This week's highlighted research:



Customer Respect Group. "Second Quarter 2006 Online Customer Respect Study."



Patricia Seybold Group. "Provide a 360-degree view of the customer relationship."



Jupiter Research. "US customer service and support metrics, December 2005."

Customer service by email is a wonderful thing. It's convenient to be able to avoid making a phone call and waiting on hold, and just shooting off an email to somebody's Customer Service Department instead. But how many of us have done just that, only to receive no response? Sometimes it feels like those emails are going into a giant customer service black hole. What gives? Are those emails getting lost along the way? Evaporating into the ethers that make up the Internet and reappearing somewhere in outer space? Do companies' spam filters knock out customer requests they don't want to deal with? Or do they just think we're not worth the effort?



A study by The Customer Respect Group found an ironic bit of information: CRM software vendors didn't score very well in how they treat their own customers online. The survey indicated that 27 percent of email questions were completely ignored -- a surprising statistic about a category of companies that should definitely know better. The study assigns a Customer Respect Index (CRI) to each company -- and overall, CRM vendors scored lower than other industries, and they scored especially low in the area of communications with customers. Only one company scored well in this category, and that company is SalesForce.com, which also scored the highest overall rating.



Jupiter Research also takes a look at customer service metrics and email responsiveness, also discovering surprisingly poor performance. Jupiter's research shows that 92 percent of Web sites do offer email customer response options, but only 41 percent of them send an automated email response to acknowledge receipt of the email. Only 45 percent of the sites surveyed were able to resolve email queries within 24 hours, and 39 percent took three days or more or did not respond at all. Statistics like this make getting put on hold for 30 minutes look like nothing at all. Jupiter says there are two reasons for the lack of responsiveness; increased email volume, and lack of appropriate email handling technology.



Focusing on the solution is Patricia Seybold Group, with its free common-sense report that outlines how to create a 360 degree view of customer relationships. Part of this means paying equal attention to each method of customer contact. The report discusses four strategies; first is to create a "one stop shopping" environment for customers, which goes beyond the retail and ordering end, but also allows customers to perform multiple interactions from the same place, including addressing customer problems. Point number two is to remember everything about your customer. This one has always been a big nuisance for me. Every time I place a customer service call, an automated attendant asks me to input information such as account numbers, and to indicate by numeric keypad entry what the nature of the problem is. But when a live attendant gets on the line, they seem to know nothing at all about what I entered into the keypad, and ask for everything all over again.

Seybold's third point is to make sure everyone in the company has access to the customer's big picture, so a customer can be serviced without having to be bounced around from department to department. Fourth is the technological infrastructure meant to accomplish it.

ITworld.com

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