with these
frustration and opportunities in a way that scales
well?
The challenge is not merely to answer
questions, but to create an experience. What's the
difference?
Build a Process and They Will Come
Don't bury your FAQs in the sand. Hiding
key information in the middle of a long FAQ may create
more frustration than delight.
You can help by putting the answers to
questions in the context of the site's content. Collect
your top ten questions about membership benefits and put
them on the membership page. Collect your top ten
questions about the upcoming convention and put them in
the conferences and proceedings area.
But even more effectively, you can
create a process that's all about asking and answering
questions.
TIP: You can create a
service on your site that lets visitors ask questions
from any page. The page from which they ask their
question can be automatically captured (ask your IT
staff how) and sent along with the query. This can
help you understand at what points in your site your
visitors are most confused. It also tells you what
information they'd value most on that page! You can
later redesign the page to answer the questions that
arose. You can also use the information to redesign
your site or even to inspire new products and
services.
First, understand who is asking the
question and what they need from you.
Sound tough? Then go back to the drawing
board on your association strategy, because all this
means is that you have to know who your customers are
and what they need.
Example
Let's take a look at a typical case.
Jane Smith comes to your site with a question. Somewhere
buried on your site is an email address to which Jane
can send her question. If she finds just a link with the
mailto: HTML
that pops open her own email client, you miss out on the
chance to find out explicitly from her all kinds of
great information you'd get if you instead had a web
form.
Web forms abound nowadays, and with
reason. Web forms allow a company to gather structured
information, put it right into a database without
hand-keying (or losing that information in some email
inbox down the hall where it will never be seen again).
So, the web forms technology is not new.
But how can it be used to greatest effect? The key here
is to have it launch a customer relationship process. It
starts with gathering the information we need from Jane
Smith.
What kind of information?
Who she is. What she wants. How urgent
her request is. Where she looked on the site previously
for the answer. Suggestions on improving the site.
And every bit of that information is
something you can use to improve your association.
Let's say Jane in fact finds such a
form. Her question then becomes a prescription for
delighting her.
Let's create a mockup. We'll ask for key
information that can help us answer her question. But
the form gives us some other opportunities to delight
her.
Upselling:
We ask Jane to tell us what areas of the site she most
liked. We can use this to suggest in our response email
other areas of the site she would likely enjoy. This
information can also be the first step in creating a
true one-to-one marketing tactic for site visitors
because it begins to create a profile (or "customer
view") for your visitor.
Urgency
Ranking: If you have staff people "triage"
the incoming information requests, those marked urgent
can be sorted to the top.
Automated
Response: Using the email address Jane supplied, we
can get out an immediate response that summarizes her
question and assures her that her request is being
brought to the attention of the right person at the
association.
Membership
Identification: If Jane isn't a member, kick your
staff into gear to get her membership information.
Consider asking her to sign up for a free email
newsletter for non-members. You can use the information
she's already provided to fine-tune the contents of that
email newsletter. If Jane is already a member, this
request should go into her "file" (you do keep
a unified view of all your members in true CRM fashion,
don't you?). Her request should be used to analyze
whether your site design needs to be improved, its
content updated, or a new product or service identified.
If you don't get a lot of queries on
your site, a free-form response to "What Areas of
our Site did You Find Most Useful or Fun?" is best.
It helps you see more clearly how your site is working.
The question itself, of course, may tell you how your
site can be improved. Together, it's a powerful
combination.
Even if you get a lot of queries and
would find a lot of free-form responses to be hard to
handle, you should still consider them -- at least for a
time. You may be able to spot trends in the responses --
for example, everyone may love the 'Why Canada is Better
Than the US' game. That could inspire you to create all
kinds of new events and products.
After a while, the text box in which
Jane tells about her favorite areas of the site might be
replaced with checkboxes to help automate the process of
responding with site tips. Your backend database can
detect her top choices from the checkboxes Jane selected
and automatically create a response email, thanking her
for her question and suggesting other parts of the site
that may suit her tastes.
Finally, you can pore through all these
requests to create a well-structured and real-world
Frequently Asked Questions document for your site.
You'll even be able to sort the "urgent"
questions to the top because you'll actually know which
questions were most urgent to your visitors. This will
save your visitors lots of time.
Even more, you can turn these questions
into content for your email newsletter
(Question of the Week) or for a section on your home
page (Did You Know?). Remember that putting the answers to questions near
the right content can have greater value to your
visitors.
A Process That Delights
The internet, in theory, is a platform
for quick, point-to-point communication. That means you
don't have to think of communications as a broadcast
process. You can, instead, "pointcast"
information to people based on their profiles or stated
needs. This lightbulb shone brightly over the heads of
customer relationship management professionals in the
mid-1990s, led by Peppers and Rogers (see sidebar for
URL).
If you create tools using databases, web
sites and email that let you develop point-to-point
communication and one-to-one relationships with your
site visitors, you're on the way to building loyalty.
Why?
People love it when they push a button
and something important happens. The buttons of your web
site give them power and the opportunity to change -- by
learning, doing or questioning.
When the results of pushing this button
meet or exceed Jane's expectation, you've built her
trust. She can rely on you the next time she needs a
similar question answered. That builds loyalty.
This "push button premise"
underlies a great deal of the success of good CRM. And
in the example with Jane Smith, here's what she gets
just by pushing a button:
·
A quick reply that her question has been
received.
·
A list of links that might interest her.
·
A promise for a more detailed response.
·
If she's interested in membership, she
gets more information on the association's value
proposition.
·
If she's already a member, she gets proof
that her membership dollars are at work.
Not a bad deal for Jane. It's also a
great deal for your association. You've started to build
a series of "trust transactions" --
communications between your association and Jane that
set a fair expectation of service and meets or exceeds
that expectation.
When you meet or exceed a visitor's
expectations you create customer delight.
Remember, too, that we hoped to create a
solution that scales. You've answered a question using
technology (web forms and auto-reply emails) that
scales.
What's Next?
Now comes time to answer the question
that Jane Smith asked you.
Here's how you can proceed, in three
scenarios:
You've
got a database of frequently asked questions and their
answers and you want to respond by email. A staff
person gets Jane's question and other comments emailed
to him, looking something like this:
You can improve on this system, though,
if you use your database system to suggest answers to
similar questions based on a keyword search it has
performed automatically. In that email, then, you might
see:
You
don't have a database of frequently asked questions and
their answers and you want to respond by email. Building
a comprehensive solution with a database and email
process might cost you a little more than you have in
your budget now.
So what do you do? Let's presume that
you become the only authorized respondent to these
emails. (The job should really be shared using an email
group name, but let's set that aside for now.) Every
email should be sent to you using a unique email
address. This email address can be used to trigger an
auto-responder rule that sends a generic thanks to Jane.
It's not ideal, but it's a start.
When you get the email, respond
thoughtfully and as completely as you can. Save the
email before sending in a separate FAQ folder. Later you
can copy the email and rename its subject by describing
its contents.
Over time you'll develop a repository of
emails by subject that can be used as the basis of all
your FAQ responses.
Alternatively, you can save each
response in single Word document. Cut and paste from
that document into email as necessary.
Over time, this set of emails or the
Word document serve as the basis for a more automated
system that scales so well that your staff could handles
dozens or hundreds of responses each day using a
well-designed repository.
If you think this second system is too
clunky for any but the smallest association, think
again. One of the largest labor unions in Los Angeles,
for whom I consulted, cut and pasted answers to
frequently asked questions all day long. They have over
100,000 members and a plethora of non-member information
requests.
FAQs: Not the Final Frontier
Lists of frequently asked questions do
serve a purpose. Keep the list short, and populate it
with actual questions and tightly worded, provably
helpful answers. Then, supplement it with a form like
the one above.
But what if you have infoglut -- so much
information in such high (or random) demand that you
feel compelled to have the user search himself for
answers?
If you can't keep the list short, then
the problem has changed. You're now looking at building
a database -- to be used internally or by customers --
as an information repository.
When your information becomes this rich,
look around for best practices. Technical information on
software or computer manufacturer websites are great
models. Good online help systems understand what you're
looking for even if you don't know the right terms. Some
let you "tune" your question by letting you
select answers "most like" what you're looking
for. That can be a great way for site visitors to plough
through tons of content.
Have an IT and knowledge management
specialist design it. They'll help you define semantics,
search rules, presentation layers that work well, and
can even offer nice touches that improve the entire
process.
For example, some technical information
databases allow you to email the response to yourself.
Note that this also allows you to capture email
addresses, but don't abuse that opportunity. If you're
going to capture email addresses, capture other
information too, and then let people opt-in to any
further communications with you.
Other technical information databases
ask you how well the provided answer dealt with your
question. This services multiple purposes. First, look
at the psychology: If the tech info database just
provided you a service, and you take a moment to say so
by clicking "Yes, this answered my question,"
you've just proven to yourself that the site was
helpful. The site, in short, has built a little packet
of trust with you. Marketing folks love that. Second, if
the answer was not helpful, it can get sorted out and
sent back for revisions by technical staff. Third, if
the answer helped a lot, it can be sorted to the top in
future queries on the same keywords; it gets
"weighted" in order of its proven utility.
Most technical information databases
don't let you comment on what information a provided
answer lacked. That's too bad. A big part of the problem
is that even the best technical writers have a hard time
knowing how much information to put into an answer.
People looking for answers simply vary too much in their
technical background. But if a particular answer omits
information that really ought to be in it, the visitor
should be given a chance to suggest a change.
At this point, the information
repository really has become a newborn knowledge
management system. The feedback suggestion I just
proposed actually brings it into the most modern form of
knowledge management systems that are both
"adaptive" (those that change content
according to the needs of all users) and
"semantically flexible" (those that allow for
responses to be offered in context and without explicit
keywords).
That's pretty heady.
But there are tools to help. Your IT
folks can tell you about Baysean search engines such as
Autonomy's for example, and lots of search engine
vendors will work with you to create a fast, searchable
repository that can be somewhat tuned. Prices vary, as
do benefits. For associations with content as rich as
the American Medical Association, you need powerful
tools and lots of horsepower.
Keep in mind, though, that the problem
at hand is not ultimately technical. If you think so,
you've missed the point about customer delight. An FAQ
is not a job for someone who knows a little HTML, or who
can build a database, or knows about knowledge
management.
Answering frequently asked questions is
for the staff person who cares, and who has the tools to
answer the question right, and quickly.
The Delightful Database, The
Powerful Staff
No matter what you do to handle
answering questions, keep in mind that the goal is to
delight the customer. Set up an expectation that you can
answer her question, and then meet or beat that
expectation. Be faster, more complete, friendlier than
what your customer expects.
If they're members, they'll love you for
it and stay members.
If they're thinking about being a
member, you've just given them another reason to join.
And, if your "customer" is in
fact your staff, then you have a bonus. Think about it:
All that information you're gathering about your
association is great training material for your staff.
Put that material where everyone can get to it on an
intranet. Quiz your colleagues. Give them an incentive
to know the answers (staff prizes, for example, or a big
staff lunch once a month).
You'll probably find that pushing all
this information to your staff will improve their work,
their knowledge of your members, and their ability to
brainstorm with you new products and services. Perhaps
just as importantly, they'll be able to tell you which
of your ideas are doomed before you spend a dime on
them.
How will your staff be able to save you
from overspending just by having all these answers at
their fingertips?
Because everyone will know who your
customers are and what they want. And that's worth its
weight in gold.
SIDEBAR
RESOURCES
Search
engines for your site:
http://www.atomz.com
http://www.google.com
One to one marketing:
http://www.1to1.com
Knowledge
Management:
http://www.socialchemy.com/knownet.html
http://www.microsoft.com/malaysia/business/casestudies/linkpage2708.htm
http://www.kmmagazine.com
Customer
Communities:
http://www.communispace.com/otherPerspectives.html
 Paul
Ward is the Director of Business Development with
TechRiver and is at the cutting edge of technology and
business management systems. Paul can be contacted at pward@techriver.net.
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