Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience
Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience

Technical Feedback Management

As I have already said, questions from customers about your products or services are an opportunity to delight.  Always approach them from that perspective.  Any investment in listening and capturing customer feedback will always benefit you in the long term.  Technical support systems can start with the basics of servicing customers but the opportunity for learning and continuous improvement are ever-present.  Again, this is a great place to look across functional organizations for process improvements.

 

Technical support questions are typically regarded internal as a burden and an expense to be avoided.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Apple has proven that delighted customers will pay a premium for superior customer support and become passionate advocates in the process.  Investments in your customer support and feedback management are investments in your brand equity.

 

Good customer service and technical support begins with your content managment.  With every launch and promotion, post your modularized content to your web properties.  Push this content out to your users and listen to their feedback.  Build the infrastructures that allow you to implement their inputs and comments.  Short term, convert these questions into FAQs and post them on your sites.  As quickly as possible, implement their suggestions.  Enable your field sales and customers to access and interact with your content systems and watch as they delight in the result.  Build the process that enables you to listen, respond, and learn what your customers want.  Do this with agility and your brand equity will be off the charts.

 

There has been a lot of promotion of self service on the web and communities where the users support the community on their own with barely a need for the host to step in.  While this can function in open sharing businesses where the intellectual property is separate from "the tool" or the software (i.e. example generic code), it will not work in fundamentally proprietary businesses.  In these cases, the functional example is "the secret sauce" and to discuss this openly in a support forum would be giving it away.  Direct two-way feedback support is a required alternative in this case.  It costs more but it is also good for relationships and business.

 

"If trust is not your number one value, it's over", Mark Benioff.

 

 

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This Web site is aimed at capturing some of the basic concepts I use when creating integrated marketing programs and leveraging the internet.

 

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